*

1. Your feelings do not originate from the part of your brain that is under your control   You cannot control your feelings.

2. Feelings are not subject to any moral code.  They’re neither good nor bad, right or wrong.  They just are.

3. Even though you can’t change your feelings, you are responsible for them.

4. Emotions can be “walled off” but not extinguished.  If you wall off an emotion it does not disappear.  It just goes and lives on the other side of the wall. 

5. Feelings can lead you down the right path or they can lead you astray.  It all depends on what you do with them. 

6.  When you disregard an emotion you are actually empowering it.  Ignoring, pushing away or walling off a feeling may seem to make it go away — but it’s the feelings you’re least aware of that control you the most. 

7. There is only one way to make an uncomfortable feeling go away, and that is to let yourself feel it.

8. Your feelings drive your thoughts, but you can also use your thoughts to manage your feelings. 

9. Sitting with a powerful emotion and letting yourself feel it while thinking about it — to understand why you’re having it, what it means and what it’s trying to tell you — is called “processing” the feeling. 

10. Your feelings are valuable messages from your deepest, most authentic self.  When you follow Rule 9 you are listening to the messages, honoring yourself, and making use of this invaluable inner resource. 

11. The way your parents treated your feelings as they raised you is probably how you treat your own feelings now.

~ Adapted from “The ten rules emotions follow that everyone should know,” at Psych Central.

*

Whatever we don’t own, owns us.

~ Carl Jung

.

Among recovering people, and in the lexicon of nearly every therapist I know, the single most common word used to describe unfinished emotional business is:

Shit.

Not surprising.

It’s a good metaphor.

Consider:

Actual shit is a waste product, what’s left undigested after our systems process nourishment.

Emotional shit is what’s left undigested after human beings process (or can’t process) emotional experiences.

Actual shit is smelly and unpleasant.  So is emotional shit.

Actual shit, when it collects inside you, makes you very uncomfortable.  So does emotional shit.

Releasing actual shit is an enormous relief.  Ditto the emotional version.

The biggest difference between them is that most people instinctually know what to do with actual shit.

They know they need to expel it from the body on a regular basis.  And they know that if they don’t they’ll get sick.

But many people don’t know that about emotional shit.  They think the way to handle it is to hide it, keep it inside, store it up.

Then they don’t understand why they go around feeling shitty.

They’re emotionally constipated.

Constipation produces all sorts of symptoms, like anxiety and depression and anger and addiction.  Also high blood pressure, headaches, backaches, gastrointestinal distress and exhaustion.  Also arguments and violence and child abuse and divorce.

What has this all to do with what I call the inner Kid?

Because this is the main way inner Kids gets wounded.

We’re not born constipated.  We’re born healthy little animals, able to trust what our bodies tell us and automatically expel waste products.  Then in childhood we begin hearing messages like Quiet down and Big boys don’t cry or Don’t cry or I’ll give you something to cry about.  Surrounded by giants on whom we depend for food, shelter, love and security, we have no choice but to follow such instructions.

Voila.  Constipation.

And why, exactly, does emotional constipation make us feel shitty?

“When feelings are denied or kept inside there is typically a buildup of physical tension,” Paul Foxman explains.

“An accumulation of such pressure leads to anxiety, due to fears of losing control emotionally.  That condition also triggers anxiety because of its physiological similarity to the fight/flight response, which is normally associated with danger.  Thus our personality creates a paradox in which we deny feelings to prevent anxiety but experience anxiety when we deny our feelings.”

One more consequence of constipation is worth noting:

It makes it impossible to feel like an adult.

Being adult means being strong and healthy enough to be yourself.   That includes being able to notice your feelings, even the smelly ones, and take responsibility instead of hiding them.  Taking responsibility means learning to express feelings in appropriate ways, ways that leaving you feeling stronger, not constipated.

Hiding feelings is what kids do.  So no matter how old we are, to the extent we feel compelled to hide our feelings from others, we are going to feel like kids inside.

Adults can, in the jargon of recovery, own their shit.

There’s more to adulthood than this one ability, of course.  Owning your shit doesn’t automatically make you a grownup.

But you can’t start growing up until you start owning your shit.

_______________________________

Foxman, Paul.  Dancing with fear: Overcoming anxiety in a world of stress and uncertainty.  Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996.

*

Once there was a handsome young shepherd so self-absorbed he could love nobody else.  The gods punished him by making him fall in love with his own reflection in a pond and stare into it until he starved to death.

His name was Narcissus, and every third or fourth day one of his distant cousins shows up in my office.

They’re not there for therapy. 

What they really want is magic. 

They want someone to help them control the people in their lives, whom they experience as unappreciative and ungiving.  

They want me to teach them how to get those other people to love them better.

They’re my toughest clients.

Most people mistake narcissism for vanity or self-love.  It’s not.  

It’s the opposite.

Narcissists are hungry blind people.   

They’re hungry because (usually) they didn’t get fed enough as kids.  Most grew up in families unable to provide adequate attention, acceptance, approval or affection, the four emotional staples known as narcissistic supplies. 

And they’re blind because they carry that hunger into adulthood, where they’re so preoccupied with getting themselves fed that they ignore the needs and feelings of those around them.

I explain it this way to clients:

Narcissism is like trying to drive a car that has a mirror instead of a windshield.  You look out over the dashboard and you don’t see streets or traffic or pedestrians; you see only your own needs, feelings and preferences.  You’re so fixated on the mirror you don’t see where you’re going, or who you run over to get there.  When you hit someone you barely notice the bump.

Me-monkeys take many forms, some easier to spot than others.  The most obvious are the showmen, loud, demanding, self-conscious Trump types who constantly polish their image, trumpet their viewpoint, and leave me feeling less like a therapist than an audience.

Then there are the victims, eager to tell me their tales of abuse and betrayal, and desperate that I agree that absolutely none of it was their fault.

Then the addicts, so busy struggling with their tangled unmanageable feelings that they’re simply unavailable for healthy relationship with anyone else.

Finally the codependents, who always seem to be putting everyone else first, but whose caretaking, people-pleasing and avoidance of conflict are actually subterfuges meant to protect them from rejection and win a few emotional tablescraps in return.

Again, my toughest clients. 

There are two reasons for this.

The first: narcissists are terrified. 

The emotional starvation they suffered as kids left them convinced there was something wrong with them, and they’ve carried that belief ever since.  The false self they construct and show the world – be it codependent or Trumpesque – was built to hide their shame, sense of incompleteness, and their secret conviction they’re unlovable.  It’s hard to do therapy with them, because therapy requires trust, and many of them trust no one.  (How trust others if you can’t trust your parents?  If you can’t trust yourself?)  Many are just too frightened to come out of hiding and reveal the person inside. Some have hidden behind their false front for so long they can no longer distinguish it from their real self.

The second reason: I’m a me-monkey myself.

Earlier I mentioned that it was Bert’s idea I become a therapist.  A nifty way, he thought, to put my codependent Plan A to work.  I would help others solve their problems, win narcissistic supplies in return, and get my emotional needs met without having to reveal either my needs or my emotions.

That was decades ago.  I’m well into my Plan B now, which is less about image and insulation than honesty and risk.  

But every Plan B is an ongoing project, and I still have plenty of work to do on mine.

Carl Jung:

We cannot change anything unless we accept it.  Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses….  If a doctor wishes to help a human being he must be able to accept him as he is.  And he can do this in reality only when he has already seen and accepted himself as he is.  Perhaps this sounds very simple, but simple things are always the most difficult.  In actual life it requires the greatest art to be simple, and so acceptance of oneself is…the acid test of one’s whole outlook on life.*

We teach what we want to learn.

____________________________

*Quoted in Psychotherapy East and West by Alan Watts (Ballantine Books, 1961).

Adapted from Chapter 29 of Monkeytraps: Why Everybody Tries to Control Everything and How We Can Stop (2015).

*

Note to readers:  Apologies for my long absence.  Life and a busy practice have prevented me from writing until now.  I hope to resume a regular blogging schedule shortly and to continue with the Plan B Talk series.  In the meantime I thought I’d republish some evergreens readers have requested.  This one, about what codependency and narcissism have in common, still seems pretty relevant.

*

In therapy we sometimes talk as if narcissists and codependents come from different planets.

I’ve done it myself.  In one post, for example, I contrasted their relationship behavior as Me First versus Yes, Dear.

I forgot how much they have in common.

Such as?

First, they’re both hungry. 

