Adult Children of Family Dysfunction: The Problem and Solution

Do you feel isolated, uneasy with other people, especially authority figures? To protect yourself, are you a people pleaser, even though you lose your own identity in the process?
We either become alcoholics or married them or both. Failing that, we found another compulsive personality, such as a workaholic, to fulfill our sick need for abandonment.

The Problem
 We guess what is normal.
 We have difficulty following a project through, from beginning to end.
 We lie when it would be just as easy to tell the truth
 We judge ourselves without mercy.
 We have difficulty having fun
 We take ourselves very seriously
 We have difficulty with relationships
 We over-react to changes over which we have no control
 We constantly seek approval and affirmation
 We are either super responsible or super irresponsible
 We are extremely loyal even in the face of evidence that the loyalty is undeserved
 We look for immediate rather than deferred gratification
 We lock ourselves into a course of action without giving serious consideration to alternate behaviors or possible consequences
 We seek tension and crisis and then complain about the results
 We avoid conflict or aggravate it; rarely do we deal with it
 We fear rejection and abandonment, yet are rejecting of others
 We fear failure, but sabotage our success
 We fear criticism and judgment, yet criticize and judge others
 We manage time poorly and do not set priorities in a way that works well for us

The Solution
The solution is to become your own loving parent
 Find the freedom to express all the hurts and fears kept inside and gain freedom from the shame and blame carried over from the past
 Become an adult who was no longer imprisoned by childhood reactions
 Recover the child within us, learning to accept and love our-selves
 Move out the isolation
 Rediscover feelings and buried memories
 Gradually release the burden of unexpressed grief; slowly move out of the past
 Learn to re-parent ourselves with gentleness, humor, love and respect
 Learn to see our biological parents as the instruments of our existence
 Trust that our actual parent is the Higher Power, Jesus Christ. Although we had dysfunctional/alcoholic parents, our Higher Power gave us the eight Principles of Recovery  Receive experience, strength and hope to others
 Restructure sick thinking one day at a time
 Release our parents from responsibility for our actions today
 Become free to make healthful decisions as actors, not reactors
 Progress from hurting to healing to helping
 Awaken a sense of wholeness we knew was possible
 Come to see parental dysfunction for what it is and know how that affected us as a child and continues to affect us as an adult
 Learn to keep the focus on ourselves in the here and now
 Take responsibility for our own life and supply our own par-enting
 See beautiful changes in all our relationships, especially with God, ourselves and our parents.