Adult Children of Alcoholics

It’s been a long time—certainly far before I found the 12 Steps—since I consciously and willfully chose to be angry at my family, to hate them, you know; however, for other reasons this book has become far less central to my life than I imagined it would be when I first started it. I got this book with another book (free shipping on Amazon for orders over $25), a chess book, and at the time I was struck by the differences between the two. The chess book, for a sort of surplus of mind-energy and time, a slightly absurd if harmless and diverting puzzle-smashing thing, you know—but the ACA Red Book, ah! Cracking the code of life and suffering itself! And it’s true I’ve dumped and deleted all my chess crap, and plan on finishing and cataloging this book. But perhaps there are similarities as well. The trauma of one’s early life and how it leads to one acting dysfunctionally towards self and others in the present is indeed a sort of endless puzzle to crack, and in a way I’m glad I bought this book and that I learned about being an adult child, so I can see patterns in myself and others, lowering my expectations of parents and such who were themselves mis-parented and who never even properly started to recover from that, without even realizing really, indeed after pretending to (even though also pretending not to need to), and of course to catch myself in patterns internally and with other people, to feel myself veering onto the “rumble strip” of life, as another writer in another genre likes to put it, and hopefully, you know, wake up. Hopefully, sure: do something better.

And I’m not trying to say that the Steps and the meetings aren’t potentially helpful, but there’s often that focus on the problem, rationalism, despite a sort of church-like Enneagram Six energy where we’ve been a little taken in by fear and problems and thoughts, potentially. Ultimately, though, life is not a game of chess and not everyone who has a woo-woo yet smothering mothering Irish alcoholic mother and a bookish yet quasi-Southern/Confederate fundamentalist father needs to read a six-hundred-and-fifty-page book—650 BIG pages!, about each and every little rat’s corner of the mind-prison we build for ourselves when we are taught to fear from a young age by fearful people. Obviously part of it is enlightenment—waking up. Wake up from fear to love. But of course, you still have to do things sometimes after you become enlightened, but instead of necessarily busting these mind-puzzles all day, you could try some prosperity work, right. Don’t just give up on never having a good job; use your spiritual muscles! And then you can give a good inheritance: not only a good example of a sober, non-reactive person, but someone who has also manifested health and, yes, relationships and wealth. And then someone down the line can write a book about the GOOD patterns that came about because of their early life. But the 12 Steps, as good as they are at some things, probably won’t take you there. They’re basically centered around purity problems, life-endangering toxicity of various kinds, which, certainly is good and not bad protection, but it leaves you to wonder what you’ll do with the rest of your life when you’re reasonably stable—perhaps hoping there’s another problem hidden somewhere, a new terror you can meet to relieve your boredom? Why not just /think of things that make you happy/, you know? When it’s not avoidance of some kind and you’re humble enough not to be the wisdom scholar, but the happy duck, it’s surprising, I think, how /good/ that can be.

…. Like a lot of secular psychology it’s not wrong in its analysis. If ACA used “religious language”, it probably would say that “we are sinners because of our ancestor’s sin”, and not because of any conscious choice we made in our own separate destiny. (Cf Paul in Romans, “Adam’s sin”.) It certainly doesn’t teach separation-seeking from parents, even if obviously you don’t agree with everything your parents do when you’re an adult. (Part of my psychic wound is I’m a Six and I wanted to be part of the system—asleep under Odin’s tree—but my parents agree on nothing—NOTHING, basically—so complete obedience to both of my parents is impossible.) It’s just, again, like many wise modern Western ways, it’s more about /understanding/ than change. I read an article in Elle magazine—“I am aligned with the energy of opulence” says the prosperity affirmation; well, alright then! I guess I’m not afraid of girls and money anymore! 😹…. You know, second thought, my parents did agree about something: be afraid of money, and good relationships! 😹—where the girl says, “Everything is about dynasty”. And look, I don’t know if the British royals are pulling their honest weight, whether some old families will fall from grace when this passing age is over: but I am saying that that’s the opposite of the ACA-y family; “everything is about dynasty”, instead of inherited dysfunction.

