The 7R's of living in community are as follows: Rules, Roles, Relationships, Responsibilities, Respect, Resources and
Returning Cycles.
1) Rules
Rules are a specific body(s) of information … sometimes
described as guidelines … that we as a group choose to live by. These guidelines serve as the foundation for
governing our living together. These rules can outline very complex
international issues … these issues can differ dramatically between various
societies … everything from traffic laws, criminal laws and the comings and
goings of the social services safety net … to educational systems and a myriad
number of variations on a theme … falling under categories such as social
custom or common law … codes of conduct etc.
History and simple necessity are often the originators
of most social and interpersonal rules. Community or social rules are the
vehicles through which we can begin the task of fulfilling our needs … for
food, shelter and clothing, … Maslow and his triangle … as well
as set into motion a safety element or environment within the social structure
where an individual may from the sanctity from within the construct of the
created social zone begin to search out love and acceptance and move up the
socialization triangle to higher orders of completion.
These Chosen Rules can set our direction and define our responsibilities to ourselves and with those that we share the system with…
2)
Roles
· Roles relate to the many “jobs or masks” we wear
within the family and our community.
· Roles are often determined according to our
community or family needs.
· Please Note: just because it is
what the family needs does not make it healthy.
· The healthy
roles we play provide us with our opportunities for learning and
growth.
· Roles can be channels for expressing the truth
about our needs and us. BUT…
· The problem in the system seems to be that we were trained to be who we think we are. All this
learning happened at a very early age. This training, often as not, contributes
to the predetermination of the Roles we will adopt in our life and display
in our community as we advance toward our adulthood. It has a circular theme … what was learned in
childhood is how we will be in Adulthood.
· Our childhood training often demands that we
give up true self. It is basically a defense strategy. We do this for the sake
of the system and its survival … not ours necessarily. We adapt a grab and run technique for our
needs fulfillment. This is refereed to as narcissistic depravation
Thus we cannot nurture our lost self unless we leave home at least
figuratively. Some of us have to break
ties altogether … literally.
We leave home
by giving up the role that our system demanded we be … for the good of the
system … scripts and rigid unhealthy roles.
These scripts defined us by what the system needed and not as us as an individual.
This process of giving ourselves up for the greater need
of the system denied us our authenticity, our sense of self and our sense of
self-esteem. Each of us adhered to these
rigid roles out of our misplaced loyalty to the system we were born into. The odd thing is that we got a sense of power
and of being in control from doing this, but this entire process cost us
dearly. To adhere to the rigid role we had to give over our sense of
uniqueness, our sense of self, and the essence of being … just to maintain
membership in the system.
We were born to be
ourselves.
Truer words were never spoken.
To be ourselves is an absolute … something that to gain
we must separate from the system that generated us and we must learn to stand
on our own … be separate from the designation and definitions that either the
system or our parents or our siblings had labels us with. This process of breaking free of the our
original roles and labels needs to often extend out into our community, how we
are known and by whom … to teachers opinions or police officers or neighbours …
to anyone we viewed has having influence over how it was that we thought about
our self and anyone that our parents had abdicated their power and authority to
for us.
This phase of maturation is called negotiating your adolescence. Now the oddity of this phase of maturation is
that the vast majority of people don’t even know that it needs to be done … and
for those who do … most simply don’t get to it until their late 30’s or later
in their life’s process.
Matthew quotes Jesus as saying, "I have not come to
bring peace, but a sword. For I have
come to put sons against fathers and daughters against mothers ... And a man's
foes shall be those of his own household."
Leaving home means;
o Separating from our family system.
o No longer living up to the idealizations and the fantasy bond of being
forever protected by our parents or their stand-in(s)… surrogates … such as
employers or social systems or friends or spouses.
Only by
leaving home and becoming separate, giving up the old role identification and
standing up on our own can we begin the process of negotiating our
adolescence/freedom … that will lead us back to a place of actually having a
choice in life … the choice to have a true and real relationship with others
even those who hurt us or let us down.
This most basic of relationships … with our parents … demands separation
and detachment first before any possibility of a healthy relationship can exist
for anyone who hails from any type of toxic environment.
PLSE
NOTE: For
some, because of abuse issues it may be necessary to create some distance for a
time from our family or its surrogate.
For those who've been badly abused, you will have to make a prudent
evaluation of how close you can get to your family or surrogate without violating
your own boundaries.
3) Relationships
Relationships deal with the nature and quality of our
interactions … us with us and us with others … but first us with ourselves.
To form a relationship we must first be able to relate
and understand how to set the relating process in motion.
