There are three parts of me: the Higher Power, me, and Little Tony. I have to love Little Tony – my child within, – if I’m ever going to unite with God. Little Tony is my connection to God. I learned this from a Hawaiian Kahuna teaching. Several months afterwards, I heard about the Inner Child work beginning in the therapeutic community…. Trust has to become a process, and love is a process. When I can trust and love me, I can trust and love others. I think we have to become as little children. Feelings are the Spiritual Path of an adventure to know God.
Tony A, October 5, 1992
Re-parenting and Inner Child work is recognizing that all adult behaviors stem from childhood experiences. Re-parenting addresses childhood trauma by focusing on how the adult actively works to meet their own emotional needs where their parents failed to do so.
Helen Villiers & Katie Mc Kenna, You’re Not the Problem
Tony Allen was born on November 4, 1927, and raised in New York City. Both of his parents were alcoholics. His father was a successful stockbroker on Wall Street, so the family was well provided for materially. Emotionally, however, his family was impoverished. From the beginning his life was touched by the insanity of an alcoholic household.
One evening, when he was one year old, his parents went out to dinner. It was the servants’ night off and they had left him in the care of his 19-year-old uncle, an alcoholic whom his father was trying to help out of a tight spot. When his parents returned from their night out, they discovered his body in Tony’s bedroom, a gun and a bottle of booze at his side. He had shot himself in the head, in an alcoholic stupor, and Tony’s crib was splattered with his blood and brains. From that time on, loud noises always terrified Tony…
In the 1970s Tony, having already embraced the Programme of Recovery from alcoholism using the Twelve Steps of A.A., became instrumental in the emergence of what is now another fully-fledged Twelve Step Fellowship of its own, this one for Adult Children recovering from growing up in Dysfunctional Families.
Though called ACoA, – the final letter standing for `Alcoholics´, – it was made clear from the beginning that it was designed to address the recovery from developmental impairment suffered by anybody who grew up in a dysfunctional family.
The originators of this fellowship provided a relatively broad definition of the dysfunctional family, citing seven characteristics of the adult care givers (usually the parents and/or other adult members of the extended family) in such cases, as follows: actively addicted, emotionally ill, hypochondriac, hypercritical, perfectionist, ultra-religious, or sexually abusive.
In my view, my own family of origin fulfils several of these criteria. This is stated in the full knowledge that my siblings may have had a vastly different experience. We each experience our childhood in a unique fashion. I respect the possibility that my siblings may have had a very different experience to mine. My perception is also free of blame or judgement of any of the actors involved.
Though my childhood experience was in no way as violent as Tony’s, it was nevertheless turbulent and set me up for many of the characteristics and behavioural patterns set out in the ACoA Laundry List presented below.
My substance abuse, for example, commenced at the age of 16, the year of my father’s untimely death at the age of 51, and got steadily worse over 26 years until I got clean and sober in 2003. The responsibility for steering my path through life lies with me, of course, and with me only.
Tony came up with this list of typical characteristic behaviours for children who had grown up in what he termed dysfunctional families. When he first read it out at a meeting of this fledging movement, someone exclaimed: `Hey, that’s my laundry list!´ This is how the list found its name. Tony’s wish for the fellowship was to use, as guiding principles, the original Laundry List and the new ACoA Twelve Steps which he published in his book written in 1991.
He summed up the goal of this programme as follows: `This programme is about learning to love myself and then others unconditionally. We are not God-connected if we don’t´.
The Laundry List and its Flip Side – 14 Traits of an Adult Child from a Dysfunctional Family and where the process of recovery will take us, reads as follows:
1. We became isolated and afraid of people and authority figures.
We move out of isolation and are not unrealistically afraid of other people, even authority figures.
2. We became approval seekers and lost our identity in the process.
We do not depend on others to tell us who we are.
3. We are frightened by angry people and any personal criticism.
We are not automatically frightened by angry people and no longer regard personal criticism as a threat.
4. We either become alcoholics, marry them or both, or find another compulsive personality such as a workaholic to fulfil our sick abandonment needs.
We do not have a compulsive need to recreate abandonment.
5. We live life from the viewpoint of victims, and we are attracted by that weakness in our love and friendship relationships.
We stop living life from the standpoint of victims and are not attracted by this trait in our important relationships.
6. We have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, and it is easier for us to be concerned with others rather than ourselves; this enables us not to look too closely at our own faults, etc.
We do not use enabling as a way to avoid looking at our own shortcomings.
7. We get guilt feelings when we stand up for ourselves instead of giving in to others.
We do not feel guilty when we stand up for ourselves.
