9th Renewal Convention on
Adult Children, Recovery, & Trauma
Las Vegas , NV � February 23-26, 2005
Perfect Daughters & Silent Sons: Adult Children Revisited
Robert J. Ackerman, Ph.D. (ACOA25-001-Ackerman)
ACKERMAN: Like all reunions, I don't know about you, but if you've ever gone to a high school reunion, if you've ever gone to a college reunion, people start telling stores. After a while you begin to wonder whether that really happened. Everybody embellishes the stories, and I'm guilty of that just as I know many people are. It dawned on me one day about the grandiosity of old stories, and I was at a reunion. I was asked to speak, and it was where I did my undergraduate, but it dawned on me the grandiosity of the old stories, that it's great to have that, and it's great that they become more grandiose as the years pass because what that means is that they are grandiose in proportion to the meaning of the impact that they had on people's lives, and that's why we embellish them. As a matter of fact, I think those who are recovering and those in the recovering community embrace their recoveries every day stronger than they did yesterday because it consistently and continually adds meaning to their lives.
So I hope that you will indulge those of us who are, in fact, old-timers if we go back every now and then, but perhaps we go back to provide the meaning and the passion that I often see today as people struggle with it. There are many things that addiction does to people, and I'm going to say this early, but one of the things it robs many people of is, in fact, passion.
You can pretty much bet the ranch that the client comes in to see you, and at the point the client comes in to see you her or his self-esteem is somewhere below their feet and passion does not exist in their vocabulary. I love to see people make absolute fools out of themselves in public places to get a two-year-old to laugh. Why? Not because they're fools, but because they have passion. Have you ever seen those who don't understand it? Somebody turns around and it's just rained, and outside in the middle of the sidewalk there is a puddle. But it's not a puddle; to the two-year-old, it's the Great Lake . And there's a popsicle stick, but that's a ship, isn't it? And some 61- or 62-year-old grandmother is down on her hands and knees with the child [blowing] the popsicle stick, which is the great ship, across the lake. And somebody has to walk on that sidewalk, and they complain because they have to walk around. They'll say, �Look at this, for Pete's sake, they're holding up the sidewalk! A grown woman down there. You wouldn't catch me doing that!� And I'll say, �Yeah, you're right, but you'd never catch a two-year-old looking at you that way either.�
So hopefully through some of the older eyes that are here perhaps we can give you visions and meaning and not just a cookbook of when people try this, this, or this, because when someone comes in, no matter how many children of alcoholics or adult children there are, each person wants you to see their story. Each person wants you to hear them, to see their emptiness or their completeness or their recovery and not to be treated as if we are, in fact, all one and the same.
You know, yesterday when I was flying out the plane was just packed. It was one of these deals when it was just packed. I fly out of Pittsburgh Airport . USAir is not doing too well, but for some reason they all still fill the plane to go to Las Vegas . So I got on the plane, and I'm in an aisle seat, and the woman next to me says after a while, �Wow! No one's sitting here yet,� and she says, �Wow! This might work.� And I said, �Don't move yet until the last person...� you know, [mumble, mumble]. Well anyway, they finally closed the door. Boom! Empty seat. She was sitting right next to me. I'm figuring, �Great! We're going to have some room.� She didn't move! And I haven't really recovered well enough to get into what Mallow called self-actualization; I was just staring at the empty seat. Being a flaming co-dependent, I thought that she would know what I knew what I wanted, and she didn't move! So finally I just sort of opened up the brochure of the conference, and then I said to her, �You're not an adult child, are you?� and she didn't know what that was. I said, �You sure aren't co-dependent, are you? Because you would have gotten up and moved and given me the whole seat,� but she...so her and her healthy behavior just sat next to me. I got out the DSM and tried to diagnose it because I'm not used to people being like that.
Anyway, I want to look at, I want to go back to this whole thing about adult children of alcoholics, adult children of trauma; and in the short amount of time, what have we done? What types of things have we solidified? Do we know anything a little bit better? What was really going on in the field when we first started?
