Why the Confusion? A Reading for the ACA ACoA/DF Newcomer
Why the Confusion? is an ACA ACoA/DF reading that explores issues which often face those just beginning the Adult Children Anonymous program.

Feeling uncertain, disoriented, agitated, unprotected, and just plain stumped can be very good for your recovery.  Children of dysfunctional families often feel this way, especially when we are making progress with our greatest difficulties.

In the process of spiritual recovery, the most painful experiences are often those which entail the shock of recognition, as the protective masks we once wore are stripped from us.  We experience afresh the panic, the suppressed rage, and the sense of helplessness which compelled us as children to adapt our character to the disturbed nature of our home environment.  These feelings themselves can inspire fear, they threaten our sometimes precarious equilibrium and the childhood taboos that we often still carry.   Most frightening of all, they can make us feel stuck in our past.

By entering this program, we have begun to step into uncharted inner territory.  Together we are moving towards self-awareness, respect, honesty, love and responsibility for ourselves.  The general experience in recovery is that, after a while, we do become more comfortable in our emergence as emotional, occasionally somewhat difficult individuals.  As we begin to orient ourselves to this new state, we can find considerable satisfaction in our increasing integrity.  Still, we may frequently find our emotional landscape in glorious disarray.  This is quite normal (for us).   Contact with others who are experiencing recovery can offer crucial help at these times.  Certainly this takes courage.   Sometimes we are apt to feel that we have nothing to share but our hurt and shame, and it is tempting to slide back into the closet or the eating, or the working, or the bottle, or whatever dark place we came from.  But please do pick up the telephone or come to a meeting and spread the fertilizer around.  It often seems as if the deeper our immediate difficulty, the more Adult Children we can connect with.

We each bear a past which we have been able neither to assimilate nor to escape.  The roots of our anger, fear and heartache run deep into the earliest layers of our soul’s experience.  As we begin to make the mental, spiritual and emotional connections that enable us to survive today, and as our perceptions open up more to reality, we find ourselves changing in ways that were almost unthinkable before.  The distorted self-image which we formed in the dysfunctional environment - perhaps the greatest "authority figure" we will ever have to face- begins to be challenged daily.  Owning up to this past and these distortions, to the damage that we have undergone, seems fundamentally to be a process of grieving and letting go.  It is painful to admit how far the situation of our life has been outside our control, outside of what seems fair or right.  As a residue of our upbringing, we sometimes get " moralistic" with ourselves and experience our powerlessness, pain and uncertainty as punishment.  Perhaps this attitude is one last attempt to preserve the old hope that if we can just be obedient enough, we will be taken care of.  We may also feel that our every move ought now to be an obvious step forward, with no steps back required.  These are self-blaming attitudes which we can let go of.   Our true self will always do us the invaluable service of stubbornly refusing conformity with any ingrained notions of what we "should" need or "should" feel.  Deeply effective recovery is rarely experienced as a smooth, graceful, assured process.  It involves the recognition of some very sickening circumstances; contending with their effects on us cannot always be both truthful and outwardly pleasing.  The feelings and attitudes rigidly prohibited to us as children are the most disorienting ones to learn to know today, but this is exactly what liberates us.

Confusion, isolation and self-doubt are the natural result when we are so continually forced to withhold our strongest feelings that we begin to disown them.  Now, in the process of coming back to life, we must come face to face with the horrors we are leaving behind us.  It is a necessary step towards regaining our own identities.  But this reunion with a "long-lost self" is more momentous than meeting a long-lost relative (especially given the kind of relatives most of us seem to have).  Your recovery in this program may not be measurable or controllable, but surely it is already under way.  And you are not alone.