Both typically came from families unable to meet their childhood emotional needs.   So they spend their adult lives seeking attention and acceptance, approval and love.

Second, they’re both control addicts.  

Yes, they control differently – narcissists more overtly, codependents more covertly.But both spend most of their energy and time trying to transform the reality they’ve got into the reality they want.  And neither is good at going with the flow.

Finally, they’re both self-centered.

Narcissists, of course, are obvious about it.  Look at me.  Ain’t I special?  Gotta love me.

Codependents are more subtle.  You okay?  Anything I can do for you?  Sure, whatever you want.

Their Yes, dear behavior may manifest as people-pleasing, conflict avoidance, emotional dishonesty, self-sacrifice, self-abuse, or any number of other ways of disguising their true selves.

But behind it all is a desperate attempt to feed themselves by manipulating others — to get their needs met in the only way they know, and without much concern for (or even awareness of) how it impacts those they’re manipulating.

They may call it love or respect or being considerate or being nice.  But codependents put others first, not out of altruism, but in hopes that someday someone will return the favor.

So forget all that two-planets stuff.

Think of codependency as narcissism in sheep’s clothing.

And narcissists and codependents as two weeds with one root.

Laws & Alternatives

x

x

In the last talk I defined Plan B as a kind of software for the mind — a set of ideas and practices which enables us to remain objective under stress and replace control addiction with better ways of taming anxiety and getting our needs met.

Let’s start with the ideas.

x

The four laws

Plan B is based on four conclusions about control:

1. That we are all addicted to it.

2. That this addiction causes most (maybe all) of our emotional problems,

3. That behind this addiction stands the wish to control feelings.

4. That there are better ways to manage feelings than control.

These are the four laws of control, and they underpin everything that follows. 

Note that these laws are descriptive, not prescriptive. 

Not laws in the sense of Thou shalt do X, but in the sense of This is what thou art already doing.  

The first step to developing a Plan B is becoming aware of how these laws already play out in our lives. 

Because to do that is to step into a new way of perceiving and reacting.

x

1. Addiction

“We are all addicted to control” is the law of addiction.   

We become aware of this law by paying attention to how often we try (or want to try) to edit reality.

Remember, controlling comes in a zillion forms and disguises.  As I said several talks ago,  

We’re controlling whenever we scratch an itch.  Comb our hair.  Mow our lawn.  Salt our soup.  Spank our child.  Balance our checkbook.  Change channels. Stop at a red light.  Vote.  Punch someone in the mouth.  Flatter someone.  Seduce someone.  Lie.  Hide our true feelings.  Worry.  Dream.

Most of these forms are benign, but there are two areas of emotional life where controlling tends to cause more problems than it solves.

Those areas are feelings and relationships.

2. Dysfunction

“Control addiction causes most of our emotional problems” is the law of dysfunction.  

Once you start to see how controlling you are you may also notice how ineffective controlling is. 

You may notice, for example, how defensively hiding or disguising your feelings leaves you more anxious, not less.  

Or how trying to control other people leaves you feeling more frustrated and alienated than accepted and safe.

Unfortunately, since compulsive controlling is baked into human nature, it can take a long time to see this.

And most people never do.

Which explains why so many of us go around in emotional pain much of the time.

And how do we respond to this pain?

We try to control it, of course.

Thus controlling leads to pain, and pain leads to controlling, which leads to more pain.

Just like in any addiction.

x

3. Emotion

“Behind control addiction stands the wish to control feelings” is the law of emotion.

Think about it.  Whenever you try (or want to try) to control something, isn’t it because you think controlling it will make you feel better?

Control addiction is all about feelings.

We become aware of this law when we shift our attention from externals to internals — from the people/places/things which stress us to our reactions to those stressors.

Do that long enough, and you realize that — surprise! — stress is not something that exists out in the world, but something that happens inside us.*

Which is damned good news.

Because while there’s an infinite number of stressors in the world that are beyond our control, we can learn to manage our response to them.

Or as someone once said, “We cannot direct the winds, but we can adjust our sails.”

And how do we do that?

We learn alternatives to controlling.

x

4. Alternatives

“There are better ways to manage feelings than control” is the law of alternatives.  

The alternatives are the basic practices that make up Plan B. 

There are three: surrender, responsibility and intimacy.

I’ll explore each of the alternatives more fully in future talks, but here’s a brief introduction:

Surrender means the ability to stop controlling in any given situation.  In practical terms it usually means detaching – stepping back from something instead of automatically wanting or trying to change it.  It’s the tactic AA is advocating with the slogans “Go with the flow” and “Let go and let God.”  To do either requires a certain amount of faith that surrendering is both safe  and an effective way of handling stress or problems.  That’s why I call it the spiritual alternative to control.

Responsibility means the ability to respond – to make a healthy intelligent answer to a problem or stressor.  In practical terms it usually means listening to feelings and being able to tap into our authentic selves (our Kid, for example) to get a sense of what it is we really want or need.  Becoming responsible in this sense means overcoming the socially-conditioned habit of concealing or denying feelings.  Thus responsibility is the emotional alternative to control.

Intimacy means the ability to be yourself with another person and to allow them to do the same with you.  It is the hardest alternative to master, since it requires a person to both surrender (refrain from controlling the other person) and be responsible (emotionally authentic).  In practical terms it means developing the courage to come out of hiding with the most important people in our lives and show them who we are despite the risk of judgment, conflict or rejection.  This is scary stuff for everyone, and so is usually attained only by people committed to growing up and developing healthy relationships.  But intimacy — the relational alternative to control — is also as healthy as human relationships ever get.

***

Steve Hauptman is the author of Monkeytraps: Why Everybody Tries to Control Everything and How We Can Stop (2015), available here, and the forthcoming There I go again: Monkeytraps for Adult Children.

 ______________________________

*In 1936 Hans Selye defined stress as “the non-specific response of the body to any demand for change.”  A more modern definition: “Stress is a feeling of emotional or physical tension.  It can come from any event or thought that makes you feel frustrated, angry, or nervous.  Stress is your body’s reaction to a challenge or demand. In short bursts, stress can be positive, such as when it helps you avoid danger or meet a deadline.  But when stress lasts for a long time, it may harm your health.”  Source: Medline Plus Medical Encyclopedia, https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/003211.htm

The Plan B Talks:

I recently began a new group for adult children of alcoholic, narcissistic, abusive, and otherwise dysfunctional families. In this group I’ll be giving a series of talks about how we’re all shaped by our families of origin and what we can do about it.  It’s been suggested that my readers might find these talks useful, so I plan to publish the talk notes here. The series continues with (Talk #6) Mindware.  Questions and feedback welcome.

***.

.

Change how you see and

see how you change. 

~ Zen proverb

.

The idea of anxiety

Before we move on to Plan B, let’s look at anxiety.

My clients and I talk a lot about anxiety, so most of them know how I usually explain it.

They’ve heard me describe it as a symptom of emotional constipation. 

They know I believe that feelings, like shit, need to be expelled from the body, not stored up inside.  And that when we don’t express feelings we feel shitty. 

Anxiety is the name we give to this feeling. 

Psychologist Paul Foxman explains,

When feelings are denied or kept inside there is typically a buildup or physical tension.  When that tension is not released, an internal pressure builds up.  An accumulation of such pressure leads to anxiety, due to fears of losing control emotionally.  That condition also triggers anxiety because of its physiological similarity to the fight/flight response, which is normally associated with danger. 

Thus our personality creates a paradox in which we deny feelings to prevent anxiety but experience anxiety when we deny our feelings. (1)

I know this is true because of all the anxious clients who describe how their anxiety drops when they’re able to express what they feel. 

But I also think anxiety is much larger than that. 

.

Consciousness

Anxiety is an organism’s response to a real or imagined threat. 

We tend to experience it as heightened tension, sensitivity to our environment, and a feeling of fear or apprehension about what’s to come.

For human beings anxiety is simply the cost of being conscious.  That’s because to be conscious is to be aware of (among other things) threats to survival and safety and wellbeing.  We sense threats in the present, remember them in the past, and anticipate them in the future.  We can’t help this; we are hardwired to do so. 

So to be conscious is to be forever on guard to some extent. 

Anxiety both causes and results from being on guard. 

It’s not inherently unhealthy.  We actually need some anxiety.  We wouldn’t want it to go away entirely.  That would leave us unconscious and vulnerable. 

But anxiety is damned uncomfortable. 

Severe anxiety can be crippling.  (Ask anyone who’s ever had a panic attack.) 

