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

» joy2meu - Re: Re: Re: Her pain-my pain

Autumnnut,
Yes, it is sad. And it is important to grieve for the past - but it is also vital to not judge and shame yourself for it. Here is a quote from my book:

"We must start recognizing our powerlessness over this disease of Codependence.

As long as we did not know we had a choice we did not have one.

If we never knew how to say "no," then we never really said "yes."

We were powerless to do anything any different than we did it. We were doing the best we knew how with the tools that we had. None of us had the power to write a different script for our lives.

We need to grieve for the past. For the ways in which we abandoned and abused ourselves. For the ways we deprived ourselves. We need to own that sadness. But we also need to stop blaming ourselves for it. It was not our fault!

We did not have the power to do it any differently." - Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls

We cannot change the past, so it is vital to stop judging ourselves for it. You could not have done it differently. It is by becoming conscious of your codependency and getting into recovery that you are doing your part to break the cycle of this disease. It is important to remember that the tools, knowledge, and guidance needed to break these cycles and recover from the condition of codependency are relatively very new in civilization. (I am going to share quotes from a few of my articles here in the hopes they might help you with your process of forgiving your self.)

"For all of the so called progress of our modern societies, we still are far behind most aboriginal cultures in terms of respect for individual rights and dignity in some kind of balance with the good of the whole. (I am speaking here of tribal aboriginal societies - not urbanized ones.) Nowhere is this more evident in terms of our relationship to our children.

Modern civilizations - both Eastern and Western - are no more than a generation or two removed from the belief that children were property. This, of course, goes hand in hand with the belief that women were property. The idea that children have rights, individuality, and dignity is relatively new in modern society. The predominant and underlying belief, as it has been manifested in the treatment of children, has been that children are extensions of, and tools to be used by, their parents.

A very telling insight into the basic beliefs underlying Western attitudes towards children is shared by inner child pioneer Alice Miller in her book The Drama of The Gifted Child. She shares how the 19th Century German Philosophers who laid the groundwork for modern psychology, emphasized the importance of stamping out a child's "exuberance." In other words, a child's spirit must be crushed in order to control them.

Children are to be seen and not heard. Spare the rod and spoil the child.

It is only in very recent history, that our society has even recognized child abuse as a crime instead of an inherent right of the parent. The concept of healthy parenting as a skill to be learned is very new in society." - Inner Child Healing - Why do it?

"As I have shared elsewhere, we are only a generation or two removed from cultural treatment of both women and children as property. It is only within the last 15 years or so, that such things as healthy parenting classes existed to acknowledge the reality that though we may have to get a license to have a dog or drive a car, there are no such requirements for becoming a parent." - Men and Women are from the same planet

"So often when I am working with someone, helping them to understand their codependency, they will say, "Why didn't I learn this sooner. I feel so stupid that I have have wasted so many years in denial about how much my childhood experiences were running my life."

What I need to remind them of, is that the information we have now wasn't available when they were growing up. It was in only the late 70s and early 80s that researchers were able to identify the Adult Child Syndrome, that family dynamics researchers were starting to speak of the concept of dysfunctional families. Before Betty Ford had the courage to go public with her recovery from alcoholism in the late 70s, there was very little information widely available about alcoholism. Phil Donahue started bringing controversial topics out of the closet in the 70s, and was followed in the 80s by Oprah Winfrey. These were the first times that such subjects as child abuse and incest were openly discussed in American society. Denial, keeping secrets, had been the traditional norm in both families and society." - The Condition of Codependency

The disease of codependency causes reaction to extremes. Because of this, many people in the last generation to be raised in a time when children didn't really have any rights, in a time prior to the great changes in society brought about by the Civil Rights Movement and the Feminist Movement, among other things - went to the other extreme when they became parents. It is quite normal that many of us in the baby boom generation - that were raised in a time when keeping secrets and keeping up appearances was still paramount in society - reacted to growing up with parents who controlled us by breaking our spirits, by going to the other extreme and giving our children too much power. That is abusive to a child also. What is healthy is finding the middle ground. The key is learning how to Love our selves and be emotionally healthy, so that we can not only be healthier parents but healthier role models. Giving children healthy messages while acting acting out in an emotionally unhealthy way ourselves will not work to make us healthy parents. As I say in my book:

