Feeling Understood

"My sister and I don't communicate any longer since she doesn't understand who I am."

We used to make excuses for people when we said things like, "Oh, they don't know any better." There may be a lot of truth in that statement, but it feels like we were saying, "They just didn't see me when they ran me over, so it's okay." Just because someone is a family member doesn't mean we should accept the unacceptable, including subtle things like them not really hearing us, or less subtle things like having them label us as over-reactive.

We can now tell whether we're being heard or not. We realize that others don't have to agree with us, but they may not disrespect us. We recognize our needs and start to speak up for ourselves. We are learning to live a healthy emotional life, no longer wishing to be around denial and shame. We let go of those who can't journey onwards with us because we cannot carry them while we are climbing to the heights we need to keep our heads above water. We may reconnect with them later, but that will be our choice.

Before recovery, we may have spent all our energy on our families because we thought that was what we were supposed to do. Now we give our "gifts" to those who can appreciate and actually understand them.

On this day I choose to spend my time and energy on those who wish to make this journey with me. I deserve to be heard and loved for who I am.

Brain Pickings, on Erich Fromm "Art of Living"

[From BrainPickings.org, by Maria Popova]

A pioneer of what he called “radical-humanistic psychoanalysis,” the great German social psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900–March 18, 1980) was one of the most luminous minds of the twentieth century and a fountain of salve for the most abiding struggles of being human.

In the mid-1970s, twenty years after his influential treatise on the art of loving and four decades after legendary anthropologist Margaret Mead turned to him for difficult advice, Fromm became interested in the most basic, most challenging art of human life — the art of being. At the height of a new era that had begun prioritizing products over people and consumption over creativity, Fromm penned a short, potent book titled To Have or To Be? — an inquiry into how the great promise of progress, seeded by the Industrial Revolution, failed us in our most elemental search for meaning and well-being. But the question proved far too complex to tackle in a single volume, so Fromm left out a significant portion of his manuscript.

Those pages, in many ways even richer and more insightful than the original book, were later published as The Art of Being (public library) — a sort of field guide, all the timelier today, to how we can shift from the having mode of existence, which is systematically syphoning our happiness, to a being mode.

Art by Jean-Pierre Weill from The Well of Being

Fromm frames the inquiry:

Full humanization… requires the breakthrough from the possession-centered to the activity-centered orientation, from selfishness and egotism to solidarity and altruism.

But any effort to outline the steps of this breakthrough, Fromm cautions, must begin with the foundational question of what the goal of living is — that is, what we consider the meaning of life to be, beyond its biological purpose. He writes:

It seems that nature — or if you will, the process of evolution — has endowed every living being with the wish to live, and whatever he believes to be his reasons are only secondary thoughts by which he rationalizes this biologically given impulse.

[…]

That we want to live, that we like to live, are facts that require no explanation. But if we ask how we want to live — what we seek from life, what makes life meaningful for us — then indeed we deal with questions (and they are more or less identical) to which people will give many different answers. Some will say they want love, others will choose power, others security, others sensuous pleasure and comfort, others fame; but most would probably agree in the statement that what they want is happiness. This is also what most philosophers and theologians have declared to be the aim of human striving. However, if happiness covers such different, and mostly mutually exclusive, contents as the ones just mentioned, it becomes an abstraction and thus rather useless. What matters is to examine what the term “happiness” means…

Art from Kenny’s Window, Maurice Sendak’s forgotten philosophical children’s book

Most definitions of happiness, Fromm observes, converge at some version of having our needs met and our wishes fulfilled — but this raises the question of what it is we actually want. (As Milan Kundera memorably wrote, “we can never know what to want.”) It’s essentially a question about human nature — or, rather, about the interplay of nature and nurture mediated by norms. Adding to the vocabulary of gardening as a metaphor for understanding happiness and making sense of mastery, Fromm illustrates his point:

This is indeed well understood by any gardener. The aim of the life of a rosebush is to be all that is inherent as potentiality in the rosebush: that its leaves are well developed and that its flower is the most perfect rose that can grow out of this seed. The gardener knows, then, in order to reach this aim he must follow certain norms that have been empirically found. The rosebush needs a specific kind of soil, of moisture, of temperature, of sun and shade. It is up to the gardener to provide these things if he wants to have beautiful roses. But even without his help the rosebush tries to provide itself with the optimum of needs. It can do nothing about moisture and soil, but it can do something about sun and temperature by growing “crooked,” in the direction of the sun, provided there is such an opportunity. Why would not the same hold true for the human species?