There are a couple of things that I want to lay a foundation for right off the bat. I have probably fought this my entire career, and that is even though people did this and I think their hearts were in the right place many, many years ago, I never bought a lot of stuff that people said about adult children. One, I didn't buy it because I didn't know whether or not there was really any validity to it. How do you really know that? Was it conjecture? Where did you get it from? So I guess that was the academic side of me that said, �Let's go out and check some of this out.�
The other thing is that what a lot of people did even if their hearts were in the right place, a lot of people had nothing to say except negative things. By the time they were done, even if their hearts were in the right place, there were a lot of people running around talking about adult children as if we were the most walking catastrophic-personality-defective people ever created. What would happen is people will talk about adult children as the most walking catastrophic personality things going on. I don't know about you, but one of the things is this: When we look at children, and so much from NACOA and so much work about children of alcoholics, there is one thing that we should not forget. See, in the old days you could tell there had been growth and change right away. In the old days people were so co-dependent, they'd say, �I'm not going to say anything. You say something!� �I'm not going to say a word...� Then when it went over, people who had been going out saying, �I didn't hear a thing. Did you?� So we do have some growth; this is really good.
If we look at this, I don't know about you, but talking about children, for example, young children, there is a thing we should never forget even though we're going to look at all kinds of issues for the next couple of days. There are things we should never forget. You know, children, children of alcoholics, have more in common with all children than they are different. Adult children of alcoholics, adult children of trauma, have more in common with all adults than we are different. So the first thing is let's not go out and recreate some category of individuals that we want to put over here when, in fact � I don't know about you � but I've never met an adult child of an alcoholic who doesn't consider himself or herself to be a survivor. If people were so incredibly dysfunctional, how can they also be so functional? If we go out throughout the United States , we're going to find out one of the most significant byproducts of alcoholic and drug-addicted families in this country is that their sons and daughters grow up and disproportionately run all of our human services agencies? If people were so incredibly dysfunctional, how could they also be functional?
Do you know what I think we're doing and where the transition is is we need to balance that dysfunction with function, don't we? We need to turn around and take a lot of those functional attributes and characteristics that people have and use those to help people get better as opposed to years ago where we turned around and said, �Wow!� and everything was this, this, this, or this.
Let me give you a couple of examples. I was looking at this, you know, years ago I think we went a little too far. I don't know if you'll be able to read all of this � there's a lot on here from Calvin and Hobbs � but usually I think we went a little too far: On the first panel he says, �Nothing I do is my fault. My family is dysfunctional and my parents won't empower me. Consequently, I'm not self-actualized. My behavior is addictive functioning in a disease process of toxic co-dependency. I need holistic healing and wellness before I'll accept any responsibility for my actions.� And the other says, �One of us needs to stick his head in a bucket of ice water.� Then he says, �I love the culture of victimhood.�
So on one hand you've got to look back and say, �Wait a minute! The idea was to get us past there, wasn't it?� The idea was really to turn around and get us past. Then there were some people who just didn't want to get past. They just said, �Just leave me alone,� and they died that way and that was about it. There they were! Then some people just got carried away. They just wanted to make the entire world safe. No one was safe, and they wanted to start intervention earlier and earlier, and it led to this. <Laughter> I think they got a little carried away there, right? Like, �Wow! Take it easy! Take it easy!�
On the other hand, where did we go? What was going on? If you look at certain stuff, if I turn around and look at some of the research and things that I've been doing and I did some studies on, where are the adult children? What's really going on? What happened with adult children?
What I found out in some of my stuff if you're interested � and I don't want to bore you with methodology but you can write to me and I'll send you journal articles and whatever I have � but one is I found out in different ways of measuring it is that about 35 percent of adult children are more than mostly satisfied in their adult lives. Yes, they've been through this, and this happened, and this and this and this, but about 35 percent [are satisfied]. Now interesting, there was a study done in Poland , and what they found out in Poland was 32 percent of adult children were more than mostly satisfied.
Do you want to know what one of the strongest things was in the background of the adult children that were doing very, very well? This is interesting. One of the strongest variables in their background is that they had a very positive image of their non-alcoholic parent as a parent. Isn't that something? Not as a spouse, not as a partner, but as a parent. And how do we translate that today? We translate it to be even broader because as we can see so many changes in families, now what we do is talk about the importance of a caring adult in someone's life. Right? Don't underestimate that. It's like looking back, looking back...the ability to be connected.
