A blameless
recovery for adult children is a healing process whereby we gradually learn to
stop reacting to our challenges in life through the practice of blaming our
parents, others and ourselves for our situation and condition today. Our goal
is to achieve increasing acceptance of our own condition and to additionally
accept our own lives as we live them without shaming ourselves or blaming
people, places and things for our problems.
This
blameless approach to managing our adult lives allows us to slowly begin to
take responsibility for our own life. We understand our condition is the direct
effect of the programming we received in our dysfunctional family system,
resulting in our living our lives as adult children. In our recovery we are
able to progress toward developing the ability to focus our effort and
attention on our own healing process with the help of our own higher power, the
support of the ACA fellowship and our own willingness to heal. Rather than
incessantly blaming others for our problems and our emotional pain we can learn
to live a life beyond merely surviving by truly accepting life as it happens
and living in solutions.
When we
react to our problems in the present by focusing on and blaming whomever we
believe is at fault for our condition today, we are not in a blameless
process. Unfortunately looking to assign
blame for our problems may be a an excuse to avoid our own painful feelings and
a way to avoid taking personal responsibility to address our own condition;
blaming is forever backward-looking and stagnating with the frequent result of
little to no progress in our healing; consequently we may not move beyond the
stage of blaming and fault finding…whereas taking responsibility for improving
our condition is forward-looking and self-empowering.
This movement toward
healing and more functional living may accelerate with the practice of a
blameless recovery. Fixating primarily on blame can delay our own recovery;
blaming can take the focus off of ourselves, blaming can restrict the feeling
our own feelings, and may delay any necessary corrective action. Constant
blaming may inhibit implementing solutions that could help us progress in our
healing process.
We are born
as innocent children. As innocent children born into a dysfunctional family
system we did not receive the love, safety, validation, sense of well-being,
emotional security and acceptance which are necessary for a healthy emotional
childhood developmental process. A healthy emotional childhood development
process can occur in functional families. Our experience of living in a
dysfunctional family system was that of an arrested childhood emotional
developmental process.
We experience
this arrested childhood developmental process resulting in a condition within
ourselves as manifesting an inability to feel loved, lovable, acceptable,
competent, confident, validated, safe, secure, heard and understood. As a
result of the childhood traumas and the repetitive negative conditioning
processes which occur in dysfunctional families we are often unable to live
life without ever present unreasonable fears we learned in our family of
origin.
Emotionally
abandoned, neglected and abused by parents, family members and others was our
own direct experience. As adult-children we can get stuck in our childhood pain
by blaming ourselves for our condition through the process of self-shaming,
self-criticism, and self-loathing. This self-incrimination is not innate but
rather is a learned habit developed within the dysfunctional family system.
Noted Psychologist Dr. Lisa Firestone states: “The causes of self-loathing lie
in the past, when, as children, we were trying to cope with our lives in the
best way possible. The nature and degree of this division within ourselves
depends on the parenting we received and the early environment we experienced.
Parents, like all of us, have mixed feelings toward themselves; they have
things they like about themselves and they have self-critical thoughts and
feelings.
The same
negative feelings that parents have toward themselves are unfortunately often
directed toward their children as well… In addition… if a parent has unresolved
feelings from either trauma or loss in his or her past, this will impact his or
her reactions to his or her children. …Because of their acute sensitivity to
pain and negative circumstances, children of all ages pay particular attention
to, and are more affected by, even small incidences of parental anger. They may
experience a parent’s anger, whether acted out or not, as being
life-threatening. (Under extreme circumstances, they may be accurate in their
perceptions.) In any case, children in stressful situations often feel
threatened to the core of their being and frightened for their lives.
During times
of stress, when children are afraid, they stop identifying with themselves as
the helpless child and instead identify with the verbally or physically
punishing parent. The parent is assimilated or taken in as he or she is at that
moment, when he or she is at his or her worst, not as he or she is every day.