Even if we had no theoretical knowledge about the reasons for the norms that are conducive to man’s optimal growth and functioning, experience tells us just as much as it tells the gardener. Therein lies the reason that all great teachers of man have arrived at essentially the same norms for living, the essence of these norms being that the overcoming of greed, illusions, and hate, and the attainment of love and compassion, are the conditions for attaining optimal being. Drawing conclusions from empirical evidence, even if we cannot explain the evidence theoretically, is a perfectly sound and by no means “unscientific” method, although the scientists’ ideal will remain, to discover the laws behind the empirical evidence.

He distills the basic principle of life’s ultimate aim:

The goal of living [is] to grow optimally according to the conditions of human existence and thus to become fully what one potentially is; to let reason or experience guide us to the understanding of what norms are conducive to well-being, given the nature of man that reason enables us to understand.

Illustration by Emily Hughes from The Little Gardener

But one of the essential ingredients of well-being, Fromm notes, has been gruesomely warped by capitalist industrial society — the idea of freedom and its attainment by the individual:

Liberation has been exclusively applied to liberation from outside forces; by the middle class from feudalism, by the working class from capitalism, by the peoples in Africa and Asia from imperialism.

Such external liberation, Fromm argues, is essentially political liberation — an inherently limiting pseudo-liberation, which can obscure the emergence of various forms of imprisonment and entrapment within the political system. He writes:

This is the case in Western democracy, where political liberation hides the fact of dependency in many disguises… Man can be a slave even without being put in chains… The outer chains have simply been put inside of man. The desires and thoughts that the suggestion apparatus of society fills him with, chain him more thoroughly than outer chains. This is so because man can at least be aware of outer chains but be unaware of inner chains, carrying them with the illusion that he is free. He can try to overthrow the outer chains, but how can he rid himself of chains of whose existence he is unaware?

Any attempt to overcome the possibly fatal crisis of the industrialized part of the world, and perhaps of the human race, must begin with the understanding of the nature of both outer and inner chains; it must be based on the liberation of man in the classic, humanist sense as well as in the modern, political and social sense… The only realistic aim is total liberation, a goal that may well be called radical (or revolutionary) humanism.

The two most pernicious chains keeping us from liberation, Fromm observes, are our culture’s property-driven materialism and our individual intrinsic tendencies toward narcissism. He writes:

If “well-being” — [defined as] functioning well as a person, not as an instrument — is the supreme goal of one’s efforts, two specific ways stand out that lead to the attainment of this goal: Breaking through one’s narcissism and breaking through the property structure of one’s existence.

Illustration by Maurice Sendak for Bearskin from a special edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales

He offers the crispest definition of narcissism I’ve encountered (something that took Kafka a 47-page letter to articulate):

Narcissism is an orientation in which all one’s interest and passion are directed to one’s own person: one’s body, mind, feelings, interests… For the narcissistic person, only he and what concerns him are fully real; what is outside, what concerns others, is real only in a superficial sense of perception; that is to say, it is real for one’s senses and for one’s intellect. But it is not real in a deeper sense, for our feeling or understanding. He is, in fact, aware only of what is outside, inasmuch as it affects him. Hence, he has no love, no compassion, no rational, objective judgment. The narcissistic person has built an invisible wall around himself. He is everything, the world is nothing. Or rather: He is the world.

But because narcissism can come in many guises, Fromm cautions, it can be particularly challenging to detect in oneself in order to then eradicate — and yet without doing so, “the further way to self-completion is blocked.”

A parallel peril to well-being comes from the egotism and selfishness seeded by our ownership-driven society, a culture that prioritizes having over being by making property its primary mode of existence. Fromm writes:

A person living in this mode is not necessarily very narcissistic. He may have broken through the shell of his narcissism, have an adequate appreciation of reality outside himself, not necessarily be “in love with himself”; he knows who he is and who the others are, and can well distinguish between subjective experience and reality. Nevertheless, he wants everything for himself; has no pleasure in giving, in sharing, in solidarity, in cooperation, in love. He is a closed fortress, suspicious of others, eager to take and most reluctant to give.