Severe anxiety can be so unbearable that people kill themselves to escape it.

Moderate anxiety depletes energy, impairs concentration, limits productivity and destroys peace of mind.

Even mild anxiety is uncomfortable enough so that we work constantly to lower it and keep it at tolerable levels.

Which is where the idea of control comes in.

.

The goal of control

I’ve defined control as the ability to edit reality, to direct or dictate or manipulate our environment. 

Why would we want to do that?

Mainly to manage anxiety.

That’s because we’re used to thinking of anxiety as a reaction to people, places and things.

In their book about American neurosis and neurotics, sociologists Snell & Gail Putney write,

One of the unquestioned assumptions of American culture is the belief that emotions have an external explanation.  When an American feels angry he looks around to see what provoked him and when he feels happy he looks around to see who delighted him. (2)

Read that again; it’s important.

Because it is this unquestioned assumption which leads us into control addiction.

Ultimately the goal of all our controlling is

Actually our emotional reactions come not from externals but from how we interpret and respond to them.

But if you don’t know this, you have a big problem.

Because then you’re left with no choice but to try to control the world around you.

Which is largely impossible.

Sure, some externals are controllable.  But many are not.

Most are not. 

And even when we do get a bit of control we can’t hold onto it for long. 

(Have you noticed?)

So a person for whom control is the only defense against anxiety is driven, inevitably, into compulsive controlling.

.

A new goal

By comparison, Plan B has a different goal.

It’s both more realistic and more achievable.

The goal of Plan B is

.

The idea of objectivity

“Seeing objectively” means seeing clearly and realistically.  It means moving beyond feeling, fantasy or desire. 

Or as Alcoholics Anonymous describes it, dealing with life on life’s terms.

In Plan B the idea of objectivity replaces the idea of control.

Control addicts, in their need to edit reality, find themselves perpetually at war with What Is.  Objectivity allows us is to declare a cease-fire in that war, to accept What Is and to cope realistically with it. 

For example, objectivity enables me to move beyond fear and desire and become able to see

~ why it’s pointless to try and stop “my” alcoholic from drinking;

~ why I can’t expect a narcissist to meet my emotional needs;

~ why my parent’s inability to love me was about their limitations, not mine;

~ why someone’s abusive behavior is never my fault;

~ why hiding my feelings makes me feel more scared, not safer; 

~ that I can feel good even when people around me are feeling bad;

~ that I’m as sick as my secrets;

~ that I’m as healthy as my relationships;

and

~ that there are things I just cannot or should not try to control.

So how do we achieve objectivity?

We change our mindware.

.

Mindware

Mindware is a term used by family systems theorist Michael Kerr to define “Mental knowledge and procedures used to solve problems and make decisions.” (3)

Plan B is a kind of mindware.

It’s a set of ideas and practices which allow us to remain objective under stress — i.e., replace anxiety-driven controlling with more rational and effective ways of managing our emotional lives.

The components of this mindware will be the subject of the remaining talks in this series.

I love the mindware metaphor because it suggests that, once installed, this new learning allows us to respond in a healthier way automatically.

In my first book (4) I told a story to illustrate how I discovered that the mindware I was teaching my clients had seeped deep into me:

During a routine physical my doc runs a cardiogram and finds a blip that suggests a TIA (transient ischemic attack).  He tells me to drive to the ER.  I feel fine, but I go.  At the hospital they put me on a gurney and park me in a hallway for four hours while they run an assortment of tests.  I have to cancel six clients, calm my worried wife over the phone, wonder what all this is costing me, and then just lie there and wait.  At one time I would have reacted to all this with frustration, worry and anger.  Now I surprise myself by closing my eyes and taking a nap.  It’s a pretty good nap, too.

Change how you see, and see how you change.

***

Steve Hauptman is the author of Monkeytraps: Why Everybody Tries to Control Everything and How We Can Stop (2015), available here, and the forthcoming There I go again: Monkeytraps for Adult Children.

___________________________________________

(1) Paul Foxman, Dancing with fear: Overcoming anxiety in a world of stress and uncertainty (Northvale NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996), 48.

(2) Putney, Snell & Gail J, Putney, The adjusted American: Normal neuroses in the individual and society (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1964), 99.

(3) In his book Bowen theory’s secrets: Revealing the hidden life of families (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019).  Kerr says the term was coined by Keith Stanovich, in his book What intelligence tests miss: The psychology of rational thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

(4) Monkeytraps: Why everybody tries to control everything and how we can stop (New York: Lioncrest, 2015).

The Plan B Talks

I recently began a new group for adult children of alcoholic, narcissistic, abusive, and otherwise dysfunctional families. In this group I’ll be giving a series of talks about how we’re all shaped by our families of origin and what we can do about it.  It’s been suggested that my readers might find these talks useful, so I plan to publish the talk notes here. The series continues with (Talk #5) Hungry, lonely, scared: Decoding the laundry list.  Questions and feedback welcome.

***

Because we are afraid of life, we

seek to control or master it.

~ Alexander Lowen

Three talks ago I told you about The Laundry List, those thirteen symptoms common to kids from dysfunctional families.

Three decades of working with adult children — plus seven decades of living as one — make it hard for me to read that list as anything but a detailed description of control addiction. 

For example, as an adult child

(1) I guess what normal is, then try to imitate it.

I don’t feel normal, whatever that is.  I feel emotionally hungry, lonely and scared.  I feel this all the time, and assume these feelings are unique to me, and am convinced that if you knew about them you’d judge me.  So I hide my feelings and fake normalcy.  I do this in order to control how you perceive and react to me.

.

(2) I have trouble following projects through from beginning to end.

This comes from how I handle discomfort.  I hate discomfort, mainly because I’ve no idea what to do with it.  I haven’t learned to detach or vent or ask for support or help or advice.  So I try to make the discomfort go away by stopping what I’m doing.  (I call this “taking a break.”)   And since all projects turn uncomfortable at some point, demanding I do things I’d rather not do, I end up stopping permanently.  Thus my garage remains a disaster, my graduate degree unearned, my book unwritten, and I may never lose those last ten pounds.  I do this to control how I’m feeling. 

 .

(3) I lie when it would be just as easy to tell the truth.

Since the truth — like how I really feel about myself, or how I feel about you, or what I really want or hate or fear —  makes me uneasy, honesty feels dangerous.  It feels much safer to conceal and manipulate the truth.  I’ve been doing that for so long that now it’s become automatic, a habit.  I control the truth because it calms my anxiety and helps me believe I can control what happens next.    

.

(4) I judge myself without mercy.

Childhood taught me to expect others to criticize, judge or reject me.  This was so painful that now I anticipate it and do it to myself before you can.  I’d rather abuse myself than feel victimized.  (Kind of like quitting a job before they can fire you, or ending a relationship before you can be dumped.)  And judging myself without mercy saves me from being surprised or disappointed should you ever do it.   I do this to control the anixety I feel in relationships.

.

(5) I have trouble relaxing or having fun.

As a kid I never knew what to expect.  Will Dad come home drunk or sober?  Happy or angry?  Will he hug me or hit me?  Will Mom comfort me or point out my flaws?  Will my parents get along tonight or scream and break things?  This uncertainty made me hypervigilant.   I learned to constantly scan for danger, signs of unrest or tension or anger or conflict or some other trouble.  I did that for so long that I lost the ability to not do it, to drop my defenses and relax or just play.  I became an adult chronically braced against imminent danger.  I do this in an attempt to control my anxiety about living in an unpredictable environment.   

.

(6) I take myself very seriously.

Anxiety makes you pretty damn serious.  It hijacks your attention, steals your energy, keeps you preoccupied and wary.  And since one of the things I’m most scared of is rejection, I’m forever worried that others will dislike or judge me.  I dread embarrassment and humiliation.  Dance?  Play?  Act silly?  Make a fool of myself?  God, no.  On some level I’m afraid of that all the time.  Chronic seriousness feels like controlling how you will see and evaluate me.      

.

(7) I struggle with intimate relationships.

Intimacy means being able to be myself with another person and allow them to do the same.  It means dropping my defenses and surrendering control.  It requires faith, both in you (I trust you not to hurt or betray me) and in me (I am basically lovable and can take care of myself).   I never developed that kind of faith, intimacy scares the crap out of me.  Showing my true self to another person feels like skydiving without a parachute.  Frankly, it’s hard for me to imagine how anyone can do it, or would want to.  Intimacy means surrendering control in a way I simply cannot.

.

(8) I over-react to changes beyond my control.

