Whatever a person experiences in childhood, they carry with them into adulthood and often unconsciously recreate or recreate those dynamics in school, in workplaces, in clubs and organizations, in their own family, and if seek recovery, even in twelve-step meetings. Whether these experiences are positive or negative in nature, they are internalized and accepted; and, if the person wishes to change any feelings, emotions, behaviors and reactions based on them, he needs to identify, understand, address, process and transcend them. It is unlikely that he can do this on his own.
Because parents are not perfect and generally do the best they can based on their own parenting circumstances, no home of origin can be a flawless environment in which a person can be fully prepared for life.
However, Anthony Stevens attempts to describe what an ideal home could theoretically look like in his book On Jung (Routledge, 1990, p. 97). “… Maturation proceeds through a sequence of innate archetypal expectations, which the environment either succeeds or fails to meet,” he states. “The most important of these expectations is that the environment provide adequate warmth and food for survival; a family made up of mother, father and companions; enough space for exploration and play; security against enemies and predators; a community that provides language, myth, religion, ritual, codes of conduct, stories, values, initiatives and, eventually, a partner; and an economic role and/or vocational status”.
Adult children growing up with alcoholic, para-alcoholic, dysfunctional, and even abusive parents are powerless to fight, escape, or even understand their circumstances and often attribute any shameful, judgmental, blaming, or hurtful behavior toward them as justified actions because of their own inadequacies, inferiorities, or simply dislike plan. Forced, with no choice, to flee inward and create an inner child triggered by trauma and frozen in time, they stop developing, replace their true self with a false or synthetic one, and unknowingly adopt survival traits through brains. reconnected, as they expect similar. circumstances of the outside world to which they were subjected on the inside.
Developed to survive, resist, tolerate, and adapt to unstable, unsafe, and even dangerous circumstances when maturity, tools, and brain development were lacking, some of these traits include isolating oneself, being afraid of authority figures who represent parents, seeking approval, fear of anger and criticism, taking on addictions and compulsions, identifying themselves as victims, overdeveloping their sense of responsibility, habitual prey on fear, pitying others instead of genuinely loving them , repression of childhood feelings to the point of callous annihilation, fear of abandonment and being consistently receptive.
When an adult child finally leaves their home of origin, they are not a blank slate starting anew in the world beyond their doors. Instead, he takes all of his experiences, understandings, feelings, fears, and defenses with him and unknowingly expects and recreates them as he goes along his life path.
One of his “recreations” involves his subconscious need to continue to recreate one or more of the family roles he may have adopted during his upbringing.
By becoming a hero, one of them, he rises intellectually and functionally above his pain and becomes what delayed recovery expert John Bradshaw called “a human being as opposed to a human being.” As an achiever, he can get high grades in school, join extracurricular clubs, become captain of the soccer team, and win prizes.
“The hero child of a dysfunctional family might look forward to getting good grades,” according to the Adult Children of Alcoholics textbook (World Service Organization, 2006, p. 98). “This is the honor student showing the world that his family values education and that is why he is stable.”
What it really is, however, is the equivalent of the perfect family portrait where everyone is wearing suits, fancy dresses and smiling, but misleads and misleads opinions and covers up the madness and chaos that can unfold behind closed doors.
Other family roles include the pet, or child who continually tries to overcome tension with jokes and humor, and the lost child, who feels his surroundings are unsafe and therefore fades into the background, unable to express an opinion and reduces himself. little more than a shadow that dances on the walls. He locks himself inside himself, fantasizes in his room, escapes his harsh reality through books and movies, and disconnects from his circumstances. Shrinking and squeezing, he may wonder if his image will really appear in the mirror if he walks past one.
The scapegoat, the fourth type, is the child who bears all the blame, anger, responsibility, and shame, whether or not he has a part in the situation.
“Such survival roles tend to be life-resistant and remain fixed in our personalities long after we have left our unsanitary homes…” according to the Adult Children of Alcoholics textbook (ibid., p. 98). “(Adult children) can look at their families and see the roles in place decades after the children have grown up and left the family.”
The hero, for example, can assume an increasing number of responsibilities in his job and not even be compensated for them, nor, ironically, believe that he deserves it. Your pet may only understand humor as a way to deal with stress and adversity, since he hasn’t been able to get other tools with which to do it. The lost boy can calmly and unassumingly play his role at work, never expecting to be anything more than what his entry-level title suggests and never even being known by name to more than a few of his co-workers. And the scapegoat, having acquired a hairpin trigger, can immediately accept responsibility for anything that isn’t right or completely missing, so accustomed is he to this interaction.
