Helping Others to Learn Reparenting

By La Xtina

I am beginning a study that I hope to be developing as a series of talks for prisoners. America spends so much money of incarceration and so little on rehabilitation, that I want to take a program to prisoners about reparenting.

Having been an addictions counselor for years and in my personal recovery since 1976,  I know that healing comes from within. It usually begins with someone realizing that another person is loving them unconditionally. What is unconditional love? It is love from one person to another without ulterior motives. Unfortunately, we usually experience unconditional love from new people in our lives.

As children, we are taught hundreds of ways that we are unlovable. Transactional analysis states that we have over 20,000 hours of negative feedback about ourselves that we are continually rebroadcasting to ourselves. (To read more about TA:  Learn to Listen to Your Inner Self with Transactional Analysis.)

After we learn how to shut off this committee of negative voices in our head, we begin to see how our real self is vulnerable to such attacks from our mind. The mind is best used a the switching station for our thoughts. If it is allowed to dominate and control, it will choose to keep us submissive by negatively. I always say that our mind is out to get us. But, in reality, we simply have to learn how to use the mind and begin relying more on the soul as our guide for our lives.

To help prisoners to learn about themselves, I have chosen reparenting as an avenue to help them to not only learn how to parent but also to learn how to be better parents to themselves. Personal growth is like the grass, as Walt Whitman wrote in his poem about war, “I am the grass, I cover all”. When I was at Guantanamo Bay, from my office I looked down on the air field below me that was unused and covered in wild grasses. And I understood that as a living creature, I was either living or I was dying. Grass doesn’t get to a certain height and then stop growing. It is either, as on of favorite bloggers says, in a quote from Dylan, “he not busy being born is busy dying”.

One of the greatest gifts we can give to another is an avenue to help them to help others. If you have a negative self-image, you don’t believe that you have anything to give. Teaching prisoners how to parent– which is what reparenting is–teaches them skills to help anyone. As we help others, we learn how to love ourselves.

 

ACA, Codependency and My Inner Child

“Our society considers hard work, intense recreation, vigorous exercise, rushing through the day, excessive eating, frequent anger, occasional deep depression, and sex without love as “normal”, and we have become addicted to the brain chemicals that accompany these so-called normal behavior.
Paul Pearsall

Addiction is not difficult to understand. Accepting we or a loved one is an addict is difficult. The only reason that people use a substance or a position (power) or food is to change their feelings.

Often the addict has a large reserve of hurt moments or experiences which s/he uses to prove why her/his life is so tragic.

I know this because during my addiction to alcohol I had saved up every hurt feeling or experience and I remember consciously choosing which feelings to use where. This all gets tremendously labor-intensive if the same people are seen very often as new abuses have to be “used”. So the ever resourceful addict creates sad, bad, horrible experiences that never happened. I think this behavior could safely be called “crazy”.

This behavior is what mental health professionals use to “prove” the mental illness. The problem is no one has been able to prove the medical model of the disease theory. So, as far as I am concerned, the disease theory is a theory.

Instead, I believe, that when we are under the control of an addiction, we make increasingly bad and hurtful choices. Remember, the addict is living in his/her head in a world of their own creation. Pile those crazy choices on top of the fantasy in one’s head and the addict is miserable. The misery is self-inflicted and he/she is the only one who can choose to leave that miserable state.

I believe mental health to be fluid and we are each in and out of it several times a day. I know I am healthy when I know I am crazy because I didn’t used to know the difference. Today, I have the choice to abandon my crazy behavior.

Addiction is very prevalent in our world. Changemaker defines addiction as any behavior that is chosen to enable a person to live a fantasy. Addicts don’t live in reality. They live in a mental world of their own creation. What an addict uses to control his/her feelings and thoughts is not important. Rather it be alcohol, food, religion, other drugs, power, money, etc., the addict is using the addiction for only one reason–to change how they feel. It is said that there are a million excuses for using the addiction but only one reason. And that reason is to change how he/she feels. When someone is living in his/her head, reality rears its ugly head in feelings. So those feelings have to go away—this is what the addiction provides. It takes the feelings away.

We believe that many of us use something from time to time to change how we feel. The addict is the person who uses the addiction on a regular basis to avoid the reality of life around them. For example, alcoholics may be daily drinkers (3-4 days weekly) or weekend alcoholics (mainly drink on the weekends), or periodic alcoholics (drink for 2-3 days in a row but do the drinking at different periods of time–also may go long periods of time (even years)–without alcohol.

Substance addicts are easy to spot. But many more people are addicted to power (codependency), money, material possessions (living in homes/having automobiles they can barely afford), work (they will say that they have to work because they need the money–often married to poor money managers), sex, etc.

Many people are addicted to feeling bad (the victim role). Remember how we feel is our choice. It is very hard for the martyr to give up that “poor me” behavior but until both people in a relationship are free to give and receive without guilt trips, the relationship is not a positive experience for either.

The disease model of addiction has helped add to the confusion about addiction. Addicts live in a self-induced delusion. The delusion is that the world revolves around them. In reality, the world doesn’t revolve around any individual.

As John Powell has written, we each need a Copernican moment when we realize the world doesn’t revolve around us. Remember Copernius went against all other thinkers to say that the Sun didn’t revolve around Earth, but that Earth revolved around the Sun.

In other words, some of the main issues in addiction treatment are maturity issues. The age at which a person started drinking, using, eating, buying, being overpowering to others, using sex, etc. is the emotional age he/she still is. If he/she started at age 15, which is pretty normal, then he/she is age 14 emotionally.