I spent childhood defending against situations that were confusing, stressful and scary.  This left me experiencing the external world – the world of people, places and things — as dangerous.  And I concluded that the only way to achieve a sense of internal safety was to control those externals.  A logical conclusion, maybe, but psychologically disastrous, since it left me hypersensitive to everything I couldn’t control.  Every life is filled with the uncontrollable.  So now, to the extent that I rely on control to feel secure or confident, my internal life feels not safe but chaotic.  My need to control external reality keeps me scared of reality itself.

.

(9) I constantly seek approval and affirmation.

Every kid needs large helpings of the four A’s: attention, acceptance, approval and affection.  These are the basic components of love.  Kids who get enough grow up feeling loved and lovable.  Kids who don’t grow up emotionally hungry.  I grew up hungry, and now my hunger compels me to seek feeding in the form of approval and validation.  Unfortunately I seek it in controlling and self-defeating ways.  For example, since I feel unlovable, I feel unworthy of feeding, so instead of showing you my true self I hide the parts of me I think you’ll reject.  I try to fool you into loving me.  This never works, because whatever love or approval I do win feels meaningless, since I had to lie to get it.  So I remain chronically hungry and chronically compelled to seek approval and affirmation again and again.  The controlling way in which I seek feeding makes it impossible for me to ever feel adequately fed.

.

(10) I feel different from other people.

This comes from how I overcontrol my emotional life.  I don’t trust or listen to my true feelings so much as judge them.  Since I judge them, I don’t share them with anyone else.  Since I don’t share them, others don’t share their true feelings with me, so I never discover that we feel essentially the same way.  Trapped in this closed loop of feeling > judgment > more feeling > more judgment,  I’m forced to the inaccurate conclusion that I’m different from everyone else.  The wall I’ve built to control the risk of judgment keeps me feeling isolated, alienated and alone.

.

(11) I’m either super-responsible or super-irresponsible.

This comes from how I manage my anxiety.  Since I don’t realize that my anxiety comes mainly from emotional constipation — i.e., holding feelings in — I blame it on external stressors, like the endless To Do list that is my life.  Sometimes I try to control my anxiety by finishing everything on that list (super-responsible), and sometimes I turn my back on the list (super-irresponsible).  Neither approach works for long.  Hyper-responsibility leaves me anxious and exhausted, while hyper-irresponsibility leaves me anxious and guilty.  So I swing like a pendulum between these two unhealthy extremes, confusing the hell out of myself and the people around me.  My attempts to control anxiety by focusing on externals just makes me more and more anxious.

.

(12) I’m extremely loyal, even in the face of evidence that my loyalty is undeserved.

This comes from doubting myself and the evidence of my feelings.  Childhood left me convinced I was permanently flawed, so when things go wrong between us I usually blame myself.  (If you hurt my feelings I decide I’m being oversensitive.  If you ignore or neglect me I tell myself Stop being so needy.  If I lose my temper with you I worry Am I crazy?)  My sense of self-worth is so low that I figure I’m lucky to have any relationships at all, and so must work extra hard to preserve them.  This habit of ignoring or misreading my internal radar keeps me in relationships long after a healthier person would have escaped.  My distorted self-image leaves me hanging onto you for security and constantly suppressing and overcontrolling myself.     

.

(13) I’m impulsive — i.e., tend to lock myself into a course of action without thinking through alternatives or consequences.

This, too, comes from how I manage anxiety.  I’m impulsive because I lack both self-awareness (for example, the fact that I’m constipated) and the ability to defer gratification.  Like a child, I grab for the first choice I think will bring relief.  (Boss yelled at me?  Quit the job.  Boyfriend didn’t call?  Throw a tantrum.  Girlfriend forgot my birthday?  End the relationship.  Partner cheated on me?  Drive into a tree.)  Adult children in recovery learn to calm themselves down — to take a breath, consider their options, maybe process their choices with a safe person.  In recovery I’ll learn there are better ways to reduce my anxiety than leaping without looking.  But now I get so flooded with uncomfortable feelings that the only way I know to control them is by acting out.

***

Steve Hauptman is the author of Monkeytraps: Why Everybody Tries to Control Everything and How We Can Stop (2015), available here, and the forthcoming There I go again: Monkeytraps for Adult Children.

The Plan B Talks

I recently began a new group for adult children of alcoholic, narcissistic, abusive, and otherwise dysfunctional families. In this group I’ll be giving a series of talks about how we’re all shaped by our families of origin and what we can do about it.  It’s been suggested that my readers might find these talks useful, so I plan to publish the talk notes here. The series continues with (Talk #4) Weapon of choice: The roots of control addiction.  Questions and feedback welcome.

***

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We come now to the last of the three metaphors: control addiction.

I said earlier that control addiction is my favorite explanation for human behavior.

That’s because it explains so much of what we feel and do as adults.

It also combines the first two metaphors – Plan A and the inner Kid – in a theory of how we develop emotional problems.

Plan A, remember, is that set of adaptations we developed as kids for dealing with feelings, relationships and life in general.  And the Inner Kid is that authentic part of us which gets driven into hiding by the process of socialization.

Well, every Plan A is based on control.

And every wounded Kid gets triggered into compulsive controlling.

Since we all have a Plan A, and we all carry a wounded Kid inside, we are all, ultimately, control addicts.

Control & controlling

Some definitions to start with:

Control means the ability to edit reality – to make people, places and things (ourselves included) behave the way we want.

A craving for control is hardwired into us.  It’s rooted in our big brains – brains that remember and anticipate, analyze and plan, worry and obsess – brains which, in fact, have a life of their own and cannot stop doing any of those things. 

It works this way: 

Moment to moment, we each carry a picture in our heads of the reality we want.  And we constantly compare that picture to the reality we have.

Everything we do to bring those two into alignment — the reality we want and the reality we have — is what I call controlling.

We seek control constantly.  We do it in our heads, our speech and our behavior.  We do it in ways big and small, obvious and disguised, healthy and unhealthy.  Sometimes we do it consciously, but most of our controlling is both unconscious and automatic.

We can’t help ourselves.

Huge & invisible

“Some things you miss because they’re so tiny,” Robert Pirsig writes. “But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge.”

Control is one of those invisible huge things.

The urge to control explains a ridiculously wide range of behaviors.  Often we think of controlling as bossing, bullying or nagging, or a controlling person as someone like Hitler, Donald Trump or Mom.  But that’s like mistaking the elephant’s trunk for the whole elephant.

We’re controlling whenever we scratch an itch.  Comb our hair.  Mow our lawn.  Salt our soup.  Spank our child.  Balance our checkbook.  Change channels. Stop at a red light.  Vote.  Punch someone in the mouth.  Flatter someone.  Seduce someone.  Lie.  Hide our true feelings.  Worry.  Dream.

You get the idea.

We’re all controlling, and we’re controlling all the time.

We chase control all our lives, waking and sleeping, out in public and deep in the most secret crannies of our mind.  We chase it consciously and unconsciously, creatively and destructively, wisely and stupidly, from birth until death.

As I said, we can’t help ourselves.  Control-seeking is the default position of our species.

At the same time, because it’s such a given of human experience, we barely notice we’re doing it.

Control isn’t like a tool we pick up and put down.  It’s more like breathing, or blinking, or the way your knee jerks when the doctor taps your patellar tendon.  Constant, automatic, involuntary.

Nor is the wish for control like a faucet we can turn on and off.  An urge to control flows through us continuously, saturates all our behavior and feelings, infuses everything we desire and fear.

It not only drives our behavior, it structures our thinking.  

What is most of our thinking, if not an attempt to somehow change some circumstance, shift some piece of reality closer to what we’d prefer?  What else do you call problem-solving, planning, analyzing, fantasizing, worrying, obsessing?

It also structures our emotional lives. 

More specifically, it causes most of our pain.

Yoga teacher Stephen Cope writes,

Each of us has our own silent War With Reality.  Yogis came to call this duhkha.  Duhkha means, literally, “suffering,” “pain,” or “distress.”  This silent, unconscious war with How It Is unwittingly drives much of our behavior:  We reach for the pleasant.  We hate the unpleasant.  We try to arrange the world so that we have only pleasant mind-states, and not unpleasant ones.  We try to get rid of this pervasive state of unsatisfactoriness in whatever way we can — by changing things “out there.”  By changing the world. 

The idea of control makes up the psychological sea in which each of us swims.

And most of the time we barely notice we’re wet.

Control vs power

Finally, control is very different from power.

