Most of us carry baggage…
Family Systems Therapy
Most of us carry “baggage” into our adult relationships from the past. This “baggage” can affect our perceptions, responsiveness, moods, emotions, cogitative powers, problem solving skills, intellect and will! That’s a lot. We can lose ourselves in the process of all that baggage which can then result in CODEPENDENCE, or (my words) a fear-based eclipsing of the self and overreliance on other relationships or processes to function. This condition results over time with a series of WOUNDS to the Self which we unpack in therapy together.
After unpacking the “baggage” we get to feel, deal and heal the wounds of the past and restore the relationships between you and Self, you and Others and you and God. This Body/Soul approach honors the true dignity that each of us has been given.
I use two general approaches to unpack “baggage” from the past and have highlighted them for you below.
More on Family Systems Theory Here.
Adult Child (ACA)
What is an Adult Child? How do I know if I am an Adult Child?
The Laundry List – 14 Traits of an Adult Child of an Alcoholic
We became isolated and afraid of people and authority figures.
We became approval seekers and lost our identity in the process.
We are frightened by angry people and any personal criticism.
We either become alcoholics, marry them or both, or find another compulsive personality such as a workaholic to fulfill our sick abandonment needs.
We live life from the viewpoint of victims and we are attracted by that weakness in our love and friendship relationships.
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 get guilt feelings when we stand up for ourselves instead of giving in to others.
We became addicted to excitement.
We confuse love and pity and tend to "love" people we can "pity" and "rescue."
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 judge ourselves harshly and have a very low sense of self-esteem.
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.
Alcoholism is a family disease; and we became para-alcoholics and took on the characteristics of that disease even though we did not pick up the drink.
Para-alcoholics are reactors rather than actors.
Tony A., 1978
The Other Laundry List
To cover our fear of people and our dread of isolation we tragically become the very authority figures who frighten others and cause them to withdraw.
To avoid becoming enmeshed and entangled with other people and losing ourselves in the process, we become rigidly self-sufficient. We disdain the approval of others.
We frighten people with our anger and threat of belittling criticism.
We dominate others and abandon them before they can abandon us or we avoid relationships with dependent people altogether. To avoid being hurt, we isolate and dissociate and thereby abandon ourselves.
We live life from the standpoint of a victimizer, and are attracted to people we can manipulate and control in our important relationships.
We are irresponsible and self-centered. Our inflated sense of self-worth and self-importance prevents us from seeing our deficiencies and shortcomings.
We make others feel guilty when they attempt to assert themselves.
We inhibit our fear by staying deadened and numb.
We hate people who “play” the victim and beg to be rescued.
We deny that we’ve been hurt and are suppressing our emotions by the dramatic expression of “pseudo” feelings.
To protect ourselves from self punishment for failing to “save” the family we project our self-hate onto others and punish them instead.
We “manage” the massive amount of deprivation we feel, coming from abandonment within the home, by quickly letting go of relationships that threaten our “independence” (not too close).
We refuse to admit we’ve been affected by family dysfunction or that there was dysfunction in the home or that we have internalized any of the family’s destructive attitudes and behaviors.
We act as if we are nothing like the dependent people who raised us.
More on Family Systems…
Bowen family systems theory is a theory of human behavior that views the family as an emotional unit and uses systems thinking to describe the unit’s complex interactions. It is the nature of a family that its members are intensely connected emotionally. Often people feel distant or disconnected from their families, but this is more feeling than fact. Families so profoundly affect their members’ thoughts, feelings, and actions that it often seems as if people are living under the same “emotional skin.” People solicit each other’s attention, approval, and support, and they react to each other’s needs, expectations, and upsets. This connectedness and reactivity make the functioning of family members interdependent. A change in one person’s functioning is predictably followed by reciprocal changes in the functioning of others. Families differ somewhat in their degree of interdependence, but it is always present to some degree.
This emotional interdependence presumably evolved to promote the cohesiveness and cooperation families require to protect, shelter, and feed their members. Heightened tension, however, can intensify these processes that promote unity and teamwork, and this can lead to problems. When family members get anxious, their anxiety can escalate by spreading infectiously among them. As anxiety goes up, the emotional connectedness of family members becomes more stressful than comforting. Eventually, one or more members feel overwhelmed, isolated, or out of control. These members are the people who accommodate the most to reduce tension in others. It is a reciprocal interaction. For example, a person takes too much responsibility for the distress of others in relation to their unrealistic expectations of him, or a person gives up too much control of her thinking and decision-making in relationship to others’ anxiously telling her what to do. The one who does the most accommodating literally “absorbs” the system’s anxiety and thus is the family member most vulnerable to problems such as depression, alcoholism, affairs, or physical illness.