Reduce False-self Wounds - p. 1 of 5

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The Web address of this five-page article is http://sfhelp.org/gwc/recover.htm

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        This is one of a  series of articles on Lesson 1 in this Web site - free your true Self to guide you in calm and conflictual times, and reduce significant false-self wounds. This page...

• offers perspective on psychological-wound reduction;

• defines "wound reduction," and outlines its two phases and main goals,

• summarizes what's required for effective recovery and...

• overviews the wounding-phase of recovery.

The next four pages outline typical wound-recovery goals, pseudo recovery, types of recovery help, signs of progress, and seven recovery themes.

         This article assumes you're familiar with....

the intro to this nonprofit site and the premises underlying it self-study Lesson 1 the silent [wounds + ignorance] cycle that probably affects your family overviews of Grown Wounded Children (GWCs), and typical wound-effects, this example of a real wounded nuclear stepfamily, and...  this 3-minute thought-provoking clip "The Dash," by Linda Ellis.

Perspective

        Premise - young kids raised in low-nurturance homes survive by automatically forming a protective group of personality subselves - a "false self." False-self dominance causes up to five other significant psychological wounds.

        Until these wounds are acknowledged and significantly reduced, they combine with unawareness and other factors to cause major relationship, occupational, and health problems - including divorces. This site calls adults controlled by a false self Grown Wounded Children (GWCs). The media calls us Adult Children of toxic parents or of dysfunctional (low-nurturance) families.

       Since 1981, I've spent over 17,000 hours consulting with over 1,000 troubled women, men, and some of their kids. My experience is that well over 80% of them didn't  know that a false self was causing their problems and wounding their dependent kids. Restated: these typical adults were unaware of the [wounds + unawareness] cycle that they inherited and were unintentionally passing on to their descen-dents.

        Unseen false-self wounds and four other hazards put typical adults at risk of making three unwise commitment choices and eventually divorcing psychologically or legally. The first six lessons in this self-study course provide practical options to avoid these commitment mistakes.

       This five-page article overviews personal recovery from false-self wounds. I've been recovering from the wounds since 1986. , and have released major fears, shame, and guilt. True (vs. pseudo) wound-reco-very has made a major positive difference in my life, as I observe it to do in many other self-motivated people.

        My clinical work with scores of courageous GWCs in their own recoveries suggests that my re- covery experiences are common. I've benefited from studying and integrating the works of over two dozen veteran therapists and researchers focused on understanding, healing, and preventing these pervasive, crippling psychological wounds.

       Web-site constraints force this article to be a skeleton overview. For much more detail on recovery from false-self wounds, see the Lesson-1 guidebook "Who's Really Running Your Life? Free your Self from custody, and guard your kids" (2nd edition - Xlibris.com, 2002). It integrates the key Web articles in this keystone Lesson.

  What Is Wound-recovery?

       It is a multi-year, two-phase, mental + psychological + spiritual + social process. The two phases are:

Wounding: personality subselves evolve automatically in order to survive early-childhood neglect and abuse. This phase spans several decades of accumulating intolerable pain and weariness, and ineffective attempts to deny, ignore, and relieve these.

        Some wounded people eventually hit bottom and break their life-long denials. This usually happens in mid-life. Many other people endure years of unhappiness, wound their kids, and die prematurely without ever knowing their recovery options. Hitting true (vs. pseu- do) bottom triggers...

Wound-reduction ("Recovery"):

• years of increasing self-awareness and knowledge, which promote...

• major permanent changes in key attitudes, values, behaviors, and relationships. The changes include...

• learning how to identify and grieve many major losses (broken bonds) from early childhood through the present - i.e. learning how and why to free up blocked grief..

        True (vs. pseudo ) wound-recovery involves recognizing and freeing the innately wise, resident true Self to reorganize other reactive, distrustful personality subselves into a cooperative team working toward clear, long-term personal goals. Part of this process involves seeking and accepting human and spiritual help, and stabilizing control of any addictions (maintaining "sobriety.")