Our comprehension of how relationships work (or don’t)
lay at the feet of our parents ... those persons who parented us, Mom’s
relationship with herself and dad’s relationship with himself and their
relationship with each other lays the ground work for our understanding of how
relationships work or don’t work. Once
this is appreciated or imprinted or impressed on us it then plays like a
message on a tape recorder … over and over again. There are variances that are explained by
personality and other outside influences but basically the parents and their
interactions set us in motion on how we will conduct ourselves during our adult
relationships.
To get to the root of the problem it is essential to
plumb the depths of our own psyche and our own past … to release those lost and
buried hurts and pains … then to grieve the losses we experienced.
4) Responsibilities
Responsibilities in one sense refer to the level of
maturity we have reached, or how we handle ourselves both privately and
publicly, and more importantly how we handle getting our needs met … especially
our dependency needs.
Our inter play with other people, and the roles we
choose to fill in the interacting process with them are simply expressions of
our sense of our ability to fill our own needs through inter play with
them. Often as not, responsibility
appears to have something to do with providing inspiration or leadership to all
who come into our spheres of influence. M Scott Peck pointed out: Life
is what happens to you while you are busy doing something else. Assuming the working definition of
responsibility is a commitment to being involved … you with your life …
in a complete, full and healthy fashion … thus being able to fulfill
the ways of satisfying your own needs … it helps to understanding the
difference between Wants and Needs. This
is an essential aspect.
5) Respect
This
starts with the individual’s sense of self and that sense of self is a
by-product of very early developmental experiences.
Its
clearest defining qualities are related to time and how time and interaction
with affective adults was spent … with those who reflect how that individual
was viewed by them during the child’s first 30 to 60 months of life.
It Is True That:
It is a necessity that we must
first have respect for ourselves … it then follows naturally … that we next
have to have respect for the rules we chose by … which we agree to … and
conduct our living accordingly and build our social order around.
On the other hand if we do not have this sense of
respect instilled at a very early age then ... it is with great effort and difficulty that we will move through our
lives.
Respect is something that is purely experiential … it
can be obtained anytime … but first we must know what it is that we are looking
for … and then … where it is we must search to find it. 12 Step programs help
enormously here as do other self help programs.
The book Iron John asks the question “Where is the Key hidden”.
One of life’s conundrums is that sooner or later we get
our selves involved in attempting to make something happen or a series of
things happen … where, in lay the problem that a necessary ingredient for those
things to happen is we need to respect our selves to accomplish or complete the
tasks we have set out for our selves to complete … now the complexity sets in
insomuch that for the most part most of us don’t carry the necessary tools to
cause the respect to be there because it is not part of our working tool kit … it some how got overlooked … those the task
at hand that should not be all that difficult becomes a very difficult
task.
The Basics of the concept is:
o A person cannot respect himself unless he knows the truth of himself.
For most the truth about us is lost back in the early
begins … at times and places where we simply had to begin to pretend to be
someone else just to be able to get along in our families of origin That
Hurt(s). It is also true that our
every effort is to maintain the lid on this painful thing so that it does not
get out and hurt us again. The problem
is that (neurotic) defense strategies themselves become more painful then the
pain they were masking but our only defense to pain is to build another neurotic
structure … mask … false self … to protect us from our pain of our reality.
Finding our lost self-respect is a prerequisite to
healing. Something a kin to Peter Pan
recovering his lost shadow from Wendy’s drawer.
Now we have a place to look … and a direction to go in.
6) Resources
They are available to us on many levels. Help will only help if you reach out for
it. It is necessary that you participate
and utilize them … put them to work for you … it is your entitlement … they
won’t work unless you work them. I quote
John Bradshaw from Healing the Shame that binds you.
Appreciating Compliance &
Surrender
Compliance is motivated by
guilt. It is in fact an attempt to
surrender without giving up control. It
is the attempt to appear to be doing what it is that is necessary to recover
without actually doing anything that might inspire of the repressed pain to
escape and hurt us again.
From my own experience this example:
It was in May 1979 that I first attended my very first
recovery type meeting.
I was teaching at Twin Valleys
School
Things in my life for periods of time had turned into a
dark hell of my own making … it took me sometime to see this but it was true.
I thought I could always pull myself out … and I had …
but when confronted with the truth of who and what I had become … me or all
people … I mean I was shocked … hell I worked in the trade of saving folks from
this kind of stuff and I knew better … nothing like beating yourself up.