But we don’t read Elle in ACA. We’re self-important; I mean, self-help. Lol. I mean, not in Meetings, right. But a lot of wisdom/spirituality people aren’t open to everything. I mean, Elle isn’t All you need, but…. —A pretty girl! —Oooh, I hate that! —“Everything is about dynasty.” —A dynasty of sin? —Why do you always make assumptions like that? Why can’t it be a dynasty of wealth, true wealth?

…. People are kinda proud of this book because it’s the “PhD” program of 12-Step books, but it’s kinda bad, you know, like that: it’s the only 12-Step Big Book I know of with few, very few, stories, at least compared to the abstractions.

Normies tend not to notice if you do the right thing—a book is a book, regardless of whether it’s intended to be exclusionary or inclusive, and has no bearing on how they’ll treat you when they “invite” you to eat food you don’t like (eg animal corpses) with people who don’t let you talk about your own business, but I try to consider it a point of honor that I don’t want to act aloof for the hell of it or exclude the honest general reader, you know, the person who’s trying even though they’re not Whatever, who most intellectuals Will alienate, basically as a matter of pride, as a ‘plus’, you know.

…. I’m still /kinda/ happy I read this book, you know; it’s not a chess book. Maybe watching tennis might be better, on some occasions; understanding your life isn’t a panacea, just because it’s mental, you know. But you have to do it from time to time. I just, I don’t know. I used to look down on heal-by-doing, you know, and I found meetings to be compatible with that philosophy, but maybe I gotta heal by just deciding to feel good, deciding not to think about it, and deciding to be productive, literally and financially, even though yes “it’s a family weed” as my grandfather once described the family to me in a letter, lol. Back then I had no idea there was a personal (or even familial) aspect to life because it wasn’t part of my schooling, you know. 😸

…. I’ve always thought it’s nice to have non-professional “therapy”, or whatever, peer work, free stuff, but the 12-Step attitude towards “poverty” is kinda strange if you think about it. I know that technically it’s only the group that has to be poor, as a corporate entity, but even that seems terribly distrustful to me. Iron-bound tradition says that if 12-Stepper Susan or Samuel were making a buck so that they could take their kid out to the movies or something, Baby Jesus would explode, and the paranoid Franciscan Karl Marx the Wrestler, world-renowned Real Man, would cry out, Where there is money, there is no hope! It’s not the poor communities where everything is a bombed out hell-hole that has no hope—“some people would disagree”—but the place where men grow soft, where men lose the cojones (balls, guts), of religion!

I mean, /even the punk kids/ get stuff done and get paid to do it, you know, “by now, you should have somehow, realized what you’re supposed to do”—and that’s to do The Girlfriend, you know.

But it’s none of my business. I think it’s like people want to suffer so they can act tough and be men and proud of their large testicles, you know—but again, I don’t think in other people’s minds. If I went around giving them a bad name, I’d be an Eight in the next life, /raging/ at the Threes, you know.

…. But I do think that 12-Step governance isn’t perfect for being decentralized. Just because there’s no central motivator getting credit doesn’t mean that people don’t have to be asked by some random person to step up, nor that this asking always happens in the ideal way. I was in this Underearners Anonymous meeting, and this toxic mom person was like, Who’s Going To Read The Twelve Steps—like, “Who’s going to tell the prison warden we’ve volunteered to go to on a fast”, you know, like, negative energy, /you losers/, stuff. But she wasn’t getting paid or even getting credit in any official capacity, so it’s good, right! 😉

And that’s when I gave up on the Steps and decided I’d have to network independently.

…. And you know, I never thought I’d be one of these people who think that the Steps are old-fashioned—I know sometimes people emote negatively when they use that thesis—but I think that the Steps have the same Enneagram Six energy as most of the traditional church, and can have similar issues around fear: fear of addictions, fear of dysfunction, fear of anything that can threaten my sobriety…. A lot of good can come from it, but also some bad, and as a Six I think it has the potential to reinforce things I don’t need reinforced, you know.… (meer)