During the setup for a recent surprise birthday party for one of the women in my office, for example, this family dynamic clearly played out. While many prepared dishes, put candles on the cake, and wrapped gifts, one employee, who I knew to be a grown girl, ordered various items as she wrapped her own gift.
“Do you have any tape?” she asked. “Where are the scissors? Is that the only tape we have?”
Every time the tension seemed to build inside her.
“Do you have a bow so I can finish wrapping this present for NADIA’S STUPID BIRTHDAY?” she finally screamed.
In disbelief, others shot him a look, wondering how an occasion that was supposed to be pleasant could be perceived with such emotional turmoil.
Looking at her, I calmly said, “It’s good that you can join us at the party, Mr. Smith.”
He knew she was acting like his father had always done at home and “brought” him into the office. Parties were not pleasant occasions for her. Instead, they were filled with chaos and tension created by her father for her alcoholic and this was all she knew, as she relived the circumstances of her upbringing.
“In working the steps, the adult child realizes that family roles were required to approximate protection in an unsafe home,” advises the Adult Children of Alcoholics textbook (ibid., p. 97). “We often feared for our safety and took roles to disarm our parents.”
In fact, an adult child’s workplace represents a microcosm of their home of origin. Without recovering, he carries this dynamic with him. Once again powerless and seeking to determine his role, function, and purpose within him, he may view his boss as an authority figure representing the parents, fearing it but going to great lengths to mask this fact. He can recreate any number of survival traits and family roles, from people-pleasing to succeeding.
The Adult Children of Alcoholics Workplace Laundry List, which encompasses ten more traits than the original laundry list’s fourteen, details these manifestations of nurturing and nurturing.
“The Workplace Laundry List is a list of 24 statements that describe many of our thoughts and interactions at work…” according to the Adult Children of Alcoholics textbook (ibid., pp. 416-417). . “(This) shows how we can try to recreate our dysfunctional family roles at work or in some social settings.”
It is extensive and includes, to name just a few, perceiving a boss as an alcoholic father and a co-worker as a brother, feeling different from others, not being able to ask for help or instruction, being afraid of criticism, needing people please. , striving for perfection, becoming a workaholic, displaying a high tolerance for dysfunction and chaos, and feeling hurt when others exclude them from after-work functions and gatherings.
Unresolved fears, traumas, mistrust, and distortions of the family of origin provide walls that an adult child cannot penetrate or overcome without significant recovery, and serve as barriers between him, others, the world at large, and the Higher Power in his life. comprehension. Trying to see and understand God, in fact, can be nothing less than trying to see him through broken glass.
“…Many of us transfer our parents’ traits to God,” notes the Adult Children of Alcoholics textbook (ibid, p. 219). “We project our parents who abandoned us onto a Higher Power, believing God to be vengeful or uncaring. Even if we thought God was love, many of us secretly wondered if he really cared or listened.”
Twelve-step meetings can be the final place where family dynamics are recreated. Ignorant of their structure, which includes their operation by a Higher Power, the need to work the steps and traditions, and the rotation of service positions among attendees, an adult son may mistakenly conclude that whoever first reads the opening and presents the topic, it should be the authority figure who is “in charge of everything.” He may feel insecure and nervous. He may feel the need to be in control to foster the perception of safety. And he may take several meetings before taking his first action, rehearsing it in his mind before vocalizing it, and then berating himself when he realizes he failed to deliver the perfect performance he intended. These are all familiar dynamic recreations.
Whether a person is raised in an unstable, insecure, and dysfunctional home and thus may be labeled an “adult child,” or comes from a loving, supportive home, they subtly learn what they experience and anticipate the same conditions afterward. to leave it Both types subconsciously recreate them and recreate them at times and neither of them may realize that this dynamic is at play. However, if the person in the more negative environment wishes to uproot these behaviors, they will need to identify, examine, process, and transcend them through therapy and/or the twelve-step processes.
Article Sources:
“Adult Children of Alcoholics”. Torrance, California: World Service Organization, 2006.
Stevens, Anthony. “About Jung”. New York: Routledge, 1990.
