Addictive Agents
(From Serenity® A Companion for Twelve Step Recovery, Drs. Robert Hemfelt & Richard Fowler, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville.)
Addictive agents are those persons or things on which we form an excessive dependency. The catalog of addictive agents includes:
1. Alcohol or drugs
2. Work, achievement, and success
3. Money addictions, such as overspending, gambling, hoarding
4. Control addictions, especially if they surface in personal, sexual, family, and business relationships
5. Food addictions
6. Sexual addictions
7. Approval dependency (the need to please people)
8. Rescuing patterns toward other people
9. Dependency on toxic relationships (relationships that are damaging and hurtful)
10. Physical illness (hypochondria)
11. Exercise and physical conditioning
12. Cosmetics, clothes, cosmetic surgery, trying to look good on the outside
13. Academic pursuits and excessive intellectualizing
14. Religiosity or religious legalism (preoccupation the form and the rules and regulations of religion, rather than benefiting from the real spiritual message)
15. General perfectionism
16. Cleaning and avoiding contamination and other obsessive-compulsive symptoms
17. Organizing, structuring (the need always to have everything in its place)
18. Materialism
Most of us can see ourselves somewhere in this list. And all of us can benefit from the truths that emerge from Twelve Step recovery, because all of us are, to some degree, codependent.
What does this (codependent) mean?
We define codependency as being an effort to control interior feelings by manipulating people, things, and events on the outside.
