Connecting with others, or at least attempting to do so, after emerging from a dysfunctional, alcoholic, and / or abusive upbringing that subtly taught you to distrust and maintain what you considered a “safe distance” was sometimes the equivalent of grasping a live wire. . . That at least may have explained the explosive sensation of electrocution that was generated in your brain when you tried to do it. The scope, due to the traumatic repetition, did not achieve the anticipated comfort, but an emotional breakdown, transforming you into an adult child.

“When children have been injured by alcoholism and cannot find relief from their pain,” according to the textbook “Adult Children of Alcoholics” (World Service Organization, 2006, p. 357), “they are forced to deny its reality and to withdraw into isolation. The experience of being powerless to control the events that harm us as children leaves us with a deep sense of alienation, not only from others, but from our own openness and vulnerability. “

Isolation is one of the many dichotomies associated with the disease of dysfunction: It is painful to be alone, but it can be even more painful to be around other people when you do not fully trust them and inadvertently generate feelings that may progress. from restlessness to anxiety to outright fear, which initially causes you to reject them and eventually force you to leave to turn them off.

One of the strategies used to avoid these feelings is to achieve a significant degree of independence. The more you know and can do autonomously, the less you will have to depend on others, thus avoiding potentially unpleasant interactions.

Despite what may be perceived as admired abilities of those in senior positions, leadership and management positions, for example, may actually be deficits resulting from honed skills and accumulated knowledge so that these individuals can reduce their dependence on high-ranking people. the rest.

“Many of us exposed our facades of self-sufficiency for what it was,” again according to the textbook “Adult Sons of Alcoholics” (p. 219): “a camouflaged isolation in which we were terrified to ask for help. ourselves and others “.

A person can become so self-reliant and distrustful of others, in fact, that if a lightning-like pain strikes their heart, they may choose to risk surviving with it rather than risk the danger of reaching out to someone for help. him out of her.

In a way, an adult child was created by the fact that he could not seek help from those who else should have provided it: his parents. Ironically, they were the main reasons she needed him in the first place. So, he supposed, why would those in the outside world, who didn’t know him or owed him anything in particular, serve as surrogate parents and provide the help that their real ones obviously couldn’t?

In fact, you may well believe that they would only cause additional harm than that caused by the need for that help. His definition of “father” quickly became something different from those that emerged from a safe and loving childhood.

“(We may) have spent a great deal of time avoiding others,” according to the textbook “Adult Children of Alcoholics” (p. 342). “We have isolated ourselves and run away from ourselves and from life. We always take the time to isolate ourselves.”

Isolation, which cannot be restricted to the traditional realm of defining the word, does not depend on the number of people currently in your circle, but on the number with whom you can connect. Due to the negative circumstances associated with your education, that may constitute a figure from low to zero. For example, you could stand in Time Square on New Year’s Eve, waiting for the annual descent of the lighted obelisk; however, theoretically you feel like you are alone. Therefore, isolation results from the lack of an emotional and spiritual bond, not necessarily a physical one.

Attachment disorders were created by her unstable and sometimes disruptive upbringing. It was your parents who disconnected you, despite all your attempts to insert yours into them. In fact, every time he tried to do so, the chances were that he would find his plugs empty and rejected. Even if they didn’t find you in danger, they certainly did so with abandon, leaving you to conclude that you were an unwanted burden not important or valuable enough to devote their time and attention to.

In any case, they implied that you were less than, that you were not up to the task, and that you were not particularly adorable. At least that’s the way he probably interpreted his withholdings towards you.

The way that invisible wall served to separate you and impede that much-needed parental bond paradoxically also served to separate you from your true self, resulting in an internal division.

“To protect ourselves from the disorienting effects of living with confusion and pain,” according to the textbook “Adult Children of Alcoholics” (p. 358), “we divide ourselves into a feeling and insensitive self and isolate ourselves from our own vulnerability. .between the extremes of wanting to escape our isolation and the need to stay safely hidden in our familiar prison of pain … We go from the depths of isolated depression to frantic attempts to find help in the outside world. “

Dysfunctional, alcoholic, and abusive parenting becomes the core of an ever-growing snowball that runs from infancy to adulthood, generating the survival-oriented behavioral characteristics that you were unknowingly forced to adopt. Ashamed, you felt inferior to others. The betrayal of the parents and the distrust implanted by the detriment laid a weak and easily destroyable foundation on which his life rested. Isolated and unable to participate in what others regularly and effortlessly enjoyed amplified his feelings of inadequacy and provided additional layers and reasons for his shame.

Crushed, squeezed and buried in everything is the inner child wrapped in a cocoon, which you were forced to create in order to escape internally, perhaps at the still infantile age of three, from the danger to which you were exposed.

Although it represents your true self and its intrinsic gifts, given by God, it remains inaccessible and beyond your memory or even your consciousness, long replaced by the false or pseudo-self, which cannot connect with others, thus increasing their separation and isolation.

Love expands, giving you more of who you are. Shame contracts, take away what you are. They both emanate and are therefore reflections of what your parents have or don’t have. Like your seedling, you grew or shrunk emotionally and spiritually based on the frequency and nature of these extremes.

Adult children feel like the missing pieces of a giant puzzle. Even if they are found somewhere on the table, they don’t think they fit in the gaps or deserve it, and therefore serve no purpose in completing the big picture.

Completely disconnected by lack of confidence and isolated by hiding somewhere in the box, they are not aware that both phenomena are the result of the repetition of their original, but not yet resolved, traumas caused by the parents. What was three years old may still be at 53 in their subconscious minds and what may now be their adult bodies still house their children suspended in time in their minds.