[No Title]: Re: Her pain-my pain

» joy2meu - Re: Her pain-my pain

Autumnnut,
You didn't become inept at parenting, you just never really learned how to parent in a healthy way. It is impossible to parent in a healthy way if we don't have a healthy relationship with our self. Our role models for parenting were our parents - who didn't know how to be healthy either. And rather we parent like our parents did, or go to the other extreme by trying to do it completely different than they did, we are being codependent - we are reacting to the extremes of codependency.

Codependency is a conditioned reflex - and also a form of Delayed Stress Syndrome - which causes us to live life in reaction to old tapes and old wounds. (see the codependency pages of my web site: http://Joy2MeU.com/Codependence1.html ) As long as we are reacting to life and other people out of childhood wounding and intellectual programming, we are powerless to do anything but react to extremes. This reacting to extremes dynamic is the result of growing up in cultures that taught us to see our self and life from a black and white, right and wrong, perspective. We were taught that right is what we "should" do, and that "wrong" was bad and shameful. We also got the message that life was a test that we could fail - by being imperfect and doing things "wrong." That sets us up to judge and shame our self for being imperfect, wounded, humans.

This causes us to react to situations in ways that are dysfunctional, that do not work, and then judge and shame our self for our reactions. It causes us to believe that we are responsible for other peoples feelings, and to judge and shame ourselves for our own feelings and behavior. It is very nasty, extremely powerful and insidious. The bottom line of what we need to do in codependency recovery is to stop shaming and judging ourselves for being wounded, imperfect human beings, and start seeing our self, life, and other people with more clearly and objectively so that we can change our relationships with self, life, and other people into a healthier, more functional relationships.

In other words, the key to changing your relationship with your daughter is to change your relationship with your self and life. In focusing on your relationship with you daughter (or any other person) you are only seeing symptoms - not dealing with the cause. The cause goes back to your childhood wounding and programming.

The vitally important step in this process, the one that makes the rest of recovery possible, is to start learning how to detach from what is going on - both externally and internally - enough to stop shaming and judging your self and start seeing what is happening with more clarity. Here is a quote from an online book I am writing in which I talk about the importance of detachment when it comes to codependence recovery.

"The healing process is full of paradox and irony on multiple levels. One of those paradoxes is that in order to get in touch with our ONENESS with everything, we must first be able to define our self as separate from others. And in order to become an integrated whole being, we must first separate and own all of the different parts of our self within. As long as we don't have clear boundaries between our self and others, we cannot know where we end and someone else starts - we cannot get clear on what is our stuff and what is theirs. As long as we don't have clear boundaries within ourselves, we are set up to be the victim of our own thoughts, feelings, and behavior.

Detachment is a vital technique in starting to see our self and others more clearly.

Most people who have any experience with twelve step programs will associate the term 'detachment' with Al-Anon. In Al-Anon terms detachment means to let go of believing that one has the power to make an alcoholic drink - or not drink. To stop taking an alcoholics behavior personally. It means to let go of feeling responsible for another persons feelings and behavior.

Detaching from feeling responsible for the feelings and behavior of other people is one of the initial stages of any codependency recovery. We learned in childhood that we had the power to make our parents happy or sad, angry or scared. We experienced painful consequences when our behavior was not what the adults around us considered acceptable. Some of us came from families where being a human child was not acceptable behavior. Some of us came from families afflicted with alcoholism or mental illness, in which case the definition of acceptable behavior varied wildly from one day to the next. Some of us came from families where as children we were allowed to have the power and be in control - which is terrifying and abusive to a child. Some of us came from families where no one in the family had permission to be human. None of these environments taught us how to relate to self and life in a healthy way.

We grew up getting the message that we were responsible for other people feelings and behavior. And we were taught to give other people or outside agencies power over how we felt about ourselves. We learned to do life backwards.

"I spent most of my life doing the Serenity prayer backwards, that is, trying to change the external things over which I had no control - other people and life events mostly - and taking no responsibility (except shaming and blaming myself) for my own internal process - over which I can have some degree of control. Having some control is not a bad thing; trying to control something or somebody over which I have no control is what is dysfunctional." Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls http://Joy2MeU.com/joy_22.htm

We tried to control other people so we could protect ourselves emotionally. Some of us (classic codependent behavior) tried to control through people pleasing, being a chameleon, wearing a mask, dancing to other people's tunes. Some of us (classic counterdependent behavior - the opposite extreme) protected ourselves by pretending that we didn't need other people. Either way we were living life in reaction to our childhood wounds - we were not making clear, conscious choices. (If we think our choice is to be in an abusive relationship or not to be in a relationship at all, that is not a choice - that is reacting between two extremes that are symptoms of our childhood wounds.)" - Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in the Light Book 2: A Dysfunctional Relationship with Life Author's Foreword http://Joy2MeU.com/Codependency_Recovery...

One of the reasons that you have not been able to change your behavior and do things differently is that you are trying to change from the outside in, rather than inside out. That means you are focusing on symptoms rather than cause. When we try to change from outside in, we end up trying to do things "right" - and then shaming and judging ourselves for not being able to do it perfect / "right." It is vitally important to start focusing on cause - our childhood emotional wounding and programming - so that we can change our behavior patterns and mental process. That is what inner child healing is all about - changing our core relationship with self, life, and other people - by focusing on the cause instead of the symptomatic effects.

I would encourage you to keep reading my work - and especially to focus on the inner child healing approach I share on my website. http://Joy2MeU.com/Innerchildhealing.html There is hope - there is a way out. The problems you are experiencing are not because there is something wrong with you, with who you are - it is your relationship with self and life that got so screwed up in childhood. You do have the power to change your relationship with self, life, and others by focusing on the cause and learning how to live the Serenity Prayer in your life, instead of trying to do life backwards - trying to play the game of life by rules that do not work.
Robert

-- posted by joy2meu