Acoa Quotes

You never turn away family, no matter how f***ed up they are.

Adult Children of Alcoholics was largely based on the premise that for the ACoA there is a lack of data base: ACoAs do not learn what other children learn in the process of growing up. Although they do wonderfully well in crisis, they do not learn the day-to-day process of “doing life.

The drinking parent lied to the sober parent; the sober parent deceived the drinking parent. Most children of alcoholics have learned that no one can be trusted.

ACOAs often develop an external locus of control, believing that something outside of themselves will decrease the emptiness or the pain they feel inside. Thoughts such as “If the house is clean enough, I will be good enough” or “If I win the big one at the casino, I will be somebody important” are attempts to control blocked pain and fear.

ACOA (Adult Children of Alcoholics) Counseling can break the cycle in your family. Did you parent your parents? Chaos seem normal? Unhappiness is expected? http://marlana.org/spiritual-healing

Change also comes when we learn to do something different, to make choices in our thinking and daily routines that interrupt a downward spiral and create an upward one.

One of the problems with shutting down feeling is that we begin to live in our heads. We tell ourselves a story about what we think we’re feeling or what we think we should be feeling rather than feeling our genuine emotions and allowing words to grow out of them so we can accurately describe our inner experience. When we can feel our feelings and then translate them into language, we can use our reasoning ability to play a role in regulating our emotional experience.

They learn to relate by caretaking, pleasing, isolating, or acting out rather than fully relating with their true and authentic selves. As a result, they feel accepted for their roles, not for who they were. Adult Children often have no idea how to have an equal partner relationship with healthy communication and normal conflict. As one ACOA said, “I feel that everyone else got a book at birth on how to live life, have relationships, and parent—and I never got my copy.

When he was a kid, it used to feel like his parents disappeared when the got drunk. As the levels of their glasses went down, he could sense them pulling away from him, as if they were together on the same boat, slowly pulling away from the shore where Oliver was left stranded, still himself, still boring, sensible Oliver, and he'd think, Please don't go, stay here with me, because his real mother was funny and his real father was smart, but they always went. First his dad got stupid and his mum got giggly, and then his mum got nasty and his dad got angry, and so it went until there was no point staying and Oliver went to watch movies in his bedroom. He'd had his own VCR in his bedroom. He'd had a privileged upbringing, had never wanted for anything.

The following are guidelines to finding a sponsor, therapist or counselor who will usually tend to be helpful rather than harmful. The person will tend to have or be: 1) Demonstrable training and experience. For example, a clinician or therapist has training and experience in helping people to grow mentally, emotionally and spiritually, as well as being effective in helping with specific problems or conditions, such as being an ACoA or an “AC” (Adult Child of a troubled family). 2) Not dogmatic, rigid or judgmental. 3) No promises of quick fixes or answers. 4) While you sense that they genuinely respect you as a human being and your recovery and growth, they are firm enough to push you to do your own work of recovery. 5) Provide some of your needs (listening, mirroring, echoing, safety, respect, understanding and accepting your feelings) during the therapy session. 6) Encourage and help you learn to find ways outside the therapy session to get your needs met in a healthy way. 7) They are well progressed in healing their own Child Within. 8) They do not use you to get their needs met (this may be difficult to detect). 9) You feel safe and relatively comfortable with them.

Gravitz and Bowden (1985) describe recovery in their ACoA patients as occurring in six stages: (1) Survival; (2) Emergent Awareness; (3) Core Issues; (4) Transformations; (5) Integration; and (6) Genesis (or spirituality). These stages parallel the four stages of life growth and transformation described by Ferguson (1980) and the three stages of the classical mythological hero or heroine’s journey as described by Campbell (1946) and by myself and others. We can clarify and summarize the similarities of each approach as follows.

When I think about exactly why twelve-step programs worked for me, I believe it was because: I was desperate, and it was free and the only help available. I was relatively cozy with Judeo-Christian verbiage. I had a positive memory of it. My dad had gone to ACOA and my mom had tried OA, but she stopped because she was worried that “word would get around town.” And she’s totally right. It does get around town. I could easily change my worldview on a dime (see also Suzuki, Dale Carnegie). Everyone looked like me or my mom. I do not know.

right to voice one’s opinions and voice one’s needs directly (without fear) is assured; and healthy conflict and confrontation are encouraged as part of the family communication system.

Change comes when we have sat in the pain long enough and fully enough so that we can feel it, can open our mouths and talk about it, see it for what it is, reorder and understand it, and then walk out of it. This does not mean that we won’t feel bad, hurt, angry, or triggered about our past again. It just means that if and when we are triggered, we won’t catapult into an unconscious place from which we can only act out, shut down, or dive straight into self-medicating behaviors.

