Codependency personality disorder is a condition in which a person focuses on by living through or for another person, attempting to control the actions of others, attempting to "fix" others, feeling an obsessive need to take care of others, and feeling intense anxiety about the well-being of another person, while feeling victimized and secretly blaming the other person for life's unhappinesses. The diagnosis has become very common in the 1990s, especially in people raised in dysfunctional families, and in the partners and children of alcoholics and drug addicts. In this pattern of compulsive, self-defeating, learned behaviors, one or more members of a family (or other social unit) may develop dysfunctional behaviors in order to survive in a family that is experiencing great emotional pain and stress. Often these learned behaviors are passed on from generation to generation, continuing a destructive cycle.

The idea of codependency emerged in the...