Jo Ellen Fletcher, M.A., LMFT
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The Burden of Childhood ~ Addictive Families

5/29/2017

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We have often heard that children need roots and wings in childhood to become confident, secure adults who are capable of forming healthy, fulfilling relationships. 

Unfortunately, many children of alcoholics and addicts have not been given secure base to venture into the adult world.The focus on addiction in their families, rather than on the developing needs of children, often causes these children to feel shameful and anxious rather than confident and secure. 

These children learn to adapt to life rather than learning how to live their lives.  Without connection to an emphatic and nurturing other, children in these families frequently feel like imposters, often hiding their insecurity, fear and lack of self-worth behind a mask of confidence. 

Many live out the legacies of their childhood years feeling fearful, unlovable, out of control, and unworthy.  They lick their wounds in silence, often feeling like children emotionally when they are thirty and hyper-responsible at the tender age of five.

Trauma has been described as any experience that within a short period presents the mind with a stimulus too powerful to be assimilated or mastered in a normal way.  The stimulus (internal or external) results in the child experiencing a state of helplessness.

The chronic trauma of living in any family where the focus is on an addiction, rather than on the needs of the developing children, place at least three burdens on these youngsters as they grow up: first, the repeated experience of the trauma itself; second, the effects of the trauma on personality development; and third, the need to re-experience the feelings and/or memories of the original trauma in order to integrate it and work through. 

There are those individuals who use denial, repression, projection and other defenses to function but do so in a restricted way.  They have learned how to "survive" but have difficulty "living" their lives.  They often find themselves in environments that emotionally replicate those of their childhoods---environments that demand the defenses they have learned to exist behind while they attempt to achieve mastery of their pain.  They have great difficulty when the demands of the environment exceed their ability to "defend," or when people in their lives want to get close to them, expect true connection and intimacy with the, and expect them to "live" and experience new things rather than merely "survive."

The goal toward which we can all move, there are those who are willing to re-experience the pain of the original trauma and work it through, finding their voice and gaining emotional freedom from the constraints of the past.  Such working through (grief work) is the essence of the  healing process.  This involves talking through and identifying aspects of the trauma and and is accomplished with one caring person with whom one has worked hard to establish trust.










Taken from After the Tears,
Jane Middelton-Moz & Lorie Dwinell


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Change your Brain. Foster Positive Experiences.

5/23/2017

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I am larger, better than I thought,
I did not know I held so much goodness.

--Walt Whitman

Much as your body is built from the foods you eat, your mind is built from the experiences you have. 

The flow of experience gradually sculpts your brain, thus shaping your mind.  Some of the results can be explicitly recalled: This is what I did last summer; that is how I felt when I was in love. 
But most of the shopping of your mind remains forever unconscious.

This is call implicit memory, and it includes your expectations, models of relationships,
emotional tendencies, and general outlook. 

Implicit memory establishes the interior landscape of your mind--what if feels like to be you--
based on the slowly accumulating residues of lived experiences.

In a sense, those residues can be sorted into two piles:
those that benefit you and others, and those that cause harm. 
But, here's the problem. 
Your brain scans for, registers, stores, recalls, and reacts to unpleasant experiences;
it is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive experiences.

Consequently, even when positive experiences outnumber negative ones,
the pile of negative implicit memories naturally grows faster. 
Then the background feeling of what it feels like to be you can become  glum and pessimistic.

Negative experiences do have benefits: loss opens the heart, remorse provides a moral compass, anxiety alerts you to threats, and anger spotlights wrongs that should be righted. 
But do you really think you are not having enough negative experiences? 

Emotional pain with no benefit to yourself or others is pointless suffering. 
And pain today breeds more pain tomorrow. 
For instance, even a single episode of major depression can reshape circuits of the brain
to make future episodes more likely.

The remedy is not to suppress negative experiences; when they happen, they happen. 
Rather, it is to foster positive experiences--and in particular,
to take them in so they become a permanent part of you.


Buddha's Brain - Hanson & Mendius


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Couples Therapy

5/9/2017

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Some of the most important aspects of a partnership or marriage is the security of the bond between the partners. 
In the development of a relationship, partners struggle to define the relationship as a safe haven and secure base for one another.

Humans, for generations, have evolved to deal with fear and anxiety by proximity to another safe person.  What this means is that proximity or closeness to an attachment figure (parent, lover, spouse, partner) tames fear and becomes an antidote to feelings of helplessness and meaninglessness.

A key issue in relationships that are distressed is in each partner's accessibility to the other,
their responsiveness to the emotional cues of, "Are you there for me?"

Over the generations ideas have arisen that have guided the idea of couples therapy. 

For example, that love relationships mirror past relationships with parents, and that we even re-create the negative elements of these relationships to resolve inner conflicts in our own relationships. And, that problems in relationships are due to developmental delays that cause partners to enmesh rather than differentiate; or that partners lack skills, either communication skills or the negotiation skills.

From an attachment perspective, the patterns of distress in couple relationships are quite finite and predictable and reflect the process of separation distress.  A lot of the time one partner will pursue for emotional connection, but often in an angry critical manner, while the other will placate or withdraw to "keep the peace" or protect him or herself from criticism.

Negative cycles of critical complaining and negative and defensive distance can predict the continued deterioration of the relationship.  The therapist can see beyond the negative cycles, slowing down the couple, seeking the softer emotions and eventually identifying the pattern of behavior as the enemy.  Most of the time most partners want the same thing, safety, security and connection.








Dr. Sue Johnson
Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy


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    Author:
    Jo Ellen Fletcher, M.A.
    Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist


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