In her book, Pia Mellody had made a significant effort to distinguish codependency from love addiction: While love addicts turn to a person as a drug of choice for soothing the pain of their difficult relationships with themselves, the absence of healthy self-love is itself codependency.

“I read it somewhere.” I shrugged. “I remember things.”

“That’s one definition of it,” he conceded. “Here we like to think of it as the pain from childhood that manifests in adulthood.”

“So unless you grew up in a 1950s sitcom,” I said, “you’re codependent?”

Richard forced a laugh. “It’s true that most people have unresolved pain from childhood. But not everyone ends up self-medicating with one of these.” He ran the capped marker back over the words at the ends of the branches. “The goal is figuring out how we got from the root of the tree to the branches. From codependency to addiction.”

We began by telling our life stories. “There’s no time limit on how long you have, just however long you need to take,” Richard said as I clenched the edges of my chair. Having known these people for less than twenty-four hours, I wasn’t too enthused about hearing their entire personal histories. I assumed everyone else must’ve felt the same way, but to my surprise, they seemed engaged, leaning forward attentively to listen to one another. Though I mostly scribbled in my notebook and did equations, calculating the cost per hour of being there, I picked up bits and pieces.

Alex, who I kept wanting to call Eugene because he looked like one, was an engineer with a perpetually exasperated expression on his face. I noticed him for the first time on the way to the Al-Anon meeting the night before. He’d sat beside Greg in the back row of the van with his brows raised and eyes popped, wiping sweat off his forehead with a handkerchief. At the end of the meeting he furiously gripped my hand and chanted, “Let go and let God. Keep coming back, it works if you work it!” Alex was from New Hampshire, and his wife was an alcoholic. He’d been a member of Al-Anon for twenty-seven years. “I just keep trying to fix her,” he told us, honking into a Kleenex and then throwing the wet balled-up tissues across the floor. “I mean, I’ve sent her to rehab twice, I’ve written her letters describing how it’s tearing our family apart, I’ve laid out charts for how she can gradually stop drinking,” he said. “But the more I try, the more she wants nothing to do with me.”

“Maybe you should stop trying,” Greg suggested, “and see what happens.”

“I can’t just stop,” he snapped. “We have kids. There’s too much at stake.”