It's just like kids dropping out of school in this country. Nine percent of children drop out of school in America every year. If you multiply that out, it's a lot of children...that is a lot of children. But you can go ahead and say, �Why do children drop out?� Yeah, I can give you all of the studies and the blah, blah, blah about education, about why kids drop out, but talk to kids about why they drop out. What you'll find out is the number-one factor why children drop out of school in this country is that from the child's point of view, the child believes that there is not one adult in that building that the child connects with. Connectedness obviously does a lot for people who are in trauma. Don't underestimate that.
Then I found out that about 28 percent of adult children are now struggling with their own chemical dependency. That number did not surprise me since for years and years you've heard the old number of children of alcoholics being about four times more likely to become alcoholic or drug dependent, which is four times more likely than the general population. So when you multiply this out, that 28 percent did not surprise me whatsoever that we're out there really kind of struggling with a lot of their own chemical dependency issues. And then what we found is that, and I think managed care had a lot of do with it as we were denying treatment to people and denying intervention, what we wound up with is there are a lot of people who wind up in revolving doors in mental health, aren't they? I'm sure many of you clinically see people coming back, coming back, and coming back but they're not exactly sure how to handle it.
So it came out about 37 percent are still working on issues or working through denial � in other words, they deny that it had anything to do with that issue. For example, the number one thing in research when I was doing studies on women who had been raised in alcoholic families, and as I've continued to do those studies, one of the things that I've noticed is the number-one thing that would get a daughter of an alcoholic to seek help is not chemical dependency; it was relationship issues. Relationship issues. But think of what 30 and 40 years ago used to go on. Somebody would turn around and they would be seeing the therapist. They come in, and they'd see you as the therapist. And you're getting close to closure with the client or the client sort of wants closure and they don't want to be coming in anymore, and what would they do? They'd wait until the last session or the next-to-last session because you'd be sort of like, �Well, I think we've covered everything. You're feeling pretty good about yourself...� and then wait until right towards the end and say, �You know, I don't know if this has to do with anything that we've been talking about, but I also happen to be a child of an alcoholic,� and you're like, �Hello! Where was this 12 sessions ago?� It was like �What does that mean?� It's bothering them. They're not sure whether this is a closure issue, whether it's something as an aside. Is this related whatsoever? So then all of the sudden when we really started to work with children, adolescents, and adult children, this became very, very strong in the movement, didn't it? It became incredibly, incredibly powerful.
What's happened, and no disrespect to managed care, but in a lot of ways we're back to where we were 25 and 30 years ago because someone is being forced to say, �Look, if you don't identify something in the DSM, you're not getting this.� Even if you do identify it, someone wants to say, �Oh, we'll give you three sessions. We'll give you four sessions. We'll give you...or maybe we'll call again.�
So in a lot of ways, we need to . . . years and years ago, I'll never forget this � there are people in this room whom I love dearly and helped found ACOA, great folks � and they were accused of this too. I'll never forget that somebody turned around in the early years of ACOA and accused all of us founders as missionaries. They said, �You folks are a bunch of missionaries.� This happened in Washington , D.C. , and I remember turning around and saying, �Yeah, and we're damn good at it, too because somebody needs to carry the message.� You know, somebody needed to carry that message. You can catch up on the quantitative side; right now we're looking at the qualitative side, and there are a lot of children and adolescents and adults that are hurting.
So what my fear is right now is that we need to carry that message again because somehow it's being pushed out of the structural system, isn't it? So when we revisit, we need to go back and say we need to revisit to our commitment. We need to go back and say, �Look, wait a minute. This can be associated with this and this and this.� So this is what I see that is going on.
Then the other thing is what was really coming up at the time, too, as we know was every time we heard �adult child� or �ACOA,� all of the sudden what happened in the early years, too, was first we'd start talking about children or children of alcoholics, etc. But what really happened was it kind of got carried away. We got carried away with it really quick.
