Bishop Will Willimon's blog

Check out a great message about our victimized/self-help culture from William Willimon, currently Bishop of Northern Alabama in The United Methodist Church, at his blog

Here is an exerpt:

Cloying positive messages that, "I am loveable," self-aggrandizing demands to "Look out for yourself for a change" are not the gospel. Indeed, although I am not at present victimized by depression, it is depressing to note how many church groups, counselors, and religious publishing houses have bought, hook line and sinker, into the codependency fad as if were easily transposed into the Christian message.

The gospel is not in the business of producing victims. Christian conversion is not a journey deeper, ever deeper into yourself, relentlessly scanning your psyche, your needs, your desires and hurts. Not everything painful which happens to us in life renders us into victims. (Popular codependency writer John Bradshaw has the nerve to compare adult children of alcoholics to Holocaust survivors.) The Poor Me victimization motif which infects much of this literature degrades our language and makes it increasingly difficult for us to talk about genuine cases of victimization by genuinely traumatic events. The facile adaptation of the twelve step process pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous in an attempt to apply it to every possible human malady and annoyance degrades the process. We now have smokers who have formed support groups to help them deal with the trauma they have experienced at the hands of nonsmokers. When everyone is a victim, nobody is a victim.

See: http://www.willimon.blogspot.com/ for the whole of "My name is Will, and I am addicted"