It’s a peeling back the layers of the onion one at a time, stage by stage, examining the thinking, feeling, and behavior that were learned and became engrained at each stage of development. Physical sobriety is fairly straightforward, and abstention or regulation are its mainstays, but emotional sobriety can be more elusive.

Then I began to hear and understand the message of ACoA. I had made success and people my gods, but they were false gods.

Too much time spent in a deeply dissociated state can contribute to PTSD. Additionally, lesser forms of dissociation can become an unconscious solution that can impair our ability to be “present” and to connect in other situations. For example, a child dissociating in a classroom where he’s scared may be a child who has trouble paying attention. Or an adult who dissociates in an intimate relationship may not be present enough to truly live in the relationship and understand it.

even though the false self is meant to protect the more vulnerable self, it actually has the effect of weakening it. When people who have become dependent on false-self functioning go into therapy or enter a 12-step program, they can go through a period of feeling very vulnerable and shaky because they are removing their coping strategy and exposing the pain underneath it. But over time, new healthy emotional habits get created, and new ways of healthy coping get practiced and adopted.

Even cleaning up branches and debris after a hurricane can allow those affected to restore a sense that they can do something to improve their situation, which counters the PTSD symptom of learned helplessness. Children can counter their own sense of helplessness by doing positive things for themselves, whether writing in a personal journal, helping to restore order in the house, engaging in fun or meaningful school activities that build their sense of having their own life, or getting a job to earn their own spending money.

One does not need to create some powerful therapeutic intervention in the life of a CoA in order to make a big difference. An open door, a couch to curl up on, an after-school snack, or a place to play can make the essential difference for CoAs: they just need a place to go that isn’t in a state of chaos, somewhere where they feel they can relax.

Healing trauma is healing codependency. As historical pain is processed rather than projected and the self becomes more distinct and present oriented, codependent behaviors begin to clear up naturally.

Children are naturally needy. When they feel that there is no room for their needs because the parents’ needs are sucking up all of the relationship oxygen, they develop circuitous ways of meeting their needs through others—codependency in the making. These kids often experience their parents’ needs as more immediate and important than their own. Children tend to feel that they are disappearing around their narcissistic parents. The message is strong that their parents are the center of the universe.

they assume another person will not want to meet their needs. So they attempt to meet their needs privately, within themselves and by themselves. Eventually they may feel uncomfortable even having needs, and so they try to hide them, even from themselves; they shut down that feeling within them. Their own inner worlds can feel hazy and confusing to them while the worlds of others seem clear and distinct.

Learned helplessness can be part of the ACoA trauma syndrome. In disaster situations, the smallest form of involvement can allow victims to be less symptomatic.

If ACoAs do not treat their own PTSD issues, they are at high risk for re-creating many of the types of dynamics that they grew up with in their own partnering and parenting, in one form of another. They likely do this without awareness, truly convinced that they are delivering the kind of care and attention that they never got. The problem is that their caring and loyalty may be fueled by some of their own unconscious and unmet needs and their children sense this and feel guilty and even resentful—but they don’t know why. If they felt underparented, for example, they may overparent; if they felt underprotected, they may overprotect; if they felt kept at a distance, they may even glue themselves to their children, suffocating them with more attention of a certain kind than is healthy.

We can take a daily inventory of how much exercise we get, how much sleep we get, our network of relationships, the meaning and sense of purpose that drives us, and the amount of stress we have. This inventory allows us to see if our lifestyles are supporting or undermining our ability to actualize positive change.

They may not even know they are angry; that anger may be quite unconscious and unprocessed. Another manifestation of unprocessed anger is depression. ACoAs may turn their anger against themselves and become listless, isolated, and sullen. Or they may act it out; they become the screw-up and blow up their own lives. They drink, drug, cut, or fall apart, engaging full-out in self-destructive behaviors that undermine their happiness and success. All of these are ways of not feeling the anger they carry.

The effects of being traumatized in childhood don’t tend to disappear on their own; they tend to reemerge later in some form of overreaction, compulsive behavior, learning difficulty, intimacy issues, addictions, or process addictions

Today there is help all around—articles abound on these subjects, 12-step rooms are around the corner, and help is down the hall in many schools and workplaces. But we have to reach out and take hold of the help. And we have to stick with it until we can create meaningful change in our lives.

The lack of sharing genuine feeling in the addicted home can also lead to isolation, a common feature of depression.

The more we isolate, the more out of practice we become at making connections with people, which can further isolate us. Support groups like 12-step programs are a godsend for those who fear direct connection as they do not require a formal “joining” and do not insist that people play a particular role.

