High Tolerance for Inappropriate Behavior, children and adults often do not realize that they have been mistreated. Having no other reference point from which to test reality, they think that how they...
2) Beginning to Explore At Level Two we can begin to explore our feelings. Here we may be guarded in sharing our newly found feelings, and they may come out in conversation disguised as ideas and opin...
Many children from troubled families have difficulty relaxing and having fun. Ability to be spontaneous and to play is a need and a characteristic of our Child Within.
When we are not allowed to remember, to express our feelings and to grieve or mourn our losses or traumas, whether real or threatened, through the free expression of our Child Within, we become ill. T...
We don’t have to do anything to be our True Self. It just is. If we simply let it be, it will express itself with no particular effort on our part. Indeed, any effort is usually in denying our awarene...
To get to the point of recovery, we must survive. Survivors are by necessity co-dependent. We use many coping skills and ego defenses to do this. Children of alcoholics and from other troubled or dysf...
Tim is learning about his high tolerance of others’ inappropriate behavior and is beginning to get free of this often subtle form of mistreatment.
Submitting to others, rather than affirming our own reality, is the heart of active co-dependence—we give up our own inner world in order to be accepted by others.
Our Real Self feels both joy and pain. And it expresses and shares them with appropriate others. However, our false self tends to push us to feel mostly painful feelings and to withhold and not share...
Many children growing up in troubled or dysfunctional families learn how to be either aggressive or manipulative or to sit back or withdraw. They don’t get what they want or need. They almost never se...
False self, co-dependent self, unauthentic or public self.
The emotional pain hurts so much that we defend against them by the various unhealthy ego defenses described in Chapter 8, thus shutting the feelings out, away from our awareness. Doing so allows us t...
That often seemed the only way to avoid many of our painful feelings, such as anger, fear and hurt. It also gave us the illusion of being in control. But what seemed to work then doesn’t always work w...
In our recovery we learn that love is not simply a feeling. Rather it is an energy that is manifested by a commitment and a will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s t...
As we do so, our Child Within begins to awaken and eventually to flourish, grow and create. Virginia Satir said, We need to see ourselves as basic miracles and worthy of love.
The self (or object self) and the observing self.
With the help of parents, other authority figures, and institutions (such as education, organized religion, politics, the media, and even some psychotherapy), most of us learn to stifle or deny our Ch...
The way out is to surrender, and then to become, gradually, a co-creator of life. This is where the spiritual aspect of recovery comes into play as a powerful aid. Attendance at and working 12 Step re...
1) Closed About Our Feelings When we cannot feel a feeling, we are closed in our ability to accurately name and use it (Table 8). At that stage not only do we not know the feeling, but also we are una...
What the child sees as reality is denied, and a new model, view or false belief system of reality is assumed as true by each family member. This fantasy often binds the family together in a further dy...