I'm very grateful for all your patient responses to the questions,
projections, harangues and pontifications of a nascent facilitator in basic
training.
Now I face a cyber dilemma. I would like to answer individually all the
responses --- but in reading them all, I've been able to synthesize some more
new
insights and realizations which, of course, raise even more questions, so
I'd like to forge ahead with those.
The first involves Bert's important distinction between merely ACCEPTING
one's parents and actually TAKING them as they are. Things became clearer to
me
once I read Bert's distinction between acceptance and taking in the little
book _Acknowledging What Is_. On page 93, he states:
"I differentiate very carefully between accepting and taking. Accepting is
gracious and tolerant. When I take, I take whatever is available, exactly as
it is. This kind of taking is humble and acknowledges the parents as they
are."
Then he speaks of two extremes in not taking your parents as they are:
either we
(1) admire and/or idealize them;
or we (2) condemn them.
Acknowledging these polar opposite imbalances in my own family system, I
can really see now that I used to graciously and tolerantly ACCEPT my parents
IN SPITE of their shortcomings. Sometimes I would sentimentally romanticize
them; other times, I would angrily condemn them and wish I had better parents.
However, as I got older, I developed a greater TOLERANCE of them, and indeed
that tolerance actually became more refined and thus GRACIOUS.
But such gracious tolerance I realize now was actually my wallowing in my
own "special pain" of reaction against my parents (false or secondary
compassion) as opposed to choosing to go beyond my pain to begin to feel their
pain
(true or primary compassion)
Then on the top of page 94, Bert spoke the single sentence that blew my
guilt-tripping, self-pitying, Narcissistic tolerance program to kingdom come.
In
answering a question about a child having difficulties because of an
alcoholic father, he said:
"If the child feels pain in having an alcoholic for a father, then the
father can't be taken!"
Oh my God, the father can't be taken. BUT the father may be ACCEPTED!!! And
what is Stage 5 in the process of grieving? Acceptance! (The soul plot now
thickens with Hellinger corn starch!)
Could it be, this naive Parsifalian New Age Narcissistic Flying Boy asks
himself, could it be that all this time, when loving and sincere people
describe
going through their Stages of Grief, from (1) Denial to (2) Anger to (3)
Bargaining to (4) Depression, to arrive at (5) Acceptance that they may still
be
nursing and carrying the pain of whomever or whatever caused their grief?
Could they actually be still as fully entangled now with their family system
as
they were before the grief event occurred? Because Acceptance does not
necessarily imply Taking? Indeed Accepting may actually be the final scrim of
Denial, Acceptance as a veritable psychic Iron Curtain which blocks out the
true Taking of one's parents as they are.
And now back to the alcoholic father, suppose he decided to break the
addiction and he joins AA and goes to meetings where he identifies his very
being
with the substance? "Hello, my name is Joe and I'm an alcoholic." Yes, it's
wonderful that he no longer drinks, but isn't he merely "trading up" on his
addiction, moving from addiction to an actual substance to addiction to the
recovery process? By identifying his sacred "I am" with being an alcoholic, is
he not then admitting his new codependent addiction to the group recovery
process, which never ends in this lifetime? Whatever caused his alcoholism in
the first place is still there in his soul; those family entanglements and
childhood shock/trauma events have not been touched by the recovery process,
have they?
Now consider the adult son of this man, the ACOA (Adult Child of an
Alcoholic) nurturing his special pain in reaction to his own father's
drinking, and
his reaction to his mother's disapproval of father's drinking. How
self-righteously, he might become so TOLERANT of them in spite of his
specially
crafted self-righteous anger against them, which he might feel as an actual
ENTITLEMENT! How graciously he might even refine that tolerance and become
even
more graciously tolerant of them as he gets older. HIS suffering and HIS
guilt
over HIS suffering eclipses entirely his parents' suffering.
The son might even play all 4 archetypal roles of the ACOA (Adult Children
of Alcoholics):
(1) the HERO to achieve intellectual/academic/business/athletic greatness
for the family;
(2) the REBEL who carries the family burdens and acts out the excluded
Shadow of the system by criminal behavior or simply abandons the family to
siphon
the pain off as exiled scapegoat.
(3) the MASCOT might show up, the comic, the coyote trickster, the serious
Rodney Dangerfield self-abuser & jolly life-saboteur; or
(4) the LOST CHILD, ever wallowing in more elaborate escapist fantasies, the
"inner rebel" as it were, who self-immolates in the soul, and becomes like
the family system "ghost" who becomes literally haunted by the systemic
burdens?
Finally, does anything I've written above about the description of the
issues, codependency, enabling, scripting, etc., have any relevance whatsoever
to
the monumental existential deed of Taking of one's parents (or family system)
as they are and simply carrying one's guilt and grief with the dignity of
actual compassion instead of indulging forever in the "alcohol" of self-pity?
Thomas
