How do we do a blameless inventory when fear and pain is in the picture?
There is a way. It’s a combination of detachment and fearless and thorough honesty that makes it possible. That requires a lot of detachment and trust, but it can be done in twelve step recovery because a Higher Power is a resource for us all. We are all the loved children of a Source that we are already joined within, just as the flying geese are joined in migratory flight to make everyone more safe.
To get enough perspective to recover poised acceptance, it takes looking at a long, long view of family and cultural patterns as the norms we’ve never questioned—a distance from a thousand years or more in history.
Why are we so afraid?
For people who grew up in families or in nations/cultures where slavery was tolerated, we had to learn to cope and survive, even if we were the offspring of the slaveowners! Authority was so vested we had to learn to not upset or challenge it because, whoever we were, it had the power to do anything if it wasn’t happy with us!
As babies, we become immediately aware of who we must please. We may succeed or fail in even a ruthless, brutal household or culture if we learn how to operate, but we won’t be free and equal peers if authority isn’t shared and fair and just.
Can we change this, in recovery? That’s what ACA set out to do.
Backing off another layer of perspective, we can see that, in adult child/trauma recovery, we are each challenged to confront the arguments and fears that philosophers and rulers have struggled with for at least three thousand years in Western culture. Is it possible to really trust a loving Higher Power? Will we lose something? Will we be punished or laughed at or seen as fools? Does this program work?
Adult children are like lemmings and stampeding herds of buffalo, running in panic over cliffs when we come to twelve step programs seeking balance and the living faith that makes us mutually supportive in fellowship. We are told to work the Steps. “Having had a spiritual awakening” isn’t a theory or a place with walls and armies. We have to live it and we can. It works if we work it and most of us know that already or we wouldn’t be here.
Kathleen S.