The two words are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing.

In some ways, they’re opposites.

One difference is that power is possible, but control is often an illusion.

Another is that power can set you free, while controlling can make you crazy.

Again, control means the ability to edit reality, to get life itself to meet our expectations.  But power (as I use the word) means the ability to get your needs met.  To take care of yourself.  To not just survive, but to heal, grow and be happy.

And as difficult as it may be to attain this sort of power, it’s easier than forcing reality to meet your expectations.

An example of the difference:

Imagine your rich uncle dies suddenly and leaves you control of his multinational corporation.  You wake up one morning the CEO of Big Bucks, Inc.

You go to your new job. You sit behind a huge desk. Four secretaries line up to do your bidding. You have tons of control. You can hire and fire, buy and sell, build plants or close them, approve product lines, mount advertising campaigns, manage investments, bribe congressmen, you name it.

How do you feel?

If you’re like me, you feel crippled by anxiety. Bewildered and overwhelmed by your new responsibilities. Disoriented. Panicked.

Anything but in control.

Now imagine you decide, “To hell with this.  I quit.  I’m going home to eat a sandwich and take a nap.”

How do you feel now?

Notice that in this situation you gain power by giving up control.

Often we seek control when it’s power that we really want and need.  But since we never distinguish the two, we end up chasing the wrong one.  Which can be disastrous.

 As a recovering control addict I’ve learned two essential differences between control and power.

~ Control focuses outward, at other people, places and things. So control-seeking pulls me away from myself, away from self-awareness and self-care.   The more controlling I am, the more I lose touch with me, and the more preccupied I become with my environment.  This leads to worry and frustration and exhaustion and helplessness.   

But power focuses inward, on my own needs, thoughts and feelings.  So developing power is all about developing the ability to know, understand and accept myself.  And this leads to self-awareness and self-acceptance.

~ Control works paradoxically.   People who depend on having control to feel safe and happy don’t feel safe or happy most of the time.  Even when you get control, you can’t keep it for long.  Chasing control is like chasing a train you can never catch.  

Power, though — rooted in healthy, intelligent self-care — is something you really can learn and practice.   Like a muscle which, if you exercise it, grows stronger over time.

The roots of control

So how do we get so confused?  Why do we end up chasing control when what we really need is power?

Part of the answer is what I mentioned above: our big brains.

But another part has to do with the experience of childhood.

Psychoanalyst Alan Wheeler writes, “We all start out weak in the hands of the strong.”  We have no power as kids, no ability to take care of ourselves.  We need big people to feed us and wash us and protect us and comfort us when we’re upset or scared.

And inevitably we use control to make sure they do those things.  

Control is our only weapon against helplessness.  We learn this early on, even before we have language.  We begin to learn it the first time we cry and mom picks us up and feeds us or changes our diaper. 

“Hey,” we realize.  “What I do affects what she does.”

So we begin collecting data about how to get other people to treat us the way we want and not treat us the way we don’t.

We learn thousands of ways. 

Want mom to love you?  Don’t talk back.  Want dad to be proud of you?  Get straight A’s.  Want Teacher’s approval? Do your homework.  Want to avoid being bullied?  Make friends with the tough kid.

This is how kids navigate life.  For a kid, there’s no other way.

That’s why every Plan A is based on control.

Weapon of choice

Of course, at some point we’re supposed to grow up and develop some power.

Supposed to become able to express, take care of, and stand up for ourselves.

But many of us don’t.  Many of us — especially those who’ve been abused, neglected or traumatized — stay stuck in kid mode.

We continue relying on control to get our needs met and to manage relationships.  We keep seeking approval and avoiding rejection.  We hide who we are, bury our real feelings, put on a mask, and try our damnedest to be what we think others want us to be. 

Most of the time we do this without realizing we’re doing it.  It’s our Plan A and it just feels normal. 

But we’re acting, in effect, like kids. 

And if we want to be healthy adults it’s essential to notice that while kids cannot help but fall into controlling, adults have a choice. 

Adults can learn to function more like adults.

Which means learning how to

~ stop controlling what we can’t control anyway,

~ listen to ourselves and use what we hear to make choices,

~ identify and express our feelings,

~ parent the inner Kid inside us (instead of hiding or abusing it),

and

~ be our authentic selves in relationships.

Adults can exchange the kid’s only weapon against helplessness for more effective ways of thinking, feeling and coping.

Adults can develop a Plan B.

***

Steve Hauptman is the author of Monkeytraps: Why Everybody Tries to Control Everything and How We Can Stop (2015), available here, and the forthcoming There I go again: Monkeytraps for Adult Children.

*

The Plan B Talks

I recently began a new group for adult children of alcoholic, narcissistic, abusive, and otherwise dysfunctional families. In this group I’ll be giving a series of talks about how we’re all shaped by our families of origin and what we can do about it.  It’s been suggested that my readers might find these talks useful, so I plan to publish the talk notes here. The series continues with (Talk #3) Tranced: Inner kids & adult children.  Questions and feedback welcome.

***

The child is in me still and sometimes not so still. ~ Fred Rogers

We’ve been talking* about the need to free ourselves from our families of origin in order to grow up emotionally.

We can’t do either without addressing our Inner Kid.

That means we need to acknowledge the Kid, accept it, figure out what it needs from us, and do our best to parent it.

Adults who never learn how to parent the Kid end up feeling permanently kidlike.

The Inner Kid

So what’s the Inner Kid?

Occasionally someone asks me this.

I usually answer, “It’s that part of you where you store unexpressed feelings, unmet needs, unanswered questions and unresolved conflicts.”

Usually they nod.

Not one ever says No, I don’t have one of those.

That might seem odd, given the lack of attention we generally pay to this most secret part of us.

Then again, it doesn’t.

Since we all know we’re damaged or wounded in some way.

The inner kid gives us a language for talking about it.

In my work I tend to encounter each client’s inner Kid in two forms: as the source of that person’s hidden authenticity, and as the source of his or her hidden wounds.

Authenticity

Authentic means real.

The Kid is the source of feeling, honesty, spontaneity, joy, creativity and growth.

Carl Jung wrote,

In every adult there lurks a child, an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education.  That is the part of the human personality which wants to develop and become whole.

Other writers have echoed Jung’s view of the child as the source of all human potential and authenticity:

[The inner child is] that part of each of us which is ultimately alive, energetic, creative and fulfilled; it is our Real Self — who we truly are. (Charles Whitfield)

[The inner child] is who we are when we were born, our core self, our natural personality, with all its talent, instinct, intuition and emotion. (Margaret Paul)

All the people we call ‘geniuses’ are men and women who somehow escaped having to put that curious, wondering child in themselves to sleep. (Barbara Sher)

The most potent muse of all is our own inner child. (Stephen Nachmanovich)

I also think of the Kid as the animal part, the part of us that has healthy instinctual reactions to what it experiences.

Occasionally when a client is trying to make a difficult decision, I’ll suggest they visualize each of the two alternatives they face.  Then I ask “What does your stomach want?”  That’s my way of checking in with the Kid.

Usually the stomach tenses when the person thinks of one alternative and relaxes when they think of the other.  That’s the Kid, voting.

The Kid is that part of us that knows what we really need and isn’t afraid to tell us.

Unfortunately most of us have been trained not to listen.

Wounds

Here’s where the wounds come in.

The inner Kid is the part of us that gets driven underground by socialization – i.e., when we’re trained to live with other people.

It’s the part that gets told

Don’t pee in your pants, use the bathroom,

and

Don’t eat that cookie, it’s almost dinnertime,

and

Stop yelling, you’ll wake your father,

and

Get up, it’s time for school,

and

Don’t you take that tone with me,

and

Don’t cry or I’ll give you something to cry about,

and

Why can’t you be more like your big sister?,

and so on.

Socialization is necessary, of course.  We all have to adapt to our environment in order to survive.

But the process of socialization inevitably creates psychological and emotional wounds.

It basically splits us in two parts: a public part and a private part.  Or more accurately, an adapted part and an authentic part.

This self-splitting is called neurosis, and it’s inescapable.

No one survives childhood without some splitting.

Which means no one survives childhood without accumulating unexpressed feelings, unmet needs, unanswered questions and unresolved conflicts.

And no one avoids carrying these wounds into adulthood.

Adult children

Adult child is a term we use to describe this phenomenon.

In my last talk I defined adult children as people still living according to Plan A – the set of adaptations they developed as children.

Here’s another definition:

Adult children are grownups who still feel like kids inside.