One of the things is, and Sis was nice enough to remember this, but when I wrote the Children of Alcoholics book, I have to tell you at the time I was not committed to making the world safe for children of alcoholics or this or this. I actually would talk at conferences, and I'd be one of these workshop people that you never really heard anything about; they would just kind of stick me in the back of the room. I'd talk about addiction and the family, but I'd always talk about children. One day somebody was sitting in my audience, and they said to me, �Do you know that section you did about children?� They said, �If you write it, we'll publish it. You've got something,� and I was like �Oh, yeah, sure...�
So anyway, I wrote this book, and I wasn't thinking much about it. I was a doctoral student at the time. It didn't have anything to do with my dissertation or anything, so I wrote this book. I had been director for the Department of Psychiatry for Alcohol and Drug Rehab in the military, and I started programs for children and programs for families, but it wasn't all coming together. So I put this thing together, and the book is ready to come out. The publisher says to me, �There is a major problem with your book.� I was like, �Oh, what?� and he goes, �I hope you don't have any great hopes for it,� and I said, �Thank you for that reality test,� and I said, �What?� He goes, �Well, there's a major problem with your book,� and I said, �What's the problem?� I thought maybe we could fix it. He said, �Well, the problem with your book, it probably won't sell very well.� I said, �Why is that?� and he said, �Well, it's the only one.� And he said, �Why would people buy a book if they're not sensitized to the topic?� I figured he was right; he knew more than I did. I remember 20-some years ago, the number-one selling books in this country were what kind of books, do you know? Cookbooks! What was the second-best selling books? Diet books! It never dawned on people; they were written by the same folks! They didn't care. It was like, �Oh, I'm going to the bank.�
So he comes around saying, �It's the only one,� and I'm thinking this is America ; you've got the only one. Sell that book for $900 a copy! What happened was in a very mild way, all of the sudden that book exploded. It was like getting on lists. It was exploding and it was doing very well. I was like, �Wow! Who bought all of those books?� because I know my mother would not have paid for that many. What we really did not anticipate was that who bought those books were, in fact, adult children of alcoholics who were in bookstores, who were going to places, who even though the book was about children and adolescents, it was the first thing that they saw about their life.
But what happened was this COA issue became an ACOA issue, and it almost took over. In many cases, the children were in the same situation they were in before we started. They were still, as Margaret Quirk said in 1969, forgotten. So in a lot of ways when we look at the movement and we say, �Hey, what's happening?� What really took off and what really catapulted the ACOA movement was actually the term and the phrase what? What really catapulted the ACOA movement? It's not ACOA; what word? Yes, co-dependency because people could identify with this concept of co-dependency regardless of whether or not they were raised in an alcoholic family.
Do I think there's such a thing as co-dependency? Yes. Do I think we got carried away with it? Yes. On the other hand, where did it come from? I don't have a board up here, so you're going to have to follow along. Where did this co-dependency come from? I'm an East Coast person, and I can remember years ago on the East Coast � now you're looking at the late sixties and the seventies, early seventies � all of a sudden people were concerned about drug abuse in the United States and this and this, but on the East Coast they talked a lot about alcoholics. There was a little research going on from about Boston down to the Washington Corridor. Basically, they talked about alcoholics, and life was either you were alcoholic or non-alcoholic. There wasn't much more than that; that's about where you were.
California , interesting stuff starts happening in California . California comes up with a couple of phrases. California talks about alcoholic, co-alcoholic, and then for a while J. L. Greenleaf talked about para-alcoholic. So a lot of people were never really that clear about para-alcoholic, but they liked the alcoholic stuff and they liked the co-alcoholic.
Now, the middle of the country, in the early seventies and middle seventies, the middle of the country, predominantly Minnesota leading the way on so many, many things in the field of addiction, Minnesota comes up with the phrase �chemical dependency.� I remember the first time I heard that. I was living in Michigan . Someone said, �I'm chemically dependent.� I went, �Whoa! Don't mess with him. What do you do, own half of Upjohn or Ely Lily...I'm chemically dependent.� All of the sudden chemical dependency really starts to take off.
