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enough. Nothing is. I might as well save the plane fare. Maybe I never should have moved away.
    I told Les that it was typical for children who were forced to exchange emotional roles with their parents to carry into their adult lives tremendous guilt and an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. As adults, they often become trapped in a vicious cycle of accepting responsibility for everything, inevitably falling short, feeling guilty and inadequate, and then redoubling their efforts. This is a draining, depleting cycle that leads to an ever-increasing sense of failure.
    Driven as a little boy by the expectations of his parents, Les learned early that his goodness was judged primarily by how much he did for the rest of his family. As an adult, his parents’ external demands were transformed into internal demons that continued to drive him in the one area where he could feel some sense of worth—work.
    Les had neither the time nor the appropriate role model from which to learn about the giving and receiving of love. He grew up without nourishment of his emotional life, so he simply turned off his emotions. Unfortunately, he found that he couldn’t turn them back on again, even when he wanted to.
    I assured Les that I understood how frustrated and bewildered he felt about his inability to open up to anyone emotionally, but I urged him to go easy on himself. He hadn’t had anyone to teach him those things when he was young, and they’re pretty tough to pick up on your own.
    “It would be like expecting yourself to play a piano concerto when you didn’t even know where middle-C was!” I told him. “You can learn, but you’ve got to give yourself time to pick up the basics, to practice, and maybe even to fail once or twice.”
    “If I Don’t Take Care of Their Needs, Who Will?”
Dear Abby:
I’m in a crazy family. Can you get me out of here?
—Hopeless
    This was written by one of my clients, Melanie, when she was 13. Now a 42-year-old divorced tax accountant, Melanie came to see me because of severe depression. Although she was extremely thin, she would have been quite pretty if the recent months of erratic sleep hadn’t taken their toll. She was open and talked easily about herself.
I feel utterly hopeless all the time. Like my life is out of control. I just can’t get on top of things. I feel like I’m digging myself deeper and deeper into a hole every day.
    I asked her to be more specific. She bit her lip, then turned away from me as she replied:
There’s such an emptiness inside me . . . I don’t think I’ve ever felt connected to anybody in my whole life. I’ve been married twice, and I’ve lived with several guys, but I just can’t find the right one. I always pick either lazy bums or total bastards. Then of course it’s up to me to set them straight. I always think I can fix them. I lend them money, I move them into my house, I’ve even found jobs for a couple of them. It never works, but I never learn. They don’t love me, no matter how much I do for them. One of these guys hit me in front of my kids. Another took off with my car. My first husband played around. My second husband was a total lush. Some track record.
    Without realizing it, Melanie was describing the classic behavior of a co-dependent personality. Originally, the term co-dependent was used specifically to describe the partner of an alcoholic or drug addict. Co-dependent was used interchangeably with the term enabler —someone whose life was out of control because he or she was taking responsibility for “saving” a chemically dependent person.
    But in the past few years the definition of co-dependency has expanded to include all people who victimize themselves in the process of rescuing and being responsible for any compulsive, addicted, abusive, or excessively dependent person.
    Melanie was attracted to very troubled men. She believed that if she could just be good enough—give enough, love enough, worry enough, help enough,