8. We became addicted to excitement.
We avoid emotional intoxication and choose workable relationships instead of constant upset.
9. We confuse love and pity and tend to „love“ people we can „pity“ and „rescue“.
We are able to distinguish love from pity, and do not think „rescuing„ people we „pity„ is an act of love.
10. We have „stuffed“ our feelings from our traumatic childhoods and have lost the ability to feel or express our feelings because it hurts so much (Denial).
We come out of denial about our traumatic childhoods and regain the ability to feel and express our emotions.
11. We judge ourselves harshly and have a very low sense of self-esteem.
We stop judging and condemning ourselves and discover a sense of self-worth.
12. We are dependent personalities who are terrified of abandonment and will do anything to hold on to a relationship in order not to experience painful abandonment feelings, which we received from living with sick people who were never there emotionally for us.
We grow in independence and are no longer terrified of abandonment. We have interdependent relationships with healthy people, not dependent relationships with people who are emotionally unavailable.
13. Alcoholism (dysfunctionalism) is a family disease; and we became para-alcoholics (dysfunctionals) and took on the characteristics of that disease even though we did not pick up the drink.
The characteristics of alcoholism and para-alcoholism we have internalized are identified, acknowledged, and removed.
14. Para-alcoholics are reactors rather than actors.
We are actors, not reactors.
It would be beyond the scope and intention of this essay to go through each of these 14 points. Let’s look at one or two to demonstrate how the recovery process might unfold, based on my own experience of recovery, which is still ongoing.
With particular reference to Point 10, We have „stuffed“ our feelings from our traumatic childhoods and have lost the ability to feel or express our feelings because it hurts so much (Denial), I intuitively began working with my Inner Child some years after getting sober in 2003. This was a new departure, having supressed/avoided/numbed my feelings by drinking alcoholically and using other substances for self-medication for well over twenty years.
In the rooms of A.A. we often hear: `The good news is, you get your feelings back; the bad news is, you get your feelings back´.
I came into recovery, in the desperation that results from prolonged engagement in `suicide by instalments´, to learn to embrace an unequivocal `Yes´ to life. Secretly hoping that recovery would result in feeling better, I found that it was more about `getting better at feeling´. As time went on, it slowly dawned on me, as my heart thawed out, that the act of feeling can, at times, be very stressful, challenging, and discomforting.
The recovery process helped me develop empathy for why my life had been one long `pain avoidance strategy´. Looking back, it emerged that the family in which I grew up had thought me to deny my true feelings in the service of a pain adverse and emotionally illiterate dysfunctional collective dynamic.
We come out of denial about our traumatic childhoods and regain the ability to feel and express our emotions.
How has this come about? The short answer is to accept and befriend the feelings, allowing them to bubble to the surface, and to simply be, without manipulating, wallowing in, or fuelling them, in the trust that `This too shall pass´.
When this is modelled by fellows in recovery fellowships, where experience, strength, and hope is shared, without crosstalk or judgement, we begin to cultivate our emotional abilities and give ourselves permission to find and express who we truly are.
This opens the door to grieving, something which had always baffled me. I had thought it was something that had to be done, – and felt unequipped for this task, – only to discover that it is more the willingness to embrace a state of being, to allow the pain to emerge, tarry a while, and move through, rather than something that had to be `done´.
Sometimes there is no memory to frame the re-emerged emotional state, such as that of the shattering of a precious relationship through some form of abandonment, a rupture of the most intense nature. I can surmise as to possible origins but have no cognizant memory to match, and no corroborating evidence from older family members, my parents having passed away long ago.
I have come to trust my intuition, to accept that, while the memory would be helpful, it is not, as such, necessary. It is the allowing of the emotional state to arise that matters and its treatment in the spirit of the discerning anthropologist.
Sometimes, when these states threaten to overwhelm, (Body-based) exercises which enable me to anchor myself in the present moment and regulate my emotional state prove very effective. The Twelve Steps, the PQ Mental Fitness Modality, and further resources acquired in various forms of therapy have taught me many such simple exercises which prove very helpful in this respect.
Using the mantra `I am safe, I am here, and I am now´ in the heat of the action, a shift occurs whereby it becomes clear that, while I have these states, they don’t have me, and they are sure to pass.
Like Tony A, I recognise the importance of the triangle of the Inner Child, the Adult me, and the Higher Self, in this process. A vibrant dialogue has gradually come into being among there three entities. I will say more about this process, which continues to this day, in the second half of this essay in the coming week.
