Although twelve-step recovery is a process that encompasses consistent meeting attendance, service, sponsorship, and an effort to achieve spirituality, its cornerstone is sharing experience, strength, and hope. It is a multi-directional dynamic that allows the person to tell their own story, sheds light on the story of others, and allows God or a Higher Power to lift and dissolve obstacles that resulted from dysfunctional and potentially abusive alcoholic or paraalcoholic parenting. .
As a common thread, unknowingly adopted survival traits, such as people-likes, fear of intimacy, and isolation, that the rewired brain created to endure as an adult what it believes would be similar circumstances to those experienced as a child, suture twelve steps. gather members. Paradoxically, their weaknesses become the very strengths that unite them, as evidenced by their shared experiences, strengths, and hopes. While the causes of dysfunction may vary, its effects are the same, leading to mutual identification, regardless of age, education, and lifestyle.
“Adult children of all stripes identify with one another to a degree of neglect, shame, and abuse like no other group of people…” according to the textbook “Adult Children of Alcoholics” (World Service Organization, 2006, p.xiv). “Every day, recovery from the effects of family dysfunction begins somewhere in the world as one adult child sits across from another, sharing experiences, strength and hope.”
The experience is cathartic. It brings clarity, understanding, and insight, and shares the pain and burden of all involved, actually relieving them. He emanates from one, but eventually reaches others, as expressed in the first line of the Al-Anon/Alateen creed, which reads, “Let it begin with me.” “The cure,” as one saying goes, “is in the audience.” And with that audience comes acceptance without judgment.
“(People at meetings) offered me an encouraging hug instead of telling me to get in shape,” one member expressed in Al-Anon’s “Hope for Today” text (Al-Anon Family Group Headquarters, Inc., 2002, p.31). “Instead of rejecting me for being different, they showed me how alike we are by sharing their experience, strength, and hope. Through these kinds of healthy human encounters, I began to feel a bond with other members.”
Recounting the experience is like slowly removing the hermetic stopper from a bottle that, at times, became intolerable to contain and seemed imminent to burst, but in a safe, stable and welcoming place. Break the silence, denial, and family secrets that ensured the indisputable perpetuation of the disease of dysfunction and alcoholism.
“Something wonderful happens when an adult child talks to another adult child, sharing experiences, strength, and hope,” advises the textbook “Adult Children of Alcoholics” (op. cit., p. 117). “Both are helped, and the recovery message experiences a heartbeat.”
Despite the fact that adult children often see themselves as weak and therefore have little self-confidence and esteem, they were actually forced to dig deep within themselves and find an enormous amount of strength. to survive that upbringing and then adjust and adopt to function in a world they thought approximated the one they came from, that is, their original homes. However, by facing their feelings and fears in recovery rooms, while struggling with the past that has warped and distorted their present, they become part of a collective, like-minded effort that produces strength.
“By allowing time for others to tell their stories, we forge a stronger unified support for each other than any of us can provide alone,” continues “Hope for Today” (op. cit., p. 66). “We learn to let the corrective support of the group sustain us.”
With help comes hope. Isolated, in silent denial, and mired in quicksand, an unrecovered adult child often loses hope of any kind of improvement in an illness she can’t identify. But the meetings, the members, the work of the program, and a gradual connection to a Higher Power, even if only seen as a concept at first in the beginning of recovery, provide light at the end of a long, dark, and polite tunnel: a way to regain understanding, clarity, stability. sanity and wholeness. After all, there may be hope for him, you can conclude.
“Hearing another person’s message of recovery and hope kindles the faint spark of vitality we keep buried within,” concludes the textbook “Adult Children of Alcoholics” (op. cit., p. 359). “We realize that there is a sensible model of life that can replace the crazy model we learned in childhood.”
As a selfless act, sharing experience, strength, and hope bares the soul, creates a necessary vulnerability, and exposes a past that distorts the present, helping both the person and everyone else through a kindred-spirit connection.
article sources
“Adult Children of Alcoholics”. Torrance, California: World Service Organization, 2006.
“Hope for Today”. Virginia, Beach, Virginia: Headquarters of Al-Anon Family Group, Inc., 2002.