Steps 4, 5 and 6

The response to the first series of Twelve Step videos (Steps 1, 2 & 3) has been wonderful. Keep in mind these are just one personal interpretation of The 12 Steps.

Although these are from an AA perspective, the same principals apply to adult children of alcoholics and those from otherwise dysfunctional families. May you continue to find value in them!


Step 4- Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves




Step 5- Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs




Step 6- Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character



Check out the Orange County ACA website at: Orange County Adult Children

Step 1: We Admitted We Were Powerless

Twelve Step Videos- One man's interpretation of The 12 Steps. An Informative and articulate explanation of the principles of recovery.

Step 1: We Admitted We Were Powerless




Step 2: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.




Step 3: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.




Check out the Orange County ACA website at: Orange County Adult Children

16 Characteristics Of Adult Children

I really get a lot out of seeing the "Laundry List" in an alternative interpretation. A different wording adds a new perspective and fresh understanding. This author has embellished and added a bit to the standard list of characteristics. Nice to see that long held dogmas, much like ourselves, can evolve, change and improve.

The following was excerpted from "A Primer on Adult Children of Alcoholics" by Dr. Timmen L. Cermak

1. Fear of losing control. ACoAs maintain
control of their feelings and behavior. In addition,
they try to control the feelings and behavior of
others. They do not do this to hurt themselves or
others, but because they are afraid. They fear their
lives will get worse if they lose control and they
become uncomfortable and anxious when they
cannot control situations, feelings, and behaviors.

2. Fear of feelings. Since childhood and continuing
as adults, ACoAs have buried their feelings
(especially anger and sadness). In addition,
they’ve lost the ability to feel or express emotions
freely. Eventually they fear all intense feelings,
even good ones such as joy and happiness.

3. Overdeveloped sense of responsibility.
ACoAs are hypersensitive to the needs of others.
Their self-esteem comes from how others view
them. They have a compulsive need to be perfect.

4. Guilt feelings. When ACoAs stand up for
themselves instead of giving in to others, they
feel guilty. They usually sacrifice their own needs
in an effort to be “responsible.”

5. Inability to relax/let go/have fun.
Having fun is stressful for ACoAs, especially
when others are watching. The child inside is
terrified; exercising all the control it can muster to
be good enough just to survive. Under such rigid
control, spontaneity suffers.

6. Harsh, even fierce, self-criticism.
ACoAs have very low self-esteem, regardless of
how competent they may be in many areas.

7. Denial. Whenever ACoAs feel threatened,
their tendency toward denial intensifies.

8. Difficulty with intimate relationships.
To ACoAs, intimacy equates to being out of control.
It requires love for self and expressing one’s
own needs. As a result, ACoAs frequently have
difficulty with sexuality. They repeat unsuccessful
relationship patterns.

9. Living life as a victim. ACoAs may be either
aggressive or passive victims. They are often attracted
to other “victims” in love, friendship and
work relationships.

10. Compulsive behavior. ACoAs may work
compulsively, eat compulsively, become addicted to
a relationship or behave in other compulsive ways.
ACoAs may drink compulsively and become alcoholics
themselves.

11. Tendency to confuse love and pity.
Because they don’t differentiate between these two
emotions, ACoAs often “love” people they can pity
and rescue.

12. Fear of abandonment. In order not to experience
the pain of abandonment, ACoAs will do
anything to hold on to a relationship.

13. Tendency to view issues in terms of
black or white. When they are under stress, the
gray areas of life disappear and ACoAs see themselves
facing an endless series of either/or alternatives.

14. Tendency toward physical complaints.
ACoAs suffer higher rates of stress related illnesses
(migraine headaches, ulcers, eczema, irritable bowel
syndrome, etc.) than the general population.

15. Suffering from delayed grief. Because the
alcoholic family does not tolerate intensely uncomfortable
feelings (such as sadness and anger), children
in such homes rarely, if ever, grieve over their
losses. Losses in their adult lives usually cannot be
felt without calling up these past feelings. As a result,
ACoAs are frequently depressed.

16. Tendency to react rather than to act.
As children, ACoAs became anxious and hyper
vigilant. They remain so in their adult lives, constantly
scanning the environment for potential catastrophes.
Problem solving and stress management
techniques are something they consider after the
fact if at all.


Check out the Orange County ACA website at: Orange County Adult Children

Feeding Your Inner Child

As an ACA I am prone to ignoring my needs and denying feelings. But deep down, I NEED to FEEL positive, encouraged and hopeful.

I recently found some Youtube messages to help nurture and feed my inner child.

The first video is a spoken word affirmation and the 3 following videos are non verbal text only. Thanks to those who took the time to create and uploaded them.









Check out the Orange County ACA website at: Orange County Adult Children

Adult Children and Forgiveness

Adult Children of Alcoholics and those from dysfunctional families often struggle with forgiving the wrongs of the past. I've heard it said that "Forgiveness means giving up all hope of having a better past."

To me this means that although wrongs were done, I no longer seek revenge or hold anger about them. I am free to live without the bondage of past injustices. This frees me to forgive myself and accept forgiveness from others for my wrongdoings.

Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend discuss the healing power of Forgiveness

Grace Is the Ultimate Fertilizer



The Nature Of Forgiveness



Empathy is Ultimately about Love and Grace



Q: How do you forgive hurts that are continuously being committed? (2:55)



Q: I am an only child of two alcoholic parents, and I am now fifty-seven. My mother is still alive and continues to be emotionally abusive. Would God want me to forgive and submit to this abuse, or is it ok to cut her out of my life?



Check out the Orange County ACA website at: Orange County Adult Children

Denial Is A Good Thing!

"The first step toward acceptance is denial."

What?

Had to reread this a couple of times before it made sense. I had always relegated denial to a negative, useless place where people hid from the truth. I thought insulating with denial was a backwards move. It was my enemy.

The rest of this quote helped me understand:

"The first step toward moving through denial is accepting that we may be in denial, and then gently allowing ourselves to move through."

In this way, denial serves a very valuable purpose. It is a stepping stone to reality. I had never thought of it that way.

So instead of judging denial as being a bad thing, I have decided to try and see it as a necessary part of the process. Instead of the problem it is part of the solution.

Judging things never seems to get me anywhere anyway so here is one more thing I hope to let go!

C

Quote from "Letting Go" by Melody Beattie

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Jef Gazely on Codependence & How to Develop Healthy Relationships




Jef Gazely- Dysfunctional Families and the Shame Cycle



Check out the Orange County ACA website at: Orange County Adult Children

The Power Of Now

Jim Carrey on Eckhart Tolle:


Eckhart Tolle first gained attention as a spiritual teacher with his 1997 book, "The Power of Now". In 2008, Oprah Winfrey chose his follow-up work, "A New Earth", for her book club. Her 10-week online seminar with Tolle has since been downloaded 27 million times.

Listen to a fascinating interview with Eckhart Tolle-


Adult children of alcoholics can be prone to living in the past or fantasizing about the future rather than being in the present moment. There is a force within us that works to keep us from living in the now and experiencing the peace and serenity that is our birthright.

Tolle coined the term "the pain body" to describe a subconscious force in people that is fed by painful memories and thrives on them. The pain body is below the level of our awareness, yet reacts strongly to everyday events and affects our thoughts and behavior negatively. The pain body seems to be it's own sovereign entity, surviving alongside your conscious awareness and influencing feelings and actions.

Tolle came to this realization by observing that strong emotional reactions from people are often out of proportion to the event that triggered them.

"And so I realized that there's something in everybody that is a remnant of past painful emotion. And these remnants of past painful emotion from pain that you suffered as a child, perhaps even pain that was passed on from previous generations."

Tolle believes the pain body has two ways of feeding on further emotional pain. One is through YOUR thinking and one is through OTHER people's reactions.

"If you are sitting alone in a room and the pain body gets awakened from its dormant state because it needs to feed on an experience of pain, what happens is the old emotion, perhaps triggered by one thought in your head about your sad story from the past, the old emotion rises up into the mind, and suddenly your entire thinking becomes extremely negative. It reflects the emotional energy. So all your thoughts that you're thinking about your life and your life situation and your past and other people is deeply, deeply negative. Totally distorted, of course. It's distorted by the pain of the past."

"It's an addictive thing. So it feeds on the one hand on your thinking. On the other hand, if there are people around you at the time when the pain body awakens the favorite way of feeding for the pain body is to provoke a negative reaction, for example, in your partner. It could be a little situation, something he or she says or does, and you push the buttons in your partner and you amplify something that otherwise would be a relatively insignificant thing perhaps. And you know the pain body has a certain cunning intelligence to it."

"It knows exactly what buttons to push in your partner or the person close to you or your family member. And it'll say those things that are most likely to provoke an intense negative reaction, and then it'll feed on the drama. So that's the second way, then, in which the pain body feeds, is the drama in relationships. And many couples recognize this truth and say, "Oh, yeah. That's true. Every week or every two weeks or every three weeks we go through our drama."

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"...there is a place inside me that is far more powerful than the continuous mental noise with which for many, many years I had been completely identified..."- Eckhart Tolle

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Tolle believes that the way to eventually become free of the pain body, is not to reactively reject it or the experience that triggers it but "just to see that it's there". The key is to be the awareness.

Recognize the emotion and allow it to be because it already is. Accept the reality of what is currently present. The goal is to reach a state of alert attention to what is, where compulsive thinking no longer operates. Being in the moment, in the NOW keeps you from jumping into regret from the past and fear of the future.

"This means you rise above thinking to a large extent in your life. Where you can face life without the interference of the mind, still being able to use the mind when it's needed but not being used by it".

"And then you become deeper. Or rather, you realize that you are deeper than the emotion. And that frees you from being controlled by the emotion. Then gradually the pain body weakens because it can't feed anymore on your relationship or on your thinking. And now if you have a lot of emotional pain from the past, you may always experience from time to time some painful emotion arising."

Tolle says, "The ultimate thing is the realization of the formless essence of who you are because if God has any reality in this world, it cannot be separate from who you are in your essence. And finding that in yourself, really, I see as the purpose of human life. And then the external world, the temporary world, the world of forms, also changes as a result of that. But the essence is finding who you are beyond form, beyond time."

Tips on developing still and alert attention, freeing yourself from mind noise and audio meditations can be found HERE- Exercises For Your Awakening.


Interview quotes are excerpted from: http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/tolle/


Check out the Orange County ACA website at: Orange County Adult Children