        The recovery process is complex, painful, confusing, scary, freeing, exhilarating, and literally life- changing. Every personality and profile of wounds is unique, so there is no absolute "right way" to re- cover. Seven themes of true recovery (p. 5) appear universal, but the details vary richly.

Requisites for Effective Recovery

        Though each person recovers in their own way, the healing process seems to require these com- mon factors...

§  Awareness – wanting to become habitually conscious of...

• what I think, feel, and need now; and...

• how I behave in various situations now and over time.

Evolving self-awareness inevitably promotes more awareness of these factors in other people. This helps in choosing a pro-recovery environments and communicating effectively with other people;
 

§  Knowledge and life experience – recoverers need to...

• evolve a clear understanding of the [wounds + ignorance] cycle and what it means,

• learn to apply communication and grieving basics (Lessons 2 and 3); and to...

• accumulate several decades of life experience to provide perspective on and validate these topics. And typical recoverers also need…

§  Motivation – this usually requires accumulating enough pain, frustration, weariness, and despair to hit true bottom and decide “I can no longer live like this (be controlled by a false self).” And they need…
 

§

Spiritual growth and maturity – i.e. wanting to…

• •evolve steady, genuine faith in an attentive, responsive, benign Higher Power, and to…

• turn overwhelming problems over to that Being, to gain daily serenity (inner peace) and to...

  Control any addictions for at least 12 – 18 months. Addiction-recovery is the gateway to full re- covery from false-self wounds. Achieving and maintaining sobriety (freedom from toxic compulsions) seems to require wanting to (a) live from principles like these, and to (b) associate with others who do also.

        Another vital recovery requisite is...

§  A pro-recovery environment – choosing to associate with people who…

• •are guided by their true Selves, or are working to achieve that; and...

• can differentiate low-nurturance and high-nurturance relationships, settings, and belief-systems; and...

• understand and accept personality subselves and false-self wounds; and people who…

• think clearly and communicate effectively; and...

• are evolving their own spiritual (vs. religious) faith and awareness, and who...

• genuinely (vs. dutifully) support false-self wound-reduction.

Acquiring such supporters usually requires replacing some toxic family, work, and social relationships with more nurturing ones, and grieving related losses. This may include parents, siblings, partners, and co-workers.
 

           And typical recoverers also need...
 

 § To acquire and use a range of resources (p. 5).

        With this perspective, let's now look more closely at the two phases of wound reduction.

1) The Wounding Phase

       Nurture means filling current and long-term needs. The decades-long wounding sequence starts with series of unintended nurturance deprivations (caregiver neglect) starting before (?) or soon after a child's birth. Unless the wounded, unaware caregivers start self-healing, the developmental impacts of a low-nur-turance environment steadily accumulate and self-amplify.

        Nurturance-deprivations range from minor daily neglects (e.g. lack of loving facial expressions, eye contact, touching, soothing, and voice-sounds); to nutritional, stimulation, and knowledge deficiencies; to major trauma like abuse and psychological or physical abandonment.

        Premise: to survive inadequate nurturance, a young child automatically forms a false self. Common behavioral symptoms of false-self wounds usually emerge well before puberty. Without informed guidan-ce, teenage confusions, awakenings, and struggles for independence usually amplify the wounds and re-lated behaviors. Genetic influence on personality and wound development appears to be significant, and is not yet well understood.

        Through their first 30 - 45 years, Grown Wounded Children (GWCs) experience an inexorable growth of inner pain and perhaps significant physical illnesses. This may be disguised by moderate or great social and professional successes, and/or punctuated by a series of hidden or obvious, relationship, financial, scholastic, and/or occupational "failures." 

        During this wounding phase, typical GWCs unconsciously refine and justify core traits and beha-viors to adapt to their discomforts and successes. To an aware observer, these traits stand out like a skyscraper in the desert. So do key traits of a GWC's family tree.

