Melody Beattie

Diagnoses

Personal

Vocation

Family

American self-help guru, author of "Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself" (1986). The book was on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for years and Beattie followed her successful work with several other books on co-dependency. She is the fourth child born to her parents according to her birth certificate. When she was three years old, her father abandoned the family. She reports that she was molested by a stranger a few years later and, by age 12, she was drinking enough alcohol to kill the pain and cause black-outs. She managed to graduate from high school and land a job as a secretary in an advertising department. Her need for alcohol became worse and led her to liquid cocaine. She married Steven Thurik on November 23, 1970, and they had a son, John Steven Thurik. In the meantime, her addiction caused the loss of her job and led to a divorce from her husband that became final in 1973. With such troubling addictive problems, she was forced to give up custody to her ex-husband. Sinking further, she was arrested for attempted robbery. When given a choice between prison and rehabilitation, she chose the latter. While in the detox program, she had a spiritual experience, understanding God for the first time. She said "my consciousness was raised at that moment." With her recovery complete, she became a counselor for addicts and married David Anthony Beattie on December 19, 1976. Beattie was an alcoholism counselor, who had also conquered, at least for a while, his need for drink. They had two children, Nichole Marie and Shane Anthony Beattie. When her husband relapsed, she became determined to help him and ultimately, through her experiences, discovered the concept of co-dependency. In 1986, she divorced him and, that same year, completed and published the book which put her co-dependency vocabulary into mainstream American language. The book was not her first. She had begun writing professionally early in her marriage, completing "A Promise of Sanity" in 1981, a joint project with Carolyn Owens. She had also completed materials for Hazeldon entitled "Denial" and had been contributing articles on recovery to journals. Despite her writing, her finances while she was married and shortly after her divorce were scarce and she was forced to go on welfare for a short while until "Codependent No More" became a run-away bestseller. Since then, she has been actively sought after for the lecture circuit and she has published other volumes. In 1991 tragedy again struck her life when her youngest son Shane was killed in a skiing accident. Link to Wikipedia biography