14 jun Recovery

Recovery is about facing reality, because you have to grow up to face reality. It is about growing up grieving and facing reality. I use addictive processes so I do not have to face reality. If I am a little person in a big body I can not face reality. It is to force and I do not know what to do with it anyway. I am grocery you are grocery and I do not know what to do. So what I do is I engage addictive processes so that I do not have to do it. And any addiction will do. I define addiction as any proces that for you success an intolerable reality. Because of that it begins to take priority in your life Taking time and attention away from other important priorities. Creating harmful consequences that you ignore that is what addictions are about It could be to chemicals it could be to love, to sex, to food, to work, to being busy, to gambling, many things that is what we do so that we don’t have to face reality.

If we have such a phenomenal need to control that we can not give up control like that than what we do usually is we surface the reality we don’t want to face in a physical illness, they call this somata form disorders in the dam manual. The third thing we do is we completely remove ourselves from reality by becoming mentally ill, psychotic. If I am psychotic and I create a fantasy and believe my fantasy than I don’t have to deal with reality today. This fourth secondary symptom needs to be taken care of before you can treat codependency and get people in recovery because codependency is about facing reality that is why when you come here and get treated everybody is looking at you to see if you are an addict in someway because if you do not get from delusion at least into minimisation you’re almost impossible to treat.

It is not that you necessarily have to do anything about some of these things but you better know. Because you are going to be using that addictive or obsessive compulsive proces to remove the reality that in codependence recovery we are trying to get you to face. And the last secondary symptom, the fifth one is difficulty having intimacy in our lives. now that is the one that usually brings you into treatment or to a therapist office. Because what we do in our disease is that because we have come our of a family where we weren’t appropriately parented where we weren’t told that we really mattered and that we are wonderful when we get into adult relationships we have to great a need to matter to that person. So that when we get into a relationships which we do not know how to do it we get into fighting and misery. And than we take all that misery and find a therapist and say fix it. I want to share with you they can not, because you are too immature to be in a relationship, because you are too codependent.

The problem with the dis-ease is that it is so inherent in this culture that it is hard to know that how it works is dysfunctional because how it works is normal for this culture. We normally do disease which means about everybody does it. So it feels normal. But the facts are it is dysfunctional. This chart helpt so that at any moment I could know where my patient was and also where I was because I have it too. I define the disease as being in a state of disease. I do not see it as a disease, even though we describe it as a disease so we can get third party payment . I really see this disease as an issue of immaturity and I define it as a state of disease caused by a lack of information that renders a person unable to do the five things necessary for them selves in order to be a mature person.

1. Self esteem issues. Unable to experience appropriate. levels of self esteem.
2. Trouble setting functional boundaries with other people
3. having difficulty owning their own reality politically. Not knowing when to hold it in and when to let it out. They let it out when it is inappropriate to let it out and they hold it in when it is important to let it out. And what happens in that is that they loose their sense of self in the proces which is the mayor complaint the most codependents have about themselves. They do not know who they are and who they are is determined by somebody else so that is a major issue.
4. Unable to deal with adult dependency issues around needing and wanting.
5. They are unable to experience and express their reality in moderation which involves two issues. one is that I don’t experience my reality inside myself moderately. I either find myself exploding inside thinking wild thoughts and often exploding that out on other people. but I also might be so shut down I do not feel myself. So I am exploding or not feeling inside and than what I do, I I explode or hold it so far in that you can’t tell who I am. So on the outside I am either shut down or exploding and that is basically the nature of this illness. It is a state of disease caused by childabuse that renders unable to experience appropriate levels of selfesteem they are either one down or one up in issues of how valuable they are. The y see some people as better than and some people as less than, they are and that is why we say appropriate levels of self-esteem. There are two issues involved here.
6. They are unable to set functional boundaries with others so they can protect themselves, keep themselves form being offenders. They are unable to own their own reality politically so they can know who they are.
7. They are unable to take care of their own issues around needing and wanting. needs are what you have to have in order to survive. Basically there are about sic or seven of them that I fool with; one is food, another is clothing, another is shelter, another is physical nurturing, all people need to get physical nurturing from other people and physically nurture their wn body through self care. Emotional nurturing is probably the biggest one of all.
8. We all need time and attention and direction from others forever. It is how we grow and how we keep ourselves feeling good. We all need medical attention, we all need dental casein order to survive and probably the biggest one of all especially for woman is that we are financially needy. The secondary issue around wanting is probably what personally brings you joy and only you can determine that. My wants and needs bring me joy. It’s what makes me enjoy my everyday living.

A child needs a community in which it can learn by example how to be a functional adult, if this can not be provided it’s growth is inhibited. Some children are forced to meet the needs of the parents in order to keep the parents comfortable because the parents themselves are codependent and often codependent addicts and they are busy trying to keep themselves comfortable and they do not really know how to be a parent and they are pretending and the are deluded and think they really know but what they are doing is repeating abusive behaviour that they themselves experienced thinking that they are being functional. So what we have is a bunch of parents that do not know how to parent , that are deluded about it but what will happen is that as they go into the stress of being a parent they will go into behaviour that forces a child to be who the parents need them to be in order for the parent be comfortable which is another way to define child abuse. Thejob of a parent is not to force the child into making the parent comfortable but to provide a stage for the child to develop that honours the child but lets the child surface the reality of who they are that is very precious just needs some amending every now and then and that the parents feed the child all the things the child needs to know in order to be a functional person that takes an incredible amount of skill and knowledge and maturity to do that so it does not get done.When kids get abused and grow up and abuse their own kids creating an endless cycle of this disease and that is what the disease is about.

See I say that what happens to children is that as they are born into a family they are who they are. They are authentically who they are and they can’t be any other way. And what I put in the schedule is in the first column. All children are valuable in other words as they in utero and born into existence as a separate person they are filled with all the value they need to have. The other interesting thing about a child is that they can’t avoid that is inherent in their nature is that they need protection, they need to be protected from the outside environment. They need parents that know how to do that. So that the child can learn how to protect themselves and not be offensive to others. The aren’t developed enough to be able to protect themselves so that is another thing about a child . the third thing about a child is that all children are perfectly imperfect.

Now what happens in abusive homes is that the very nature of the child upsets the parents because they do not know what to do with that, they do not know how to value their own child because they are codependent and they do not know how to experience appropriate levels of self esteem themselves so they have trouble valuing their child. They have trouble trouble protecting their child sometimes even from themselves/ They have trouble dealing with the child imperfection. They have trouble dealing with the Childs neediness and wanting. They have trouble dealing with the Childs immaturity and what they do is they start attacking the child ignore the child into being who they want them to begin order for the parent to be comfortable so the child starts moving frothier authentic self into an adapted self in order to please the parents and the disease starts happening.

Spirituality issues are pivotal because it’s in gaining a sense of spirituality that we get relief from being a human beingIntervening in resentment is to stop the memory. Stop obsessional thinking that keeps revealing the anger.

And they start loosing themselves as they become who the parent needs them to become. What happens than is we get locked into the disease and start forming mayor symptomatology that can be recognised in us when we’re adults which I’ve already explained. Now what I want to explain the last column is what is created by our disease as we have these primary symptoms. What happens is that we create other problems out in our environment.

Column 4 is the distress we create out there in our environment. Abuse can disempower. I tell you you are inadequate and I create a shame core. I take your sense of value away. You will feel less then, because all you can stand is your own shame.