It is also underscores why having a spiritual belief system, such as that in 12-step programs or faith-based affiliations, can be so helpful in personal healing and in restoring a sense of belonging to a community where one can easily access support and friendship. Having a spiritual belief system can play an important role in personal healing by providing both hope and a sense of security despite any ongoing familial and intrapsychic chaos. It can also help the person in pain to reframe suffering and give it positive meaning, which develops resilience.

Distorted reasoning can become intergenerational as children absorb, model, and live out their parent’s way of thinking about and handling distressing situations, and it can affect the health of relationships. Denial of someone’s behavior—for example, a distortion of the truth—is excessive minimization or rationalization. When we attempt to make distorted behavior seem somehow normal, we have to twist our own thinking to do so. Also, as children we make sense of situations with the developmental equipment we have at any given age; when we’re young, we either borrow the reasoning of the adults around us or make our own childlike meaning.

In other words, they are doing the necessary therapy to understand their trauma-related issues, but they are ignoring the needs of their bodies and not balancing their daily stressors with support and stress relief.

The cumulative effect of childhood toxic stress is part of what gives the ACoA trauma syndrome teeth. And though toxic stressors are common throughout society, some are more devastating than others. When CoAs move into adulthood with a history of childhood trauma, they are more vulnerable to being traumatized as adults (Krystal 1968).

The sad outcome, however, is that the false self becomes so well-constructed and adaptable—or garners so much acceptance, approval, or even power within the family that spawned it—that eventually the true self becomes lost to us (Horney 1950). We hide our true self so effectively that even we can’t find it. The false self is meant to absorb or take the pain that the child finds too overwhelming. The false self is largely unconscious. This false self is also sometimes seen as the “idealized self” (Horney 1950).

In working through the pain of a traumatic past, it is important to help clients to identify not only what hurt them, but what sustained them.

Because emotional and sensory memory are processed by and stored in the body, the most successful forms of therapy for trauma are experiential.

Though she is very talented in her work, she went blank when confronted with paperwork, and she felt too intimidated by her various employers, too disempowered and frozen within herself, to ask for help. After all, asking for help when she was young was not possible; that got her nowhere at best and abused at worst. Those core beliefs, that opening her mouth and speaking up would lead to trouble and that no one could help her, had lasted through adulthood. When Kathy could not manage an important part of her job, it triggered her back into the helplessness, choicelessness, and immobility she felt as a child.

The limbic system plays an important role in guiding the emotions that stimulate the behavior necessary for self-preservation and survival of the species. It is responsible for such complex behaviors as feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproduction, and it also assigns free-floating feeling of significance, truth, and meaning to experience” (MacLean, 1985). “Destruction of parts of the limbic system abolishes social behavior, including play, cooperation, mating, and care of the young” (van der Kolk 2005).

Вина - это нейтронная бомба шантажиста. Она оставляет нетронутыми отношения, но разрушает доверие и близость, которые питают наше желание сохранить эти отношения.

Единственные два обстоятельства, от которых все хотят отказаться - это лишний вес и назойливые родственники.

Помните, что здоровые отношения не возникают в одночасье. Они состоят из многих аспектов, в большинстве из которых очень важна взаимность. Начиная отношения с другим человеком, вы должны предложить вашему партнеру то, что хотели бы, чтобы он предложил вам.

Очевидно, что если вы росли в доме, где все время были конфликты, которые никогда не разрешались, вы будете стремиться избегать их. Когда члены вашей семьи проявляли гнев, вы все время боялись, что вы или кто-нибудь другой пострадает, и вам приходилось скрываться, чтобы не попасть под горячую руку. Несложно догадаться, почему вы не одобряете такой тип поведения.

Один из плюсов здоровых отношений в том, что вам не нужно все делать самому, вы можете выполнять свою часть, а партнер - свою. Когда возникают проблемы, вы можете вместе найти решение. Для вас важно осознание того, что вы не один.

Просто уйти, даже не пытаясь найти возможные решения, - отнюдь не лучшая идея. Но оставаться и ничего не делать - это тоже не выход.

Нельзя иметь здоровых отношений, не умея разрешать конфликтные ситуации. У каждого из нас всегда множество разных мыслей и идей, которые время от времени могут не совпадать с чужим мнением. Также случаются ситуации, когда один человек делает что-то, что раздражает другого, и тем самым злит его. Пока отношения только развиваются, невозможно предсказать, в чем именно это проявится. В идеале нужно обсуждать те ситуации, в которых один из партнеров начинает злиться, изучать причины этого и договариваться о том, как не повторять их.

Очень трудно верить другим людям, когда вы привыкли, что доверие приносит вам только боль.