The child tends to take on the anger, fear, self-hatred, in fact, the whole
complex of emotions the parent is experiencing at that time.” We have lived our
adult lives as adult children. Tony A. defined an adult child as “one who as an
adult responds from the fears and low self-esteem learned in childhood.”
When we
begin our healing in ACOA we start to come out of denial about our true
feelings and condition. Clarity about our family history and our true condition
living as adult children appears with the help of our higher power; we gain
this clarity concerning our real condition of living as an adult child. Buried
memories and feelings from our formative years do begin to return.
Coming out
of denial we have a choice to accept without doubt that we were in fact
victimized and abandoned by our parents and others; and our survival in the
dysfunctional family system necessitated that we instinctively adapt by way of
our survival instinct; thus replicating and internalizing our family of
origin’s dysfunctional lives and adopting the laundry list traits into our
personality. In essence, we became our parents.
This
maladaptive behavior of adult children developed through the dysfunctional
programming of the family system or origin is predictable. As children we felt
victimized, unsupported, neglected abandoned and alone…yet we persisted in
believing our family origin’s false messages were true for us. Our family’s
beliefs became our beliefs; their critical messages to us became our own self
talk. All the while we continued to seek out for love and approval within a
dysfunctional family system where mature love did not exist.
When we were
shamed, criticized, and victimized by verbal and emotional abuse and neglect,
we developed a belief that we were inherently defective by our own nature and
undeserving of love and acceptance. Our family system was the authority figure
in our lives, and as children we accepted their negative view of us without
question as being true for us. Dysfunction
is ingrained in a child through the repetitive programming of the dysfunctional
family system.
Simultaneously we felt to be powerless over the abuse and at the
same time we experienced the shame and blame heaped on us by the family of
origin. We were shamed by parents and others for being imperfect little human
beings. We believed their dysfunction story as true for us, and we accepted
their assigned role for us. In turn, we adapted and survived by shaming
ourselves in the same manner as we were shamed by our dysfunctional family
system…and we continue this destructive habit of self-shaming as adult children
before recovery and healing.
A double
bind developed where we knew inside we were doing our best and the mistakes we
may have made were not our fault because we were little children doing the very
best we could as innocent children…yet we took on the role of self-blaming and
self-shaming through the self-abandonment process none the less. We were in a
state of internal conflict between the powerlessness of our condition and
conditioning, and the constant messages of being shameful or defective for
simply being children, consistently falling short of the unreasonable
perfectionist expectations of the dysfunctional family system of our origin.
We
did the very best we could but our best was never good enough for the
dysfunctional family system. Locked into a denial mechanism that holds
dysfunctional family systems together, we
were truly brainwashed in a negative manner and went into hiding by reacting to
the constant dysfunction by practicing the laundry list survival traits. As our
inner clarity increases and upon completely accepting that we were truly
victimized, abandoned and traumatized we begin to feel the searing pain of our
lost childhood as we move toward recovery and the healing of our childhood
trauma.
We
experience the deep feelings of rage and anger we have held toward our parents,
others and ourselves. These are the feelings that we had stuffed and suppressed
for many years, and even in recovery these feelings can rise up within us as
triggers from the past; as the trauma is stored in our mind as well as in
physical body. On page 100 of “The Laundry List Book” written by Tony A. he
states “Year after year I was forced to stuff my feelings until somewhere deep
inside me I had developed this molten ball of rage at all the times I had been
abused and invalidated.” All of this rage and pain needs to be felt in order to
be healed.
We were
programmed for dysfunctional living. Our parents were the instruments of our
victimization and emotional abandonment, and we eventually accept this to be a
fact and part of our history. One of a blameless recovery’s goal is free from
the self-shaming and self-blaming we have punished ourselves with by
internalizing the blaming and dysfunctional messages we received from our
dysfunctional family of origin. Coming out of denial it is a natural reaction
initially to place all the blame and responsibility for our present condition
on our parents, others and even ourselves. This is an unavoidable stage coming
out of denial.
