I'd like to tell everyone about a CoDa group that I joined for a brief time a few years ago, maybe in 2010 or 2011. It was a bit of a drive, but I thought it would be worth it. As it turned out, it was a small group comprised entirely of women. That wasn't a problem for me in the beginning. When I returned the following week for my second meeting, I noticed the women in the group had gone to considerable length to dress up and prepare their make-up. I was a little surprised, but didn't think very much about it. By the third or fourth meeting I was approached by a woman in the group about the possibility of a sexual encounter between the two of us. She had picked up on the fact that I'm codependent and very vulnerable in that area, and will, as the literature says, accept sex as a substitute for love. The only thing that made me hold fast was the fact that I, as a husband, had been cheated on by my first wife and was unwilling to bring such a thing down on my current wife. I didn't sense that anyone in the group was willing make a move to protect me. Rather than remain in an unsafe and possibly compromising environment, I pretty much turned tail and ran away from that group. I was contacted a week or so later by the group's facilitator. Rather than go into detail about everything, I just more or less told her I couldn't keep placing myself in a situation that kept hacking away at one of my weakest areas.

All of this to say that I took it for granted that every group policed itself against situations like this one. No one in the group, including the facilitator, was willing to step forward and draw a line in the sand saying, "no one crosses this line" (but we're codependent and we lack the wherewithal to create boundaries). I felt like I was left to my own devices to protect myself, and those devices are in pretty bad shape. I miss being in a group but I'm really vulnerable. Any group I become a part of will have to have the ability to strictly police itself.