What happens with the emphasis with these words? The East Coast kind of just stays where it is. East Coast is either looking at alcoholics...East Coast starts to talk a little bit about children. Some of the early articles about children of alcoholics were coming out of the East Coast.
California is really dominating; and no disrespect if you're from California , but you've got to look at where the emphasis was on in California . California did not put the emphasis on the alcoholic. California did not really put the emphasis on the para-alcoholic; they started to put the emphasis on the co-alcoholic because they started to look a lot at adult issues. And no disrespect, they started to look a lot at self. So what's coming out of there is the co-alcoholics pretty strong.
Now we jump back to the middle of the country. Where is the emphasis in the middle of the country? Where would you expect the emphasis in Middle America to be on? Anybody? Family. That's exactly what happened. Family started to really dominate. The Minnesota models, we've got the 28-day stuff coming in, we've got Hazelden, we've got all kinds of wonderful things happening. So now we've got the stuff on family.
As soon as we hit family, we started to say, �Wow! Let's pay attention to people other than just who's addicted. Let's pay attention to the family members.� And we've got a word out there that's going to be dandy; we've got the phrase �co-alcoholic.� Since we were talking about other drugs, let's drop the �alcoholic�; I like the �co,� and let's talk about �co-chemically dependent people.� So for a while we talked about �co-chemical dependency.� But since most co-chemically people were not chemically dependent, what word did we drop? �Chemical,� and that left us with what? �Co-dependent.� There's a sociological interpretation of a movement that took about ten years, and literally that's what happened.
Now, what I think what's going on is many people who had never been exposed to chemical dependency started to identify with what? Co-dependency, and this is where we got into a lot of trouble. This is where we got into a lot of trouble in the field because the very concept started to have a lot of theoretical vigor to it. Co-dependency, exposure to someone who's chemically dependent. Once it started to be applied indiscriminately and very glibly and very loosely to a lot of situations, it lost that vigor, didn't it? It wound up being a joke on Saturday Night Live. It wound up with Stewart Smalley going, �And darnn it, people really like me and I'm a good person,� you know? It was like, �Wow!� but on the other hand it set us back...it set us back. So I don't know about you, but if I talk about co-dependency, I'm talking about co-dependency as it relates to exposure to chemical dependency. We must have another form somewhere floating around which means co-dependency as it relates to non-chemical dependency. That form I don't know too much about.
But did we turn around and did we learn anything from it? You know, there was a lot of interesting stuff out there; and if you look at some of these models that happened, believe it or not, there are lots of people that tried to put some things together. I don't know if you use any of this in your work, but I thought I'd just expose you to a couple of things. There are some scales out there. There are some validations. There are some instruments. You don't need to look them up now, but they were nice enough to copy all of these things
There's the Spann-Fischer Co-dependency Scale. These things are nice to see. We've come a long way here. We've come a long way with trying to put some teeth into what was conjecture and throwing out some of the stuff we should have put out. The Spann-Fischer Co-dependency Scale assesses co-dependency relative to a couple of things. One, extreme focus outside of self. Now not all of these people agree on all of these, which tells us we still have a long way to go. Extreme focus outside of self. A lack of open expression of feelings. Attempt to derive a sense of purpose through relationships � very, very strong for people. The strongest predictor of co-dependency according to their model was a very low self-esteem. It's interesting; we've talked about that, but it's nice to see it validated a little bit.
On the other hand, have you ever thought of this...have you ever thought that co-dependency � let's go on the negative side � have you ever thought that co-dependency might have been or might be a very, very slick blaming-the-victim concept? And it may be a very gender-biased concept against whom? Women! So we have to watch it because what happens is I can remember many years ago in the late 80s and the early 90s, I can remember a lot of women coming up to me saying, �I'm afraid to admit that I help anyone. I'm afraid to admit that by choice I subjugate my interests today to help you,� or I cared about this person or this person.