Our family
of origin’s parenting of us was in fact the instrument of our victimization.
Our family of origin unconsciously passed onto us the generational condition of
family dysfunction. While our parents are responsible for what they did it, may
be impossible to hold them accountable as they may choose to abdicate personal
responsibility for their poor parenting performance. We may make little
progress if we are waiting for our family to take responsibility for what they
did to us. We have a choice to take responsibility for putting ourselves in a
position to receive healing and recovery. In recovery we gradually heal over
time and outgrow the need for constant blaming and self-shaming by working our
recovery program and focusing on the solution, rather than compulsively living
in the problem.
We come to
understand that it was not our parent’s fault for our condition today, as they
too were equally victimized as innocent children by the dysfunction of their
own family of origin. Our parents gave us the generational condition they were
given, they too were victims as children…who in turn victimized their own
children by force of habit of the generational condition. It was not their
fault, but rather the direct effect of their own childhood conditioning leaving
them with little choice but to treat us in the same way they were treated as
innocent children. We discover and accept that it is not our fault for living
with the condition of being adult child. Our condition was the natural
consequence of the arrested emotional childhood developmental process.
We were not
born adult children. We are not adult children due to having a defective moral
character as children. All we did was survive life by developing the laundry
list survival traits while living with frozen feelings and trauma. There is no
fault to be found in an innocent child who did only what was needed to survive,
no amends need to be made by adult children to themselves for their lost
childhood. Certainly no amends need ever to be made to parents for our
childhood.
Coming out
of denial into a blameless recovery is analogous to the 5 stages of the grief
process. The grief recovery process includes the stages of denial, anger,
bargaining, depression and deep grieving culminating finally into a stage of
acceptance. It is doubtful we can achieve a blameless recovery if we attempt an
“emotional bypass” by intentionally avoiding the painful feelings we
experienced in childhood. Our painful feelings are to be felt and the trauma we
hold must be released and healed for us to rekindle our original nature.
It is also
unlikely we can heal on our own alone, remaining in isolation and separate from
our higher power, our true self, and our fellows. If choose not process the
childhood feelings of rage, grief, trauma and losses from our childhood
effectively, we may not be able to move toward a life beyond survival…we can
stay stuck in blaming others and ourselves. We will not experience the promises
of ACOA we seek. People may ask how do we work through our rage and blame
within a blameless recovery process?
We do so by feeling our feelings without
shaming ourselves for the feeling we have of rage and blame that were generated
in the dysfunctional family system of origin. The real
danger in getting stuck in blaming our parents is that can we justify and
rationalize that we shouldn’t have to do the hard work of recovery and healing
because it is “not my fault, therefore not my responsibility” yet holding this
belief does not liberate us from the constant self-condemnation or merciless
criticism for our condition of being an adult child.
Moving
gradually toward acceptance that we now have the choice to manage our condition
as something that was not the consequence of having a defective character; but
rather a learned condition that developed within us by being raised in an
alcoholic or dysfunctional family…we can actually experience healing from the
effects of our condition if we are willing to work a blameless recovery program
in ACOA.
We can
understand the progress of our recovery goes through sequential and progressive
stages. The stages of rediscovering the innocent child we were. Accepting that
we as innocent children were victimized by our parents, to understanding the
mechanics by which we developed the survival tools of the laundry list traits
where we abandoned our true selves, to then feeling and healing the pain of our
lost childhood and victimization. This process allows us to eventually reach a
blameless view of our parents thus releasing them from responsibility to change
our lives today.
We accept
that in fact our own condition of being an adult child is not our fault so
self-shaming gradually diminishes. We learn that we do not have a permanent
condition that is our fault, and we are not to blame for being an adult
child…that our condition of living life as adult children is truly a blameless
condition. We can now begin to implement all the tools of recovery to achieve
the promises of ACOA. We take responsibility for our own lives. This is the
goal of a blameless recovery in ACOA.
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