Maybe not all the time, but under stress.

This happens because, under stress, adult children enter the equivalent of a hypnotic trance.

In that trance they forget they’re grownups and experience themselves as the kids they once were – scared, angry, confused, helpless, overwhelmed.

The worse they were wounded as children, the more powerful this trance is.

Anyone who’s ever experienced a panic attack knows what I’m describing.

So does any adult who’s ever felt him- or herself regress to age six in the presence of family members.

These feelings are what R.D. Laing was describing when he said, “We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in infancy.”

To some extent, we are all of us adult children.

Confusion

So why is all this inner Kid/Adult children stuff important?

Because it’s essential to understanding ourselves as adults.

It reminds us of where we came from, and what happened to us there:

~ that we started out helpless, totally dependent on the big people around us.

~ that we had no choice but to adapt to those big people.

~ that this adaptation occurred not just on the surface of our personality, but seeped down to the very core of us.

~ that, like a lie you tell so often you come to believe it’s true, this adaptation came to feel not like something we did but something we are.

~ that as a result it left us confused at the deepest level – confused about who we really are and how to be in the world.

This confusion lies at the root of the most common problems people bring to therapy — anxiety, depression, addictions, unhappy relationships and parenting problems.

I’ve never met anyone who hasn’t suffered from at least one of these.

They all flow from being tranced, from feeling like kids trapped in adult bodies, from having inner Kids we don’t know how to care for and listen to.

Adult health and happiness depend on emerging from the trance, escaping from the defensive prison to which childhood consigned us.

You simply cannot be an emotionally strong and healthy adult so long as you’re carrying around a weak wounded Kid inside.

Or as Carl Jung put it, “Whatever we don’t own, owns us.”

***

Steve Hauptman is the author of Monkeytraps: Why Everybody Tries to Control Everything and How We Can Stop (2015), available here, and the forthcoming There I go again: Monkeytraps for Adult Children.

_______________________________________________________________

* (Talk #1) Three metaphors, and (Talk #2) There I go again: Families and Plan A

______________________________________________________________

Jung, Carl Gustav.  The portable Jung.  Ed Joseph Campbell.  New York: Penguin, 1980.

Nachmanovitch, Stephen.  Free play: Improvisation in life and art.  New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1990.

Paul, Margaret.  Inner bonding: Becoming a loving adult to your inner child.  San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 1992.

Sher, Barbara.  Wishcraft: How to get what you really want.  New York: Viking Press, 1979.

Whitfield, Charles.  Healing the child within: Discovery and recovery for adult childre dysfunctional families.  Pompano Beach, FL: Health Communications, 1987.

x

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The Plan B Talks

I recently began a new group for adult children of alcoholic, narcissistic, abusive, and otherwise dysfunctional families. In this group I’ll be giving a series of talks about how we’re all shaped by our families of origin and what we can do about it.  It’s been suggested that my readers might find these talks useful, so I plan to publish the talk notes here. The series continues with (Talk #2) There I go again: Families & Plan A.  Questions and feedback welcome.

***

*

The family ocean

An old proverb tells us that fish will be the last creatures to discover water.

Makes sense, right?  Water is the only environment fish know.  So to a fish water is simply a given, something to be taken for granted and ignored.

Human beings are like that.

Except the water we take for granted is our family.

By family I don’t mean just the group of people around us when we’re born and raised.

I mean an emotional environment, a way of feeling and perceiving and thinking and acting.  We depend on family not just for our lives and emotional feeding but for our sense of what the world is and how we’re meant to function in it.

Family is the psychological sea in which we swim, the only reality we know.

So we have no choice but to adapt to it and absorb it, to carry it inside us everywhere we go.

And even when what we’ve absorbed causes us problems – makes us unhappy or emotionally sick, for example – we usually don’t think to step back question it.

Since it’s almost impossible to see your family objectively.

Fish roles

If you doubt this, think of how we get defined by our family roles.

Family therapist James Framo writes,

The “family way” of seeing and doing things becomes automatic and unquestioned, like the air one breathes.  [For example,] It is very difficult for anyone, no matter how grown-up or mature, to avoid the family role assignment when he is in the presence of his family.  Whether his role is that of “the quiet one,” “the smart one,” “the slick one,” “the troublemaker,” “father’s protector,” or any one of countless assignments, he will find himself behaving accordingly despite himself. [1]

Try a thought experiment.  Think of your family of origin.  Now ask yourself,

Who was the strong one?

Who was the weak one?

Who was the emotional one?

Who was the unemotional one?

Who was the funny one?

Who was the angry one?

Who was the anxious or insecure one?

Who was the controlling one?

Who got controlled? 

Who was the problem solver?

Who was the problem?

Now try asking yourself

Did I have a role?

What was it?

Do I slip back into it when I’m with my family?

How am I still playing this role somewhere else in my life?

Was I aware of this before now?

For most of us it takes a long time to discover how our family role has defined us – if we ever discover it at all.

Conscious fish

On the other hand, if we’re in recovery from anything – anxiety or depression or addiction or chronically bad relationships or some other emotional problem — sooner or later we begin to suspect that maybe we need to reexamine our family.

That we need to do what Freud originally defined as the goal of psychoanalysis: make the unconscious conscious.

So how do we do that?

How does a fish discover water?

We consciously turn our attention to what we’ve ignored, and to start asking higher level questions about it.

And a good question to start is: What’s my Plan A? 

Plan A

As I said last time, Plan A is my label for everything we learn as children about life and how to live it.

We each have a Plan A.  And we each pretty much learn it in the same place and in the same way.

The place is our family, and the way is unconsciously.

Nobody sits us down at the kitchen table and says, “Listen up.  Here’s how you do Life.”  They just do Life themselves, and we watch and listen and soak it all up like little sponges.  Which explains why our Plan A tends to look so much like that of our family members.

And it works for a while.  Especially while we’re still living in the family.  We’re all following the same unwritten rule book.

But Plan A always breaks down.

It happens when we move beyond the family into the larger world, filled with new people and new challenges.  And we discover that what worked at home doesn’t always work out there.

At which point we have, at least in theory, a choice.

We can tell ourselves, “Oh, I see.  I guess I need a Plan B.”  Or we can tell ourselves, “I must be doing it wrong.  I better work harder at Plan A.”

Guess which we choose?

Right.  Plan A.  Always Plan A.

Two reasons for this.  First, we may not even know there’s such a thing as Plan B.  We think Plan A is just normal.  Why would anyone do Life in any other way?

Second, even when we begin to suspect there are other options, change is scary. 

So we cling to Plan A because it’s familiar.  It may not work great, but we can do it in our sleep.

And we usually keep doing just that until we develop symptoms — anxiety, depression, addictions, communication problems, bad relationships.

Those symptoms are what drive us into therapy.

Seeking, whether we know it not, a Plan B.

Symptoms

In 1983 Janet Woititz published a book titled Adult Children of Alcoholics[2] which contained what came to be known in recovery circles as The Laundry List.

It’s a list of thirteen traits typical of adults who grew up in dysfunctional families.

A dysfunctional family, by the way, is simply one in which the members cannot get their needs met.

And adult children are people still trying to figure out what their Plan A was and which parts of it they need to exchange for something healthier.

If you’d like to be able to notice when you slip into Plan A – to say “Oh, there I go again” instead of reacting unconsciously — the Laundry List is a good place to start.

Below is a revised version.

If you’re an adult child,

1. 1. You guess at what normal is, then try to imitate it.

   2. You have trouble following projects through from beginning to end.

   3. You lie when it would be just as easy to tell the truth.

   4. You judge yourself without mercy.

   5. You have trouble relaxing or having fun.

   6. You take yourself very seriously.

   7. You struggle with intimate relationships.

   8. You over-react to changes beyond your control.

   9. You constantly seek approval and affirmation.

   10. You feel different from other people.

   11. You’re either super responsible or super irresponsible.

   12. You’re extremely loyal, even in the face of evidence that your loyalty is undeserved.

   13. You’re impulsive — i.e., tend to lock yourself into a course of action without thinking through alternatives or consequences.  This creates confusion, self-loathing and loss of control over your environment.  You also spend large amounts of time and energy cleaning up the mess.

If you identify with one or more of these symptoms you may wonder what it means.

I’ll tell you.

It means you’re like me, and everyone else I know.

Because there’s no one on this bus but us fishes.

***

Steve Hauptman is the author of Monkeytraps: Why Everybody Tries to Control Everything and How We Can Stop (2015), available here, and the forthcoming There I go again: Monkeytraps for Adult Children.

