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Academic pursuits and excessive intellectualizing
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Alcohol or drugs
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Approval dependency (the need to please people)
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Cleaning and avoiding contamination and other obsessive-compulsive symptoms
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Control addictions, especially if they surface in personal, sexual, family, and business relations
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Cosmetics, clothes, cosmetic surgery, trying to look good on the outside
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Dependency on toxic relationships (relationships that are damaging and hurtful)
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Exercise and physical conditioning
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Food addictions
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Materialism
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Money addictions, such as overspending, gambling, hoarding
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Organizing, structuring (the need always to have everything in its place)
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Perfectionism
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Physical illness (hypochondria)
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Religiosity or religious legalism (preoccupation with the form, rules, and regulations of religions, rather than benefiting from the real spiritual message)
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Rescuing patterns toward another person
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Sexual addictions
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Work, achievement, and success
Codependency is a type of dysfunctional behavior prevalent in society as a whole, as well as in Christian families. There are four basic dysfunctional situations which may cause a person to exhibit codependent behavior:
- Persons who are currently in a close relationship with an addict or alcoholic.
- Persons with an addictive parent or grandparent. This includes addictive disorders such as chemical dependency, workaholism, compulsive overspending, sexaholism, and child abuse.
- Persons suffering significant childhood loss due to reasons other than addiction--death, divorce, physical or mental deprivation.
- Persons from an emotionally out-of-touch or extremely repressive family background.
Codependency, like chemical dependency, is a disease that is chronic, progressive, and fatal.
From a seminar, "Breaking out of Denominational Denial," presented by Pastor Hal Gates, Founder/Director, SDAxA Regeneration Seminars.
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