Melody Beattie, whose experiences as drug addicts, a chemical dependency consultant and the wife of an alcoholic has updated a book with the best -selling codendence that has guided countless people to drop toxic relationships, died on February 27 in Los Feliz. He was 76 years old.
Her daughter, Nichole Beattie, said the cause was heart failure. She had been hospitalized from November 30 to December 12, then evacuated from her home in Malibu due to a fire and moved to her daughter’s home, where she died.
With the dissemination of the conceapendence concept, Ms Beattie (pronounced bee-wee) became a literary star in the world of self-help with “Codependent No more: How to stop controlling others and start taking care of yourself” (1986), which has sold more than seven million copies worldwide.
“You could call her mother of self -help,” said Nicole Dewey, Spiegel & Grau’s version manager, who has sold more than 400,000 copies of the book since she was published in 2022.
Trysh Travis, the author of “the language of the heart: a cultural story of the Anonymous Alcoholics Movement in Oprah Winfrey” (2009), said in an interview that “Codependent No More” has succeeded because of the approach of Ms. Beattie’s common sense.
He added: “There were other books and leaflets published in the rehabilitation area in the early 1980s. Melody made the same arguments, but her voice met very clearly. She was not clinical – and had a number of ideas that could be applied to many, if not all of the problems that had.”
In “Codependent No more”, Mrs Beattie reported various definitions of a person with a code. She also introduced her own.
“A person who depends,” he wrote, “is the one who has left another person’s behavior to influence them and who is obsessed with controlling another person’s behavior.”
The other person, wrote, may be a family member, lover, customer or better friend. But the focus of codendency “lies to ourselves, in the ways we leave other people’s behaviors and the ways we try to influence them” – with actions that include their control, helping them obsessment and care.
Recalling her difficult marriage to her second husband, David Beattie, who was also a substantive abuse consultant, Ms Beattie described an incident when she was in Las Vegas. She phoned the hotel room and sounded like drank. He asked him not to break his promise to her that he would not be drunk on this journey. He closed him.
In despair, he called the hotel repeatedly at night, even when he was preparing to host a party for 80 people at their home in Minneapolis the next day.
‘I thought if I could just speech In him, I can make him stop drinking, “he told Minneapolis Star Tribune in 1988, but at 11 pm, he stopped calling.
“Something happened inside me, and I let him leave,” he said. “I thought,” If you want to drink, to drink. … “I gave his life back to him, and I began to take my own back.”
He said it was the first step to disconnect from their mutual coding. Eventually divorced.
Excerpts, he wrote, “not a cold, hostile withdrawal” or “Pollyannish, Dignorant Bliss”. On the contrary, it releases “a person or a problem in love”.
When should the liberation happen? he asked. Her list was great. Started: “When we can’t stop thinking, talking or worrying about someone or something. When our emotions inhibit and boil. When we feel we have to do something for someone, because we can’t afford it in another minute. …”
Melody Lynn Vaillancourt was born on May 26, 1948, in Ramsey, Minn, and grew up mainly in Saint Paul. Her father, Jean, a firefighter, was an alcoholic who left the family when Melody was 2. Her mother, Izetta (Lee) Vaillancourt, held a nursing home after her divorce, but Mrs Beattie said, defeated her four brothers. (He left the punishment herself, he said, because he had a heart condition.)
Melody was abused by a stranger when she was 5 years old. He started drinking whiskey at 12? And he started using amphetamines, barbiturates, LSD and marijuana in high school. By 20, he was shooting heroin. He also stole the pharmacies with a partner and, after being arrested, spent eight months in drug treatment at a state hospital.
After being successfully treated, he had a secretariat work before being hired as a chemical dependence consultant in Minneapolis, who was commissioned to deal with men’s wives in treatment. Her patients were even angry and focused so much on their husbands’ feelings that they found almost impossible to get them to express their own.
“Eight years later, I understood these codendents, these crazy codendents – we didn’t name them, we called them important others – because I had become one” through her marriage to Mr Beattie, she told Star Tribune. “All I could think and talk was the alcoholic. What was or didn’t.” He was, he said, “full of anger and anger because he wouldn’t stop drinking.”
While facing women living for prosperity and writing independent articles for a local newspaper, Gazette Stillwater, she interviewed codendence experts, hoping to write a book on the subject.
It received a $ 500 deposit from the rehabilitation section of the rehabilitation center by criticizing Hazelden Foundation, now called Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation. The book was published in 1986 and spent 129 weeks on the New York Times advice and the list of the best sellers.
Mrs Beattie continued to write many other books, including “Leatting Go: Daily Meditations on Codendency” (1990), which has sold more than three million copies.
Writing to Newsweek in 2009, Dr. Drew Pinsky, Medicine Addiction Specialist and media personality, called “Codependent No More” one of the four best self -help books of all time. Mrs Beattie revised her strongly for a new edition published in 2022.
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Beattie survives two grandchildren. A sister, Michelle Vaillancourt. And a son, John Thurik, from his first marriage, to Steven Thurik, who ended with divorce. John was raised by his father and his mother.
Her weddings at Scott Mengshol and Dallas Taylor, who played drums with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, also ended in divorce.
Shane Beattie’s son died in a ski accident in 1991, when she was 12 years old, plunging her into sadness. She wrote “Love lessons: Discovering our passion for life when everything seems very difficult to get” (1995)-a personal book, not a self-help guide-to describe her journey from a broken spirit to the recovery.
Her first step was to write two letters, one of which she said:
“My God, I’m still crazy, I’m not happy at all. But in this letter, I commit unconditional to life, to be here and be alive as I am here, whether it is another 10 days or another 30 years. Regardless of any other human being and their presence in my life and regardless of the events they may pass. This commitment is between me, life and you. ”