Growth, he argues, requires a dual breakthrough — of narcissism and of property-driven existence. Although the first steps toward this breaking from bondage are bound to be anxiety-producing, this initial discomfort is but a paltry price for the larger rewards of well-being awaiting us on the other side of the trying transformation:

If a person has the will and the determination to loosen the bars of his prison of narcissism and selfishness, when he has the courage to tolerate the intermittent anxiety, he experiences the first glimpses of joy and strength that he sometimes attains. And only then a decisive new factor enters into the dynamics of the process. This new experience becomes the decisive motivation for going ahead and following the path he has charted… [An] experience of well-being — fleeting and small as it may be — … becomes the most powerful motivation for further progress…

Awareness, will, practice, tolerance of fear and of new experience, they are all necessary if transformation of the individual is to succeed. At a certain point the energy and direction of inner forces have changed to the point where an individual’s sense of identity has changed, too. In the property mode of existence the motto is: “I am what I have.” After the breakthrough it is “I am what I do” (in the sense of unalienated activity); or simply, “I am what I am.”

In the remainder of The Art of Being, Fromm explores the subtleties and practicalities of enacting this transformation. Complement it with legendary social scientist John W. Gardner, a contemporary of Fromm’s, on the art of self-renewal, then revisit Fromm’s abiding wisdom on what is keeping us from mastering the art of love.

Authority Figures

"We realize that life today really is different than when we were children without a voice."

The authority figures we grew up with were scary. They got angry when anyone questioned or challenged them. There didn't seem to be any logic to it, so we did what we could to avoid having the anger directed at us.

As adults, we often felt our bosses' behavior resembled that of our parents. The potential authority they wielded made us feel like that little kid again. We avoided asking for help because we expected to be belittled. From our experience and that of our friends, that was a very real fear because, like our parents, many bosses are good at pouncing on the weak. So, rather than risk confrontation, and because we became adept at figuring things out for ourselves as children, we decided that was the way to survive at work. It was exhausting.

We realized early in recovery that we wanted and needed to find our voice. But the stakes seemed too high to experiment at work. So we role-played situations with our fellow travelers. We practiced what we could say, or what we might have said. We gradually started to gain self-confidence. And when the time was right, we spoke up. The elation we felt when it worked was indescribable. We were becoming who we knew we could be. We were making a difference - to ourselves!

On this day I will practice finding my voice with someone in the program I trust so when the time comes, I'll be ready to speak up for myself.

Sense of Purpose

"Our experience shows that the Steps are a proven way of life, yielding new meaning and a sense of purpose in one's life."

Did we save a life today?

Did we smile or have a kind word for a stranger? We might not know if that stranger was in the midst of despair, wondering if life was even worth living. Could our simple act of kindness have brought even the smallest spark of hope to that person?

We are not responsible for what others do, but we can consider the possibility that our recovery brings us new awareness of what is happening around us and the positive impact we can have in seemingly meaningless everyday contact.

We go through each day deep in our own thoughts. Often, we unwittingly avoid eye contact with others.

Even if we are not having the best day, smiling at a stranger and perhaps seeing a smile returned feels good. Maybe we let the person in line behind us go ahead when we have a basketful and they have one item. Or we take a few extra seconds to make eye contact with the clerk and wish them a good day.

These random acts of kindness can brighten someone's day and help us feel connected. We may never know the impact we make through our actions, even if we only spread a bit of joy in the moment. But it is worth the effort to carry this message of hope.

On this day I will remember that what I learn through ACA and the Steps is not just for me. My progress can affect everyone whose life I touch.

Change

"The more I change, the more I get these little hints from people around me to go back to my prior behavior, because that's when they felt safe with me."

As we started to break out of our old patterns, others became unhappy with us. They felt betrayed and abandoned as we became more self-sufficient. We were no longer taking care of them, and our healthy detachment put a distance between us that was uncomfortable for them.

Taking care of ourselves is new behavior because we were taught to placate others. Our new reactions are helping us gain ground for the first time. We are no longer bludgeoned and bullied by the silence of others as they try to manipulate us. We have begun to trust our own feelings over the desires of other people, no matter how much we think we need those relationships to be okay.

We allow others to own their own feelings. When someone is angry, we no longer assume it's our fault, and we don't let their anger control us. We move forward.

If others break off relationships with us as a result, or act wounded, we don't try to fix things. We are no longer willing to throw ourselves under the damaging tires of shame. We have learned to walk around those spiky pits of guilt and move on.

On this day I will trust that if one relationship ends, a healthier one will take its place when the time is right.

Family Relationships

"At an appropriate time, we review the relationship we want to have with our families. We will choose to avoid some family members because they are draining or abusive."

Even though we lived through the same experiences as others in our families, we may have reacted differently and developed different scars and ways of coping that often divided us much more than it united us.