"What we traditionally have called normal parenting in this society is abusive because it is emotionally dishonest. Children learn who they are as emotional beings from the role modeling of their parents. "Do as I say not as I do," does not work with children. Emotionally dishonest parents cannot be emotionally healthy role models, and cannot provide healthy parenting."

So, in order to be a healthy parent, it is vital to become a healthier person.

Your daughters were wounded, and do carry subconscious and emotional programming that will cause them to act out codependent patterns in how they relate to themselves, life, and other people. But they will be able to see the effects of the codependency much sooner, and probably get into recovery much younger than you ever had a chance of doing - because the information is available now. And the role modeling you do for them by starting to get healthier will be as if you were planting seeds within their consciousness that will bloom at some time in the future. They will probably be disturbed and resentful of the changes in your behavior at first - because children are normally scared of changes in the status quo, in what they have experienced as normal. Eventually however, as you get healthier, you will be available to them as a healthier resource and support than you could ever be while still in denial of your codependency.

So, yes they will probably carry this on for a while, but there is more hope for them - and all future generations - as more and more of us get involved in codependency recovery.

I hope this has been helpful. I am going to close my response here with another quote from my book - a quote that speaks to how important it is to focus on our own individual healing as a way of changing the human condition.
Robert

"We are Spiritual Beings and we are here in these bodies, at this time, to do this healing.

So the bad news is that the world is a real mess because we have been doing it all backwards. The good news is that it was all part of the Divine Script and that the healing has begun.

The good news individually is that the dance is changing, the healing and Joy are available to us now. The bad news individually (from an emotional perspective) is that in order to do this healing, it is necessary to do our grief processing, to feel our feelings. It is necessary to go through the black hole.

That is the reason we came into body in this lifetime - to go through that black hole, to do this healing!

The time has come for you to remember that. This is your wake-up call. It is not the first and it probably will not be the last. But it is not an accident or a coincidence that you are reading this today.

It is time to stop the nonsense of believing that our purpose and meaning comes from the money, or the job, or the relationship. We are here to be a part of the Transformational Healing Process that has begun on this planet - we are here to heal our relationship with ourselves, with our wounded souls.

The time has come to stop doing it backwards. It is time to stop shaming and abusing an innocent child, to stop judging and blaming an innocent Adult Child. The time has come to start Loving yourself. . . . . . .

Love is the secret weapon in this war! Learning to Love ourselves, and remembering that the God-Force Loves us, is what will bring peace within.

In closing this section I am going to share a story that I heard at a Twelve Step meeting. It is a story about a parent and a child.

This was one of those times when the parent was busy with something that needed to be done and the child was bored and wanted some attention. The parent needed to concentrate and was desperate to find something to distract the child for a little while so that the parent could get done with what needed to be done and could then give the child some attention. In glancing around, the parent noticed a large fold out map of the world from a magazine. The parent took the map of the world and cut it up into pieces and gave it to the child along with some scotch tape and said, "Here honey, why don’t you see how quickly you can put this map of the world together."

The child liked this idea and quickly went to work. The parent was sure that this little ploy had bought some valuable time to get finished with the project at hand. But in only a very few minutes the child called out that the map was all put together. The parent could not believe it and went over to where the child was sitting on the floor and was astounded to see the map all put together.

"How did you do that so fast?!" The parent asked.

The child, looking a little sheepish, said, "Well, I kinda cheated a little. On the other side of the map of the world was the picture of a person. I just put the person together and the world came together all by itself."

That’s what this Recovery process is all about. If we just focus on putting ourselves together the world will take care of itself." - Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls

-- posted by joy2meu