Surrender & Compliance

Compliance and guilt are ways that many a client has hoodwinked an unwary sponsor or therapist.

Shame-based people tend to seek out and even embrace punishment. 

Admitting guilt and paying for it 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. 

The theory that is held by the uninitiated says, no one willingly wants to have their face ground down into their shame or pain … that is not necessarily so, some need their shame fix and thus will go out of the way to obtain it.

A Shame Fix.

The conundrum to the whole thing is: the only way out of the compulsive/addictive shame cycle is to embrace the shame, not ignore it and don’t 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. [1]

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[1] Taken from John Bradshaw’s The Family, page 196/ paragraph 2...