So recovery is generally about growing up. Another main issue of why people are addictive is to continue to live life in their head or in their imagination. No one knows reality–we only have a perception of reality. But living in our head is not being free and open to life.

As the hero in 10 Million Ways to Die says, “I never knew that I lived in a world that I hadn’t created.”  That is why the addict experiences such anger at having to give up the addiction. It seems to the addict that his/her use can only be pertaining to him/her. In reality, the addiction is affecting everyone in the addict’s life.

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An Overview of ACOA

Alcoholics Anonymous started in 1935 and has spawned over 200 different types of twelve step meetings. One of the first to deal with feelings was ACOA–Adult Children of Alcoholics. It was a formula designed to touch on a lot of emotion–adult, children and alcoholic. Our reality is in our feelings. Our emotional patterns are established in our childhood. I believe that addiction starts from these patterns begun in childhood.

Codependency means being part or dependent on someone else for our emotional completion. Being reared in a home with frequent emotional strife means being reared with emotional healing issues.

At some level we have each experienced feelings of abandonment, difficulty trusting others, having boundaries, trouble standing up for ourselves or feeling shameful because of others’ actions. We may have learned these emotional choices in our family of origin.

Feelings are our choice. We can choose positive emotional choices.

Onion House has written the following about ACOA characteristics:
“The problem is that we come to feel isolated, uneasy with other people, and especially authority figures. To protect ourselves, we became people pleasers, even though we lost our own identities in the process. All the same, we would mistake any personal criticism as a threat.”

“We either become alcoholics ourselves or married them or both. Failing that, we found another compulsive personality, such as a workaholic, to fulfill our sick need for abandonment”.

“We lived life from the standpoint of victim. Having an over-developed sense of responsibility, we preferred to be concerned with others rather than ourselves. We somehow got guilt feelings when we stood up for ourselves rather than giving in to others. Thus, we became reactors, rather than actors, letting others take the initiative.”

This is also the classic definition for codependency–the common thread in addiction. Children in troubled homes learn that they aren’t as important as continuing the pretend picture of the family. Actually the family is in an ever-increasing cover-up which continues to eat up most of the family energy.

I recently met a classmate from high school–we graduated in 1958–and I was sharing some of my growing up experiences. She said that it was hard for her to believe what I remembered about my core family as she viewed us as the perfect All-American family. I guess we were better at the cover-up than I thought. I remember feeling so guilty as I cried on the way to school that I couldn’t save my mother from the arguments my parents had. It never entered my mind to wonder why she couldn’t save herself.

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What is Reparenting and How Do We Use It?

I have believed for years that addiction is cured only when we learn how to reparent ourselves.  This includes not only healing our inner child but also healing all the children we have within.

I have written the following posts about the inner child and/or reparenting:

Our Inner Child is our Eternal Child

Your Childhood Pain was a Gift

Reparenting Your Inner Child

Learn to Listen and Guide Your Inner Voices

Helping Others to Learn Reparenting

Books About Reparenting

According to Dr. Tian Dayton, children who grow up with alcohol or other drug abuse may experience:

• Loss of Trust and Faith Due to deep ruptures in primary, dependency relationships and breakdown of an orderly world.
• Distorted Reasoning Due to convoluted attempts to make sense and meaning out of chaotic, confusing, frightening or painful experience that feels senseless.
• Easily Triggered
• Development of Rigid Psychological Defenses When this person develops long term ‘character armor’ to defend against letting pain in.
• Desire to Self-Medicate When this person attempts to quiet and control their turbulent, troubled inner world through the use of drugs and alcohol or behavioral addictions.This can be part of how addiction gets passed down through the generations.

When Words Matter

Avoiding the Shut Down Mode

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Your Childhood Pain Was a Gift

“It requires a tremendous leap of faith to imagine that your own childhood—punctuated with pain, loss, and hurt-­may, in fact, be a gift. Certainly the unhappiness you felt was not, in itself, a blessing; but in response to that pain, you learned to cultivate a powerful intuition, a heightened sensitivity, and a passionate devotion to healing and love that burns deep within you—and there are gifts that may be recognized, honored, and cultivated. You are not broken; childhood suffering is not a mortal wound.” Wayne Muller

I believe most of our emotional pain comes from experiences and misconceptions that happened during our childhood. One of the current books I’m reading is The Inner Child Workbook: What to Do With Your Past When It Just Won’t Go Away by Cathryn Taylor.

Her book is about our inner children. The inner child has been a subject of study for several years. But Cathryn suggests that we have several inner personalities. She specifically has chapters about the infant self, the toddler self, the young inner child, the grade-school child within, the young teen within, the adolescent within, and the young inner adult.

In the introduction by Rokelle Lerner, she mentions that inner child work demands courage and tenacity. She writes “the goal of inner child work is not to blame; rather, it is to awaken the childlike wonder and spontaneity and integrate them with an adult sense of responsibility and protection.”

The tools she recommends for healing are : (1) guided imagery, (2) verbal and written dialogues, (3) mirror work, (4) drawing, (5) using pictures from magazines, (6) activities, and (7) rituals.

For beginning, she recommends that this book not be used if:

1. Do not use this book if you are not interested in being able to feel your feelings.

2. Do not use this book if you are on prescription mood-altering drugs unless your work is supervised by a professional.

3. Do not use this book if you are in early recovery from chemical dependency. She recommends that you have twelve to twenty-four months of abstinence.

4. Do not use this book in isolation.

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