Originally Posted by
grewupinabarn 
.... .Does the ACOA have this weird learned behavior of .... .
yes to all of the above
The way it works for me is that my emotions come in a bowl of soup. I _never_ get just one solitary emotion, I get a whole kettle full of them. Boiling, stirred up and ready to serve. Naturally, having been raised in a kettle full of dysfunctional people I have no idea which emotion is which. I get them all confused and sometimes think that empathy is love or that fear is anger.
My recovery from that toxic childhood consists of learning to separate my emotoins into their separate parts, give them names, and figuring out positive ways of dealing with them. Kinda like a 5 yr old picking the carrots out of the stew
Originally Posted by
grewupinabarn .... I am stumbling back and forth between steps 1 and 5, trying to come up with an altogether overly thorough and detailed list of my faults. ..... .
yeah that never worked for me. What _did_ work was to _not_ make a list of my faults. Instead, I made a list of my character _traits_ and the _actions_ that I take based on those traits. For example.
I have the character trait of "empathy". Bucketloads of it. If I allow that empathy to guide me into doing things for other that they are unable to do for themselves then I am showing "kindness". Like when I put together a clown troupe in college and we took the show to the childrens wards in local hospitals. If I allow that same "empathy" to guide me into doing for others what _I_ think they should be doing for their own good then it's called "enabling". Like when I tried to control my pill-addicts wife intake of drugs.
For each of those actions I listed my motives; what I expected to gain from my behavior. If I expect to gain _nothing_, then it is a virtue and I should do more of it. If I expect to gain _anything_, then it is a defect and I should go to more meetings of al-anon.
By writing all down on paper, and sharing it with a good sponsor, I was able to start the process of unraveling the spaghetti pile of emotions and reactions that was forced upon me as a child. One emotion at a time I have been able to tease it appart and understand what it is I feel and how to handle it.
Not that I'm perfect. I still get stuck in the spaghetti pile from time to time. But it's become much easier and faster to clean up the mess and get back to living a life that is happy, joyous and free.
Mike
