ADULTING IN RELATIONSHIP
A 12-Week Codependency & Relationship Group Based on Pia Mellody's Model of Codependency
Apply for the 12-Week Group
When we tend to our inner child, we create a more whole, authentic and connected adult life.
Your adult relationships didn’t begin in adulthood.
The way you handle conflict.
The people you choose.
What happens when someone is disappointed with you.
How difficult it is to say no without explaining yourself.
Whether you disappear, control, overfunction, rescue, rage, shut down, or abandon yourself to keep a relationship intact.
These patterns usually have a history.
This 12-week group is an opportunity to look at the connection between the relationships you have today and the family system that shaped them.
We’ll use Pia Mellody’s model of codependency to understand what happened developmentally, how you adapted to it, and how those adaptations continue to shape your adult relationships.
Then we’ll learn how to bring the Functional Adult onboard so you can respond to what is actually happening now, rather than reacting from what happened then.
This isn’t a group about learning how to “stop being codependent.”
Pia Mellody’s model goes much deeper than that.
Melody Beattie's work helped popularize the concept most people recognize today: becoming excessively focused on another person, particularly someone struggling with addiction. Much of what gets called “codependency” today overlaps with what Pia Mellody described as love addiction, which we'll also explore in this group.
Pia used the word differently.
She described codependency as a form of emotional developmental halting arising from childhood experiences that interfere with normal emotional development.
And her definition of childhood trauma is broad.
It isn't limited to what we usually call the Big T traumas.
In Pia's model, anything less than nurturing can be traumatic to a developing child.
Some experiences leave deeper developmental wounds than others. Some happen when we're very young. Others happen later.
And those developmental injuries don't necessarily disappear because we turn 18.
Over 12 weeks, we’ll begin tracing those patterns back to where they developed and learning a healthier and more mature way to relate.
Why I Teach This Model
I didn’t learn Pia Mellody’s work from a weekend training or a book.
I trained directly under Pia Mellody at The Meadows and worked within her model for ten years.
Her framework has remained foundational to the way I understand developmental trauma, family systems, codependency, addictions, adult relationships, and the overall human condition.
What I appreciate most about Pia’s work is that it gives us something concrete to work with. Instead of simply asking, Why do I keep doing this?, we can begin identifying the developmental pattern underneath it and practice something different. A lot of self-help work is good at helping us identify the problem. Pia’s model goes further. It gives us a framework for recognizing which part of us has taken over and concrete tools for bringing the Functional Adult back onboard.
What We’ll Explore
We’ll work with Pia Mellody’s model of childhood development and codependency, including her Five Core Issues:
- Self-esteem: How do I experience my own inherent worth?
- Boundaries: Where do I end and another person begin?
- Reality: Can I recognize and own my own experience without making someone else responsible for it?
- Dependency: Can I identify and appropriately meet my needs and wants?
- Moderation: Can I experience feelings and behavior without swinging between extremes?
We’ll also explore family roles, childhood adaptations, relationship patterns, shame, emotional regulation, dysfunctional family systems, and inner-child work.
This won’t be twelve weeks of PowerPoint slides about codependency.
We’re going to look at how these patterns are actually operating in your life.
The Inner Child Work
There is a reason an adult can understand intellectually that a relationship is unhealthy and still feel unable to leave.
A reason a boundary can be completely reasonable and still produce enormous guilt.
A reason a partner’s withdrawal can trigger panic, or criticism can suddenly make you feel very small.
The adult brain may understand what is happening while older emotional and relational learning is being activated underneath it.
Inner-child work gives us a way to identify those earlier experiences and begin separating what was learned then from what is true now.
The goal isn’t to live in childhood.
It’s to stop letting your childhood run your adult relationships.
This is where your relationships come in.
Imagine something significant happened when you were ten.
Years later, your husband does something that touches that old experience. He may not even be doing the same thing. Your conscious mind may not make the connection at all.
But something in you recognizes it.
And suddenly, you're not responding to your husband entirely from your adult self.
Ten-year-old you has entered the conversation.
If the developmental wound occurred very early, you may freeze, collapse, become overwhelmed, or have very little language available to you.
If it happened during adolescence, you may find yourself fighting, rebelling, withdrawing, slamming metaphorical doors, or becoming what Pia called the Adapted Adult Child.
Your chronological age hasn't changed.
But the part of you driving the interaction has.
That is why you can look back after an argument and think:
Why did I react like that?
There is usually an answer.
And once we can see it, we have something to work with.
The goal is the Functional Adult.
We are not going to spend 12 weeks excavating childhood simply for the sake of understanding childhood.
We're going back because your history helps us understand what gets activated in the present.
Then we work on what to do when it happens.
You'll learn to notice when your Inner Child or Adapted Adult Child has taken over and practice bringing your Functional Adult back into the room.
The Functional Adult can pause.
The Functional Adult can tolerate someone else's disappointment.
The Functional Adult can have feelings without making those feelings someone else's responsibility.
The Functional Adult can identify needs and wants.
The Functional Adult can set a boundary without needing the other person to agree that the boundary is reasonable.
The Functional Adult can recognize, This feeling is real, but some of its intensity belongs to something older.
And here's the part I love about Pia's model:
Perfection isn't the goal.
Pia taught that if we're operating from our Functional Adult about 50% of the time, we have good recovery under our belt.
Fifty percent.
That's doable.
Especially once you learn how to recognize who is driving the bus.
The goal isn't to get rid of your Inner Child.
The goal is to stop putting your Inner Child in charge of adult relationships.
Your Inner Child is supposed to have feelings.
But it’s your Functional Adult that’s supposed to decide what to do with them.
Over these 12 weeks, you'll learn to recognize when an old developmental wound has been activated, tend to what is happening internally, and bring your Functional Adult back onboard before deciding how to respond externally.
Timing Matters
We’ll begin at the end of September and finish the week before Christmas.
That timing is intentional.
The holidays tend to put us back in contact with the exact systems where many of these patterns developed.
Parents. Siblings. Partners. Ex-partners. Adult children. Expectations. Obligation. Guilt. Old roles. Boundary violations. The pressure to keep everyone happy.
Instead of talking about family dynamics six months later, we’ll have an opportunity to work with some of them while they’re actually happening.
Learning how to show up differently when you're triggered is where your life begins to change.
And by Thanksgiving, you’ll already have nearly two months of practice asking one of the most useful questions in this work.
Who is driving the bus right now?
Is it my Inner Child? The ornery teenager? Or my Functional Adult?
And if my Functional Adult isn't driving, how do I bring them back onboard before I respond?
Because let’s face it. There’s a reason you can be a perfectly capable 50-year-old adult and somehow feel ten years old again within twenty minutes of walking into your parents’ house.
This year, you’ll have tools for recognizing when that happens, honoring your boundaries, and choosing how you want to respond instead of automatically falling back into the role you learned to play in your family.
GROUP DETAILS
12-Week Virtual Codependency Group
Wednesdays | 7:00–8:30 PM Eastern
September 30 – December 16, 2026
12 consecutive weeks
Live 90-minute group call each week
$100/week
Billed as three monthly payments of $400
12-week commitment
Pia often described codependency as part of the human condition. We all do it. All the time.
And she taught that if we can keep our Functional Adult onboard about 50% of the time, we have good recovery under our belt.