When we begin our recovery in ACA, this divide makes it more difficult to be around the circus that is our extended family. With practice, resolve and support from other ACAs, we give ourselves permission to avoid situations that can drain us of all energy and even cause us to revert to our own dysfunctional behaviors.

If we think some family members are too toxic and abusive, we can disconnect. We don't have to participate because we know how emotionally draining they are. We have a choice. We don't have to go down with a sinking ship.

This separation doesn't have to be forever. Many of us eventually get to the point of reintroducing our True Selves to the family, and we let them make the choice to interact with us on our terms, or not.

On this day I give myself permission to separate from my family's dysfunction. This gives me the opportunity to become who I am meant to be, not who I am expected to be.

Relapse

"In ACA, we have stories of relapse and the importance of getting back to the program if relapse occurs."

We may have thought that relapse was only for others with more serious, life threatening addictions, not those of us in ACA. We had been abused. We were the ones in the right. If we let our character defects get out of hand once in a while, we were entitled, weren't we? That wasn't relapse. That wasn't even life-threatening.

By taking an honest look at ourselves in the Fourth Step, we see that emotional relapse can be just as life-threatening as anything else. We realize how we may have relapsed when we've gone back to our family of origin too often, hoping things would be different. But instead, we watched them tear each other to shreds and found ourselves participating, even a little bit. Maybe we've ignored our screaming Inner Child as we practiced other self-harming behavior, ignoring our Higher Power in favor of our old compulsive self-reliance.

Seeing how susceptible we can be to relapse, just as those who deal with substance abuse, we become more vigilant, but not in the way of our childhood hypervigilance. This vigilance is an awareness of how "awake" we are. We are mindful about maintaining conscious contact with our Inner Child and our Higher Power through our daily inventory. We create the time and space we need to move forward on our journey, no longer abandoning ourselves.

On this day I will maintain daily contact with my Inner Child and my Higher Power to help me stay focused so that I avoid emotional relapse.

Inner Child - True Self

"During these years of family dysfunction, our Inner Child or True Self went into hiding and remained heavily fortified under addictions or dependent behavior."

Before ACA, we might have heard about and even had glimpses of our Inner Child, or True Self - the part of us that hungers for the unconditional love and support we didn't receive in our families. This is the part of us that is most often buried pretty deep behind defense mechanisms and addictive behaviors that we thought were somehow protecting us from further harm.

But in recovery we learn the reasons why our True Self went into hiding. It finally starts to makes sense why that part of us can be elusive and hard to access on a regular basis.

As we identify and release our childhood trauma, we come out from behind our addictions and self-destructive behaviors to make it safe for our Inner Child. We reparent ourselves and give ourselves what we didn't receive. We begin to blossom inside and make ourselves whole with the help of our Higher Power, our fellow travelers and the tools of ACA.

On this day I will welcome and nurture my True Self. With the support of my Higher Power and ACA, I am able to provide for myself the unconditional love I've always deserved.

Worldwide Fellowship

"ACA is a worldwide fellowship. New groups are established each week somewhere in the world."

We suffered such confusion and chaos as children. Feeling horribly alone, on display, hunted, in danger, and lost, we wondered when our world would ever look like other kids' worlds. What was wrong with us that made our world different?

Many of us grew into adults who became jaded and numb and shut down. We gave up on our world becoming like others. We were just hoping to get by without too much drama, too much pain. We did little things daily to hang on, but we were aware that our lives were a struggle and very disappointing.

When we got to our first ACA meeting, we discovered that we were not the only people who felt like this - we weren't alone after all. When we heard that ACA was a worldwide fellowship, it was exciting to know that so many people were finding help. Sadly, this disease of family alcoholism and dysfunction exists everywhere.

Now that we know this is a global problem, we also know it wasn't created by our particular parents, and we must admit they weren't the only problem. It's bigger than that. Knowing that we're part of a world of people who are now recovering together as adult children gives us great hope and a feeling of comfort.

On this day I join hands with the world of adult children as I remind my Inner Child, "We were never alone."

Disease of Family Dysfunction

"Family dysfunction is a disease that affects everyone in the family. Taking a drink is not necessary to be affected. This is an ACA axiom, and it serves as a basis for our First Step."

Whether we are teetotalers or "self-made" alcoholics, our perfectionist and risk-taking attitudes and behaviors far outlast the seemingly temporary effects of alcohol and other dysfunction in the family body.