I finally had to reach out and ask for help … I called a
phone line listed in the yellow pages to get some information that I already
knew … in hopes that I could stall just
one more day and when I discovered that I really could not … I walked into
a recovery meeting at 8:25pm on that evening … I surrendered into myself and
into my pain and into the process … fully and completely … on July 1st
1996, … I surrendered.
An interesting fact that I had
to learn the hard way was: denial and delusion can continue in spite of the
acknowledgment of guilt. Guilt can
actually be a way to distract one from the real problem. Appearing to do something while avoiding it
at all costs.
For example, it's not at all uncommon to hear a smoker
or an overeater condemn them selves for creating a dangerous threat to their
health with their addictions. This is
certainly preferable to stopping smoking or overeating. Alcoholics for example, frequently outwardly
accept responsibility for the things they do when they drink. They felt guilt about them. Again it was a lot easier to admit to
these harmful things that I have done than it is to admit my drinking
... My Life ... is/ was out of control. By being guilty … the Alcoholic can deny that
their life was unmanageable and out of control. (Step one). Guilt is a useful way to continue denial.
Please Note:
Compliance and guilt are
ways that an addict has hoodwinked many an unwary therapist.
Shame-based people tend to seek out and even embrace
punishment. Admitting guilt and paying
for it in therapy enhances the denial of what they most deeply feared -
quitting doing ... fill in the blank.
To have quit whatever it was ... fill in the blank ... then the
individual would have to admit that his or her life was out of control ...
drinking say ... thus by admitting that would expose the drinker as a flawed
and defective human being. No one
willingly wants to have their face ground down into their shame or pain … the
conundrum to the whole thing is that the only way out of the
compulsive/addictive shame cycle is to embrace the shame not ignore it and
pretend it does not exist.
That is what it means to
surrender
Surrender is motivated by the acceptance of shame.
For an addict, surrender is the first true act of freedom since
beginning the addiction. It is best
embodied in the following:
Talking about our problems, mapping out our family’s
dysfunction is not the same as taking action.
Action means that I've let go of control and I'm willing to listen to
someone else and do it his way, rather than my own way.
Leslie Farber discusses the problem of the disabled will
in her book the Way of the Will … what she outlines is the mask of the supposed
powerful person who can get things done … with great will power but the
intrinsic problem is that this ability to get things done simply because he or
she wills it to be so is a form of mood altering and is never permanent and is
always illusive … temporary at best … and forms a driving force in a persons
life that attempts to mask the truth of who they are … this is a form of
dishonesty and in true fashion and form of dysfunctionality … the pain that
this dishonesty ultimately brings often as not leads to the eventual undoing of
the individual and their efforts.
By the time most of us are ready to do something ...
reached out or bottomed out ... the pain has reached a point of great
intensity. Our shame-based self-goes
deeper and deeper into hiding, the intensity of manufactured pretend false self
are increased proportionately. We have
no idea who we are. The addiction is no longer one of substance but we are
hooked into hiding our shame … and by doing so we have created an insidious
chronic pain of knowing that I was not the person I pretended to be or
was supposed to be.
We literally are be-side ourselves.
This is the way of things … the form and function of the
disease … we are coming to know as co-dependence. Most of us who wrestle with it in some of its
many forms had to wait until we dealt with its cover-up … alcoholism or
chemical addiction or compulsive spending or eating disorders … what ever it is
that we do to mood alter us away from our feelings. This point is crucial point in recovery …
this is why surrender is so important and why it is such a difficult place to
get to. For any acting-out substance
abuser, the substance has to be stopped before one can treat the co-dependence
(the disease of the disease) … alcoholism is caused by drinking alcohol. Alcoholism is a primary disease. That means it has to be treated first. The same is true for other drugs and
chemicals. Food, sex, work, and people addictions are somewhat different. You can't stop eating, drinking, sexing,
working or peopling completely. Total
abstinence would be death to self and the species. Each addiction compulsion or obsession has
its own particular nuances for recovery but there are some commonalties. One
commonality is surrendering the grandiose will.
7) Returning Cycle
It is actually I suspect a natural law of the
universe. The process of returning cycle
involves the process of giving and
receiving.
o We get from life what we give.
o Or we reap what we sow.
o But then we give it back to life again.
o
We give back what we receive, but we add just a little of our potential … our character and our talents to
it before we pass it back into the universe … why … so we can find our sense of
pride and self respect.
Thus a returning cycle is not a punishment but it is the
restoration of some community structure or form that is now enhanced by your
effort rather then detracted your resentment.
It was observed many years ago that if mankind lived according to the
principal of returning cycles many of the rules and laws of man would be
unnecessary.
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