While most people can effortlessly list the situations, circumstances, and people they have difficulty accepting, an adult child has reasons that transcend these sheer "like" and "dislike" aspects. Nevertheless, his recovery and return to wholeness depends upon transcending them, but their number is considerable.
First and foremost, he must accept his very life plight, or the one which sparks the need for all his subsequent ones, and that is that he endured a dangerous, detrimental, and even life-threatening childhood at the mercy of a dysfunctional, unpredictable pure- or para-alcoholic who robbed him of stability, safety, nurture, and love, and caused him to continually function from his fight or flight survival mode.
This, needless to say, bred the need for several secondary acceptances-namely, that the shaming, abusing, and abandoning he endured had nothing to do with his fault, flaw, or livability, but everything to do with his parent's own deficiencies and unresolved childhoods. The hole in their souls ultimately became his.
He must also accept the fact that, as an emotionally, physically, and neurologically undeveloped child, that he was reduced to nothing more than a helpless victim who dealt with his adversity the best way his available tools allowed him to at the time. But his development was arrested, he internally and spiritually escaped by creating the protected inner child, and he was forced to adopt-mostly on the subconscious level-the survival traits that enabled him to function later in life, albeit on an impaired level.
He must additionally accept that, all his early efforts to the contrary, that he could not cure, correct, or fix the parent or primary caregiver who caused his dilemma, nor was it his responsibility to have done so. The only person he could change then and can today is himself.
He must accept that he was released into the world as a young adult who was not adequately prepared for it and, although it was neither visible nor detectable to others, that he suffered from a disease of mind, body, and soul.
He must accept that he is not the embodiment of weakness, but, instead, one of strength for having found the wherewithal within himself to extricate himself from the trenches of his bed every morning and function as good as he could in the midst of mistrust, stored trauma, unresolved fear, potential PTSD, possible addictions, and a number of impairments that eventually came to define him and with which others did not seem to internally wrestle.
He must accept the fact that he unknowingly adopted the 14 adult child traits to foster the perception of safety, including being isolated and afraid of authority figures, incessantly seeking approval, becoming frightened by angry people, taking personal criticism as a threat, becoming or latching on to a compulsive person, perceiving himself as a victim, adopting an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, fearing others to avoid feeling his own emotional pain, feeling guilty for defending himself, especially when others were clearly wrong, becoming addicted to negative emotion and fear, confusing love with pity, losing the ability to feel until it approached a state of numbness, self-abandoning, having very low self-esteem, being transformed into a non-drinking, para-alcoholic, and subconsciously connecting the present with his unresolved past by reacting as he did then rather than spontaneously generating genuine feelings now.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9813450
You must be logged in to post a comment.