In Step One in ACA, we admit that we are powerless over the effects of alcoholism and family dysfunction. Those effects seem infinite in number, just as with the stars in the sky. No matter which effects we start to work on in recovery, we will most assuredly uncover more subtle effects each time we do the Steps. It is a process of discovery - that we are all affected by this disease of family dysfunction.

As we keep coming back, we experience the ever expanding foundation of our recovery as we continue to admit the effects over which we have no control.

On this day I will remember that I am powerless over the effects of alcoholism and family dysfunction. However, I am not powerless over myself. I now have the willingness to face the impact my childhood has had on me.

Sanity

"One of the keys to being restored to sanity involves surrendering our need to harm ourselves or to run from our feelings."

It is not sane to have a battle within ourselves to keep feelings from surfacing. By running from our emotions, we lose out on the valuable lessons they may teach us. When we deny or stuff feelings, they continue to hide just under the surface. They become jumbled and confusing and tend to come out with the slightest trigger.

When feelings are experienced rather than denied, they lose their power. By learning to sit with our feelings and acknowledge them, we practice self-love. As we start to love ourselves more, we will want to harm ourselves less and begin to treat ourselves with genuine kindness and compassion.

But we don't just stop the behavior of self-harm all at once. Part of the process is to surrender this need to our Higher Power, knowing that we will be shown how to love ourselves. Whether quickly or slowly, we come to have faith in the Promises of ACA.

On this day I will nurture myself by accepting my feelings as they arise, knowing they hold opportunities for me to grow and love myself more fully.

Step Five

"Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs."

In Step Five, for the first time we came clean about our real feelings and walked away more whole than before. We were not perfect and that was okay. We allowed our Higher Power to guide us through our histories with new insight. We were validated by our fellow travelers in the process, and we now knew definitively that we had been wronged and that we no longer need to accept abusive behavior from others.

This Step took a lot of courage. We paused before going forward to reflect on how far we had come and to enjoy the view. In a sense we had been reborn into self-awareness on a level we didn't know existed.

We started to put ourselves first because we were worth it. No one could take this new foundation away from us, because it was built on rock-solid pillars that could not be torn down by others anymore. We were gaining the inner strength necessary to face whatever was put in our paths. We were becoming free from those things that plagued us because we had been honest with our Higher Power and another person.

We looked forward to connecting with our Inner Child as we progressed. That child was awakening and knew it would never ever be alone again. We were there to provide the nourishment, giving everything we had.

On this day I will be honest with the most important person I will ever get to know: Me.

Attraction versus Promotion

Many of us felt the rush of belonging when we started attending ACA meetings. We found so many answers. We wanted to give Big Red Books to everyone because we wanted them to know what we now knew. We may have even been tempted to wear an "ACA Rules!" t-shirt.

But we soon learned to slow down. We found out why this is a program of attraction, not promotion. It's more about actions and not so much about the talking. We allow our Higher Power to work magic in and around us.

We take things as they come. We no longer stay up at night thinking how to put ACA in the local water source. We are sad when newcomers come and then go, but we learn to let them go. We grieve as we watch people die from the disease of family dysfunction all around us while we get healthier.

We trust that there is an abundant source of love for us and for anyone else who is truly willing to walk the walk. We do our part and enjoy the results. As we keep the focus on ourselves, we see better results for us, and that's what positively impacts the world around us.

On this day I will remember that I can't force anyone to get this message. I can make the information available and let others make their own choices. The best message is the personal change I see in myself.

Gifts and Talents

"Each of us comes to ACA with many talents. As we grow in our recovery, we discover even more talents within us."

Many of us come to ACA not knowing what our unique gifts are. We may have always measured ourselves against others and decided we came up short.

But then someone we trust in our meeting pays us a compliment that we believe. With the support of such people, we learn to see, develop and express our special talents, large or small. Maybe our gift is the ability to provide encouragement, even a small amount, to another person that helps them stay on their path. It may not take much effort on our part, yet it can be huge to the other person. Sometimes we may never learn the positive impact we may have had.

Or maybe we have other gifts, such as the words to write a book that inspires millions. Whatever the case, we remember that each talent we possess is tremendously valuable, no matter whether it helps only ourselves or others.
Freeing ourselves from our cloudy thinking is what makes room for our ability to see, develop, and express our talents. That's part of the beauty of ACA: as we feel understood and appreciated, it frees us to express our gifts, becoming whole, well-rounded, recovering adult children.

On this day I recognize that I have unique talents. I am now willing to develop and express them, as I learn how valuable I am to myself and others.