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Post by Susan Peabody on Mar 14, 2015 8:55:25 GMT -8
I tried for 28 years to help my family heal based on what I was learning about myself in recoveery. When my mom was dying my sister asked me to leave because she said, "Mom did not like you because all you did was try to fix her." I stayed but the family never really healed. So sometimes you do have to let go. Other times you can find a middle ground with strong boundaries. This is not something we should generalize about. To each his own. If I had to do it all over again I would just be a role model for them instead of trying to hard to fix them. We all dream about being the Brady Bunch. But not all our dreams come true and many of us end up survivors. You guys are my family now.
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Post by Susan Peabody on Mar 14, 2015 9:08:03 GMT -8
For a long time all we had was the "identified patient." The alcoholic for instance. Virginia Satir, of Berkeley, introduced us to the family unit being dysfunctional not just the alcoholic. Soon after Claudia Black wrote about growing up in an alcoholic home. A flood of books followed identifying what we now call the dysfunctional family. Bradshaw is a tedious writer, but his books have all the facts. He identifies the roles each family member plays in order to keep the family from falling apart. I was both the "hero" taking over the care of the family when my mother got hooked on sedatives, and the scapegoat, the problem child that the family blames for all their problems.
Google "dysfunctional families" to find shorter articles about all this.
If you grew up in a dysfunctional home, then you adopted coping skills early on. Mine were sugar, food, romantic fantasies and masturbation. I call this childhood coping mechanisms. When you are older you develop adult coping skills, i.e. alcohol and drugs. Many of these become liabilities and evolve into anything from bad habits to addictions.
I believe in going to the root of the problem, so early in recovery, after working the twelve steps, I went into psychodynamic therapy. It helped me to learn what happened in my early life. Things I could not remember. I discuss this in my book, The Art of Changing. I did not just vent in therapy, I analyzed my dreams and Freudian Slips. I dug up what was buried in my subconscious. I like the analogy of busting through the floor of an upstairs apartment and seeing once and for all what is going on down stairs. For me it was chaos, depression, fear and anger. They were all linked to certain events. As I began to remember the events I could break the bond between the trauma and the feelings, releasing me slowly from emotions bubbling up out of nowhere in my current life. The biggest one was anger.
15 Signs You Come From A Dysfunctional Family By Zach Schwartz
1. It’s been years since your parents slept in the same bed. 2. Family vacations were rarely enjoyable and always full of fighting. In fact, some of the worst fights your family ever had were during vacation.
3. You’ve said something, or multiple things, to someone in your family and in retrospect, you’re ashamed of how hurtful they were. You regret that you’ll never be able to fully take them back.
4. When people tell you that you’re like your mom or dad, you get upset and hope that it isn’t true. In many ways—and it makes you sad to admit it—they’re exactly what you don’t want to be like when you’re older.
5. You long to be in supportive, loving, and monogamous romantic relationships, perhaps to compensate for the stability you lacked growing up.
6. You related to others who had dysfunctional families—people with drug addicts in their families, divorced parents, etc.
7. You rarely brought friends to your house growing up, because of the fighting going on, the cleanliness of the house, etc.
8. To a degree, your close friends feel like your family. You love being in tight-knit social groups: your guy friends feeling like your brothers, your girl friends feeling like your sisters, etc.
9. You felt envious of the friends of yours that had “good” families in which their parents were kind, chill, and supportive.
10. You became introverted and shy because of the constant conflict around you.
11. You seem to want and enjoy sex more than the average person.
12. You don’t want to live in the same city you grew up in.
13. You tried to get out of your house as much as you could, often to do “bad” things that you know your parents would have disapproved of.
14. It was hard for you to do drugs growing up because getting too high would make you think about your family and how f**ked up it was, which might give you an anxiety attack.
15. You often think about how you’re not going to make the mistakes of your parents, that you’re going to marry someone you truly love, and that you’re going to be a great mom or dad to your kids—if, not when, you end up having them.
 
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Post by ~w~ on Mar 15, 2015 23:01:08 GMT -8
From number 4all the answers Mach, my escape root were food, alcohol ,compulsive sex from 17th, depression, somatic pains, headaches went to hospitals for that, vegetodistonia , suicide attempt with bf ( attention seeking), running away to club knowing we get grounded, romantic relationships and fantasies ,books, movies.
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Post by ~w~ on Mar 15, 2015 23:12:15 GMT -8
Masturbation was tabu and feel very ashamed about I still. When In relationship till I was 33 I did not even like sex, later on it was great. Used to each porn (stepdad video tapes) , think that sex is love. Feeling ashamed and depressed off having sex whiles drunk, but never cheated in relationship. Been sober from it for 4 mnth . Substitute :masturbatin, fantasy over poa.  ((((
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Post by Susan Peabody on Mar 17, 2015 12:08:17 GMT -8
Masturbation in moderation is healthy. It can, sometimes, become sex addiction. Shame for masturbation in moderation has to go. This outdated notion resides in your unconscious, in where Eric Berne, calls the Parent Tape, what I call the "inner critic."  
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