I just reblogged a post shared on the very well written and informative blog called Perspective On Trauma about adult children.. the following paragraph spoke to me deeply.
10. We live in conflict. We want to be perfect, but we can’t because we are paralyzed by fear. We want to control our surroundings, but we desperately want to be taken care of. We desperately want to be self-assured, because we know that’s the key to the control we seek, but we can’t be self-assured because we grew up believing we had no worth.
What a confusing conundrum of longings, desires and effects and many of us struggle to manage.. There is a lot of excellent information for adult children out there and fellow bloggers have shared with me they experience many of these traits even if raised by parents who were not addicts (although they may have been adult grandchildren or great great grandchildren).
The Al Anon reader Hope For Today is especially useful with a day year on each page containing stories and experiences of those in recovery using the 12 step tools.. There is also an excellent book I bought many years ago called Loving An Adult Child. Helpful as well is a book called The Intimacy Struggle which shows how due to incorrect beliefs formed in the hellish crucible of a childhood of trauma, inconsistency and neglect function to make us survivors very confused about how to be intimate and handle emotions, especially anger.
I hope some of these resources may be useful for others, this is also a reminder to me of some of the tools and publications which have helped me that I sometimes forget to refer to.
Emerging From The Dark Night 