____________________________________________________

[1] James Framo, “Symptoms from a Family Transactional Viewpoint,” in Explorations in Marital and Family Therapy (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1982), p. 31.

[2] Adapted from Adult Children of Alcoholics by Janet Woititz (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 1983).

*

The Plan B Talks

I recently began a new group for adult children of alcoholic, narcissistic, abusive, and otherwise dysfunctional families. In this group I’ll be giving a series of talks about how we’re all shaped by our families of origin and what we can do about it.  It’s been suggested that my readers might find these talks useful, so I plan to publish the talk notes here. The series starts today with (Talk #1) Three Metaphors.  Questions and feedback welcome.

***

*

*

Unconsciousness

The first thing a therapist learns is that most people don’t know why they feel what they feel or do what they do.

We think we do, but we don’t.

Once during a lecture Joseph Campbell drew a big circle on a blackboard and then added a tiny notch at the top.  The circle, he said, represents the whole human being, and the notch represents the conscious part.  

The main goal of this group is to expand your notch – to raise your awareness of the forces that shaped you and where your feelings and behavior come from.

We’ll do that by looking at your family of origin and how you were unconsciously conditioned by it to see, feel and act.

Personal

I’ve been trying to expand my own notch for forty years now, and the most important part of that work has involved looking at my family of origin. 

My father was alcoholic and my mother was codependent.  Those two facts shaped my life more than anything. 

They taught me how to see myself and other people.  They taught me how to handle feelings and relationships, cope with stress and perceive the world. 

They also left me with anger, anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, narcissistic tendencies, social anxiety, workaholism, an identification with underdogs, a tendency to self-medicate with sugar, and a compulsion to solve other people’s problems. 

At 69 I’m still trying to understand how all that happened, and to sort out the useful lessons from the unhealthy ones.

It’s the main reason I became a therapist, and the main reason I wanted to do this group.

Three metaphors

In the course of figuring out my own conditioning and helping others figure out theirs I’ve come across three useful metaphors we’ll be using in this group: Plan A, the Inner Kid, and control addiction.

~ Plan A refers to everything you learned as a kid about yourself, other people, feelings, relationships and life itself – all the conclusions, assumptions and rules you absorbed from your environment and your experiences. 

We each have a Plan A, and we each learn it the same way – unconsciously.  We watch and listen to the big people around us and decide that’s how we’re supposed to be.  We also have stressful experiences which force us into certain ways of coping and then, as adults, we revert to those Plan A reactions in times of stress. 

Why is understanding Plan A important? 

Because to the extent we rely on it as adults, we feel like kids inside, and we function in ways that are often outdated, maladaptive and unhealthy. 

Speaking of feeling like kids inside:

~  The Inner Kid refers to the part of you that was forced into hiding when you were powerless.  I think we each have an Inner Kid, and that understanding that helps us understand both ourselves and other people better.

In therapy I tend to think of the Kid as the authentic part – the real you, the part that reflects what you really feel and really need. 

I also think of it as the wounded part — the part that carries all your unmet needs, unexpressed feelings, unresolved conflicts and unhealed wounds. 

Again, I think we each have a Kid which was driven into hiding when we were young, and which gets triggered now when we’re stressed.  And one sign that our Kid is getting triggered is that we become controlling.

~ Control addiction is my favorite explanation for human behavior.  I’ll explain my view of it in more detail later, but here are the basics:

[] Control means the ability to edit reality – to make people, places and things (including ourselves) behave the way we want. 

[] Human beings are hardwired to seek control, mainly as a result of our big brains – brains that remember and project and plan and analyze and worry and obsess – which cannot, in fact, stop doing any of those things.    

[] I believe

~ We’re all addicted to control.     

~ This addiction causes most (maybe all) of our emotional problems.

~ The root of this addiction is the wish to control feelings.

~ There are better ways to handle feelings than control.

I call these the Four Laws of control, and they’re the basis for how I do therapy.

So those are the three metaphors.  I’ll explain each in detail in the weeks to come.

Learning goals

In the description I sent you I said this group would have three goals.  The first had to do with what I hope you’ll learn here:  To help you better understand how childhood issues play out in your current life. 

In the language of the three metaphors, that means figuring out

(a) what your Plan A is and where it came from,

(b) how your Inner Kid functions and what s/he needs, and

(c) what triggers you into compulsive controlling.

Stages

One last note about what we’ll be discussing:

Much of what I’m teaching you will be counterintuitive. 

That means not just that it will be unfamiliar, but that your mind and emotions may well reject it, at least initially.  It just won’t fit your normal ways of perceiving, feeling and acting.  It may even make you uncomfortable.

If that happens, relax.  It’s normal. 

Learning this new view means going through three stages: (a) understanding the idea, (b) accepting the idea, and finally (c) practicing the idea.

Take all the time you need with each stage.

***

Steve Hauptman is the author of Monkeytraps: Why Everybody Tries to Control Everything and How We Can Stop (2015), available here, and the forthcoming There I go again: Monkeytraps for Adult Children.

The person in the grip of an old distress says things that aren’t pertinent, does things that don’t work, fails to cope with the situation, and endures terrible feelings that have nothing to do with the present.

~ Harvey Jackins

(Continued from “Agony.”)

I can only guess, of course, whether someone with whom I am working received inadequate attunement from their mothers.

But occasionally I meet people who make me suspect that might have been the case.

They tend to be people who seem forever at war with their feelings.

Like Alan, a quiet man whose marriage is failing because he’s so disconnected emotionally, who works all day and then goes home to pore over paperwork at his kitchen table, so turned inward that he can barely sustain a conversation in session, and whose frustrated wife complains that “even when he’s there he’s not there.”

Or Bonnie, a chronic people pleaser who always looks tired, seems surrounded by people who discount or abuse her, and who worries constantly about falling back into the suicidal depression which overwhelmed her twenty years ago.

Or Cate, an attractive educated woman who keeps drifting into relationships with emotionally unavailable men, spends months trying to get them to love her, then blames each failure not on the man but on her own unworthiness.

And Dustin, a recovering alcoholic stuck in a ten-year affair with a married woman who gives him less and less time and attention, but whom he refuses to leave because “she’s the only woman who’s ever made me feel like someone loved me.”

Harvey Jackins’ phrase —

endures terrible feelings that have nothing to do with the present

— is a perfect description of each of these people.

Each is trapped in what I’ve called the Kid Trance: an emotional life dominated by how they felt when they were helpless children.

The Trance is an agonizing place to live.

Its defining characteristic is a tendency to perceive and treat ourselves as we were perceived and treated by our parents.  If they abused or neglected or judged us, we abuse or neglect or judge ourselves. 

And if our parents had no clue about how to deal with difficult feelings, we too are left essentially clueless.

What we do, then, is retreat into the ways of coping we discovered as children. 

We may disconnect and distract ourselves from feelings, like Alan.  Or exhaust ourselves trying to win love and emotional feeding, like Bonnie and Cate.  Or cling desperately to someone we think capable of meeting our emotional needs, like Dustin.

There’s another reason the Trance is agonizing: shame.

Psychologist Russell Carr writes,

In the absence of a sustaining relational home where feelings can be verbalized, understood and held, emotional pain can become a source of unbearable shame and self-loathing.

Whether it comes from being actively discouraged from identifying and expressing feelings (Big boys don’t cry) or from lacking a model for even noticing them, the inability to process feelings cannot help but leave us feeling flawed, broken, inadequate, and cut off from other human beings. 

Why cut off?

Because, in our shame, we won’t see relationship as a safe place in which to feel or reveal ourselves.

We may not even believe in the possibility of what Carr calls a sustaining relational home.

And this is one serious wound.

“Trauma is a basic fact of life,” writes Mark Epstein.

It is not just an occasional thing that happens to some people; it is there all the time.  Things are always slipping away….  The healthy attachment of a baby to a “good-enough” parent facilitates a comfort with emotional experience that makes the challenges of adult life and adult intimacy less intimidating.

Relationship is the adult’s secret weapon for handling such challenges, a life jacket to keep us afloat, a safe harbor to which we can retreat from storms. 

Without it we can’t help but feel adrift, vulnerable to emotional waves that threaten to drown us, “traumatizing us again and again as we find ourselves enacting a pain we do not understand”(Epstein).

And with no life jacket or safe harbor available to us, we have no choice but to turn to the illusion of control.   

________________________

Russell Carr is quoted by Epstein (see below).