        As inner pain, weariness, hopelessness, and emptiness (often collectively mislabeled "clinical de-pression") grow, typical GWCs make a series of uninformed attempts to minimize, rationalize, repress, numb, and/or deny their wounds and behaviors. Unaware and in protective denial, their leaderless false-self may try to...

self-medicate relentless discomfort via compulsive use of...

• mood-altering chemicals (including sugar and fat),

• activities (e.g. compulsive work, gambling, sex, "working out," Web surfing, worship, or shopping),

• relationships (codependence) and/or

• emotional states like sexual arousal, religious ecstasy, rage, and excitement. 

Unrecovering GWCs may also try to...

blame their pain on others, fate, or God (i.e. they adopt a victim/martyr4 attitude), rather than take responsibility for reducing it. Others seek to heal their growing discomforts ((like "depressions" and "failures") by making...

external changes like shifting jobs, careers, dwellings, locations, relationships, appear-ance, hobbies, and churches or religions.

These may provide temporary distractions, but not lasting relief. The shame, guilts, anxieties, confusions, emptiness, and despair (or numbness) always return and grow, amplified by the failed "cures;" losses - like divorce/s, job loss/es, and/or bankruptcy; aging; and decreasing options.

        Our multi-billion-dollar U.S. weight-loss industry and the growing media alarms about national obe- sity in kids and adults illustrate how widespread this wounding-phase sequence is. It fosters endless fad diets, exercise programs, products, tapes, self-help books, and gurus.

        These rarely keep excess pounds off for good because they don't acknowledge or heal the false-self wounds and pain that cause compulsive self-soothing from fats, sugars, and some carbohydrates. Over-eaters Anonymous is a partial exception, though it stops short of acknowledging false-self wounds as the core problem.

        The global high-fat "fast-food," snack, and alcohol industries are an ever-expanding shrine to the silent, pandemic need for psycho-spiritual comfort (vs. nutrition), and our false-selves' need to deny this  and why it exists. Paradox: if junk-food, tobacco, alcohol, and other drug providers and their advertisers taught the public why people crave their products, they'd put themselves out of business. If you agree, notice the uncomfortable implications.

        During their wounding-phase decades, typical people ruled by well-meaning false selves try to satis- fy primal relationship-needs like these. Ruling subselves repeatedly choose one or more dissatisfying (low-nurturance) and/or toxic primary relationships despite painful results. Such relationships are usually with other significantly-wounded people in denial, perhaps because excessive shame seeks its own level.

        The relationships are often complex approach-avoid sequences which indicate inner-family conflicts. The relationships may or may not involve marriage and child conception or adoption. A clear symptom of this widespread GWC dynamic is psychological and legal divorce.

        Almost half of recent American first-marriages have ended in legal divorce. Uncounted millions of other couples and their kids endure psychological divorce. Millions of other significantly-wounded adults avoid any committed, intimate primary relationship. They approach middle or old age childless and alone, or as a lonely (but safe) single parent.

      Another symptom of how widespread low-nurturance families and false-self dominance are in our cul- tures is the global explosion of codependence (relationship addiction) books, tapes, programs, and groups like Codependents Anonymous (CoDA) in just one generation. The prevalence of divorce and co-dependence suggests that the unacknowledged incidence of low-nurturance wounding is probably much greater than AIDS and cancer in our country and perhaps others.

       So - the first phase of full recovery is an inexorable buildup over several decades of inner pain, weariness, hopelessness, and unsuccessful "cures" (pseudo recovery). Typical Grown Wounded Children  take 30 to 50 years to traverse this phase. Because of false-self distortions and cultural unawareness, distrusts, and denials, many (most?) significantly-wounded adults never move into the healing phase. of recovery.

Continue this 5-page series by learning about wound reduction, pseudo recovery, typical recovery goals, signs of true recovery, kinds of recovery help, and common recovery themes. Do you need a break before reading more?

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Updated  April 25, 2010