EveningRose

I thought that many of you might be interested in this blog:

House of Mirrors: The Aftershock Of Narcissistic Abuse

I think many, if not all of these things apply to us as adult children of alcoholic families. In the sidebar is a link to another blog post about the narcissistic family destroying the name and character of their victims. I think this also probably applies to many of us.

I've certainly seen it in action. I hear from people at my church the things being said about me, and my own children are being sucked into the sickness.

DesertEyes

Thank you for posting this blog. It's always good to see different perspectives on dysfunction. As an ACoA I spend most of my recovery in the "trees" of healing. This kind of blog gives me a contrast to other forms of dysfunction, and therefore a view of the "forest".

Mike

EveningRose

I would love to hear more about what you mean by the 'trees' of healing.

DesertEyes

By "Forest and trees" I mean that I spend most of my recovery time focused on the details of my own ACoA issues ( ""the trees" ). When I go to meetings, or read material, or chat with other peeps in recovery, I am thinking about my own reactions to the world and how they have been influenced by the survival reflexes" I developed as a child in an alcoholic home.

Sometimes I loose track of the "big picture" of recovery. It is the "dysfunction", or "toxic" behavior of my biological parents that caused the damage to my life skills. Not the drinking. When I learn about the recovery of people, such as in the blog you posted, who were raised in non-alcoholic families I see that the effects were not that different.

In turn, that helps me find additional techniques and skills that I can adapt to my own needs. The damage to us kids in a toxic family, as was discovered by Claudia Black and the early ACoA pioneers, is not in what was _done_ to us by drunks, or narcisists. It is what was _not_ done for us. We were not given love, direction, role models, or any guidance as to how to become adults. Looking at other types of toxic families helps me see this distinction.

Mike

EveningRose

Thank you, Mike. Great post.

I've done more reading today--well, tried to--on narcissistic families, and how they can operate much like cults. I've had trouble reading because I'm looking for the answer to how to disentangle my kids from this dysfunction, and I see nothing on that.

But what little I manage to get into my brain, I see the narcissistic families described are even more like my family than what I see here (although what I see here is also remarkably like my own experience.)

And yes, I agree, there is a great deal of overlap and much to be learned from all sorts of dysfunctional families. I have often wondered if Tolstoy got it completely backwards when he said: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. It seems to me there's so much similarity in all these unhappy families, regardless of whether it's alcohol, drugs, narcissism, or what have you.

But I suppose it's neither here nor there. What matters is how we deal with this hand we've been dealt.

silentrun

That was a great article. I liked how she drew the comparison with high control groups. There is a kind of breaking down the individual and replacing it with a new persona that fulfills a role. The conditional love (or unattainable love) to get the child constantly reaching for something they can never gain is the same. I still blame the group I grew up in for what my mother has become. I have a really hard time holding her responsible. It doesn't matter much anymore; it just is.

Dysfunctional families do tend to crank out the same role players no matter the dysfunction.

Spacegoat

TY I really needed to read the article tonight. I feel sad.

Not confused, not sorry for others, not hopeful, just sad.