Mark Epstein.  The trauma of everyday life.  New York: Penguin, 2013.

Harvey Jackins is quoted by John Bradshaw, in Homecoming: Reclaiming and championing your inner child.  New York: Bantam, 1990.

.

There is no cell of our body that does not have a wounded child in it.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

There is another kind of unfinished emotional business which predates the kind I just described (see “Shit”) and prevents us from feeling and functioning like grownups. 

It is rooted in the way our mothers responded to us when we were infants.

Mark Epstein explains it in his book The trauma of everyday life (Penguin, 2013), drawing on the seminal work of British child analyst D.W. Winnicott.

Here’s a simplified version of his explanation:

One of the most important jobs a mother has is to teach her child how to identify and handle feelings.  She does this by modeling a combination of empathy (Oh, you’re having a feeling) and reassurance (Everything will be fine).  Anyone who spends any time observing mothers with their children sees this happen over and over. 

Oh, you’re wet and uncomfortable?  Here, let’s get you changed. 

Oh, you’re hungry?  Let’s warm up your bottle. 

Oh, you hurt yourself?  Here, let mama kiss it.  

And so on.  This ability to pay attention to and respond appropriately to the infant’s emotional experience is called attunement.

“In this state,” Winnicott writes,

mothers become able to put themselves into the infant’s shoes, so to speak.  That is to say, they develop an amazing capacity for identification with the baby, and this makes them able to meet the basic needs of the infant in a way that no machine can imitate, and no teaching can reach.     

Mom’s attunement is essential to the infant because it models for the child how to attune to itself.  The basic message is Here’s what you do with a feeling: You respect it.  You pay attention to it.  You figure out what it’s telling you, and you respond.

Attunement provides a kind of emotional container — an experience of holding, attention and safety — which the infant absorbs and, eventually, learns to provide for him/herself.  

But what if the mother is unable to attune to her infant? 

What if something else is occupying her attention or draining her energy?  What if she is exhausted, or sick, or depressed, or frightened, or angry, or being abused, or self-medicating with some substance?

“An infant who is held well enough is quite a different thing from one who has not been held well enough,” writes Winnicott.

You see two infants: one has been held…well enough, and there is nothing to prevent a rapid emotional growth, according to inborn tendencies.  The other has not had the experience of being held well and growth has had to be distorted and delayed, and some degree of primitive agony has to be carried on into life and living.

What Winnicott calls primitive agony is the experience of being left all alone to deal with incomprehensible and uncontrollable feelings.

This is not an experience that simply drains away over time.

Instead those afflicted carry it into adulthood, as I understand it, in two forms.

One form is a chronic background anxiety, which occasionally erupts as a fear of breaking down, “losing it,” going crazy.

The other form is an inability to deal healthily with their own feelings.

(To be continued.)

________________________

Mark Epstein.  The trauma of everyday life.  New York: Penguin, 2013.

Thich Nhat Hanh.  Reconciliation: Healing the inner child.  Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2010.

D.W. Winnicott.  Babies and their mothers.  Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1988.

Whatever we don’t own, owns us.

~ Carl Jung

.

Among recovering people, and in the lexicon of nearly every therapist I know, the single most common word used to describe unfinished emotional business is shit.

Not surprising.  It’s a good metaphor.

Consider:

Actual shit is a waste product, what’s left undigested after our systems process nourishment.

Emotional shit is what’s left undigested after human beings process (or can’t process) emotional experiences.

Actual shit is smelly and unpleasant.  So is emotional shit.

Actual shit, when it collects inside you, makes you very uncomfortable.  So does emotional shit.

Releasing actual shit is an enormous relief.  Ditto the emotional version.

The biggest difference between them is that most people instinctually know what to do with actual shit.

They know they need to expel it from the body on a regular basis.  And they know that if they don’t they’ll get sick.

But many people don’t know that about emotional shit.  They think the way to handle it is to hide it, keep it inside, store it up.

Then they don’t understand why they go around feeling shitty.

They’re emotionally constipated.

Constipation produces all sorts of symptoms, like anxiety and depression and anger and addiction.  Also high blood pressure, headaches, backaches, gastrointestinal distress and exhaustion.  Also arguments and violence and child abuse and divorce.

What has this all to do with what I call the inner Kid?

Because this is the main way inner Kids gets wounded.

We’re not born constipated.  We’re born healthy little animals, able to trust what our bodies tell us and automatically expel waste products.  Then in childhood we begin hearing messages like Quiet down and Big boys don’t cry or Don’t cry or I’ll give you something to cry about.  Surrounded by giants on whom we depend for food, shelter, love and security, we have no choice but to follow such instructions.

Voila.  Constipation.

And why, exactly, does emotional constipation make us feel shitty?

“When feelings are denied or kept inside there is typically a buildup of physical tension,” Paul Foxman explains.

An accumulation of such pressure leads to anxiety, due to fears of losing control emotionally.  That condition also triggers anxiety because of its physiological similarity to the fight/flight response, which is normally associated with danger.  Thus our personality creates a paradox in which we deny feelings to prevent anxiety but experience anxiety when we deny our feelings.

One more consequence of constipation is worth noting:

It makes it impossible to feel like an adult.

Being adult means being strong and healthy enough to be yourself.   That includes being able to notice your feelings, even the smelly ones, and take responsibility instead of hiding them.  Taking responsibility means learning to express feelings in appropriate ways, ways that leaving you feeling stronger, not constipated.

Hiding feelings is what kids do.  So no matter how old we are, to the extent we feel compelled to hide our feelings from others, we are going to feel like kids inside.

Adults can, in the jargon of recovery, own their shit.

There’s more to adulthood than this one ability, of course.  Owning your shit doesn’t automatically make you a grownup. 

But you can’t start growing up until you start owning your shit.   

_______________________________

Foxman, Paul.  Dancing with fear: Overcoming anxiety in a world of stress and uncertainty.  Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996.

All of us start out weak in the hands of the strong.

~ Allen Wheelis

So why is understanding the Kid part so essential to understanding ourselves as adults?

Because it reminds us of where we came from, and what happened to us there.

It reminds us that we started out helpless, totally dependent on the big people around us.

That we had no choice about adapting to those big people.

That this adaptation occurred not just on the surface of our personality, but seeped down to the very core of us.

That, like a lie you tell so often you come to believe it’s true, this adaptation came to feel not like something we did but something we are.

In other words, that it left us confused at the deepest level.

“We are hypnotized from infancy,” writes Willis Harmon.  “We do not perceive ourselves and the world about us as they are but as we have been persuaded to see them.”

“Nearly all human activity is programmed by an ongoing script dating from early childhood,” is how Eric Berne puts it.

“We build up our selves out of our defenses but then come to be imprisoned by them,” Mark Epstein explains.  “This leaves us feeling dissatisfied, irritable, and cut off.  In our misguided attempts to become more self-assured, we tend to build up our defenses even more, rather than disentangling ourselves from them.”

That last quote points to the main reason we need to understand the Kid part of us:

Until we do, we can’t understand how we — or people we care about — get emotionally sick.

By sick I mean afflicted with the most common symptoms people bring to therapy: anxiety, depression, addictions, unhappy relationships and parenting problems.

I’ve never met anyone who hasn’t suffered from at least one of these.

They all flow from the childhood adaptation I’m talking about, one which splits us into two selves — one public, one private — and starts a war between them.

This self-splitting is called neurosis, and I’ll say more about it later.

Here it’s enough to point out what should be obvious: that a personality at war with itself is unlikely to be a very healthy or happy one.

Adult health and happiness depend on rewriting the script, emerging from the trance, and escaping from the defensive prison to which childhood consigned us.

You simply cannot be an emotionally strong adult so long as you’re carrying around a weak wounded Kid inside.

Or as Carl Jung put it, “Whatever we don’t own, owns us.”

___________

Berne, Eric.  Quoted in James, Muriel & Dorothy Jongeward. Born to win: Transactional analysis with Gestalt experiments.  Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1971.

Epstein, Mark.  Going to pieces wihtout falling apart: A Buddhist perspective on wholeness.  New York: Broadway Books, 1998.

Harmon, Willis.  Old wine in new wineskins.  In Challenges of humanistic psychology, ed. J. Bugental.  New York: Magraw-Hill, 1967.

Jung, Carl Gustav.  The portable Jung.  Ed Joseph Campbell.  New York: Penguin, 1980.

Wheelis, Allen.  The path not taken: Reflections on power and fear.  New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990.