What happened is they got too carried away with somebody's definition of co-dependency. If having to give up the best part of your gender is labeled dysfunctional, there is something drastically dysfunctional with that definition. What happens is this: We may know more about how co-dependency is manifested in women than we know how it's manifested in men. It does not mean that men are not co-dependent. It may mean that we don't have a good set of male indicators. Does that make sense to you? In other words, what happens is because those people who are most willing to share their feelings, their insights, their strengths, their doubts, if you go back clinically and look at it, disproportionately they were women. If you go back and you look at the children-of-alcoholics issue and you look for children, and I don't mean it in a patronizing sense or anything else, it owes a tremendous amount of its allegiance to women because it was the daughters of alcoholics in many cases who were the ones willing to help, willing to get the support groups, willing to advocate for children, willing to do a variety of things, etc., etc.
On the other hand, we may know more about how it's manifested in women than it's manifested in men because the indicators came from women. And when you turn around and you give those same instruments to men, what did a lot of men conclude? They concluded that they weren't co-dependent because they don't identify with those indicators, but what we haven't taken the time is to figure out what would be the indicators for men. Does that make sense to you? In a little bit I'll talk to you about gender stuff because so much of my work is there.
We can see here that if you look at gender � and it's not that I know much about women � but if you look at this, men many times derive a sense of themselves by functional interactions and functional accomplishments. Women many, many times identify the sense of themselves by the quality of the interaction of their relationships with other people. So it doesn't surprise me that deriving a sense of purpose through relationships would, in fact, be one of the things that comes up.
On the other hand, we have things like the Co-dependency Assessment Tool, the Hughes-Hammer [Assessment] Tool, which turns around and says, assess co-dependency in terms of other focus, self-neglect, control and boundary issues. We've heard those over and over. Low self-worth, boy, it kind of stays there, doesn't it? It really stays there. Hiding self, repression, denial. Manifestation of medical problems. If you look at the research and you go out there, and you don't want insurance companies getting a hold of this, but for example, ACOAs � Adult Children of Alcoholics � do, in fact, use more sick days. If you look at the research out there, they do in fact use more sick days, but I think it's probably related to depression because it lowers one's immune system. Or the other way to look at it is we're really getting healthy because the first time there's trouble, we're going to the doctor. Medical problems, and obviously, family-of-origin problems.
A great friend and co-founder of NACOA, Timmen Cermak. Tim � Dr. Cermak � many, many years ago, you can see all the way back to 1986, Tim, what he tried to do at the time, he really tried to see whether or not co-dependency may, in fact, be able to get into the DSM. Tim did a lot of work trying to look at diagnostic criteria that might go into something like that. You have a copy. This is Tim's work, and it was just great. What's happened is the type of research that needs to be done has never been done to get it in. Tim was looking at that co-dependent traits could be widespread and the diagnosis of co-dependent personality disorder � gave it a great name � can only be made in the face of identifiable dysfunction resulting from excessive rigidity or intensity associated with these traits. He did not necessarily say that it had to be chemical-dependency exposure. Then he went on, as you can see in your handout, he went on to talk about a lot of stuff.
But, again, there's our old friend self-esteem up there � assumption of responsibility for meeting others' needs at the exclusion of your own � very, very strong in there. Women identified with that much stronger. If you look at co-dependency in women, co-dependency in women may have been manifested by the over-identification...the over-identification with others' needs and the under-identification of your own needs. Co-dependency in males may not be the opposite. Co-dependency in males may be the under-identification of others' needs and the under-identification of your own needs. As a matter of fact, I read a very interesting article the other day that said working on co-dependency may, in fact, benefit males; it may, in fact, hamper some women because it may have him turning around and identifying with other people where in the past he wasn't. So it's an interesting speculation to see what's going to happen with that over x-number of years.
Timm talked, too, about reliance on denial, constriction of emotions, depression, hypervigilence, compulsions, anxiety, substance abuse, recurrent physical or sexual abuse, stress � here we are again with related medical illnesses � and has remained in a primary relationship with an active substance abuser for at least two years without seeking help. So, again, that exposure to someone...another way of looking at it.
Then we had something like � and, again, you have these handouts; Potter-Effron talked about co-dependency � exposure to alcohol or drugs at least six months, consequently falling five or six characteristics. Progressive defeat � how many clients have you had where you try to talk to them and they're like, �Yeah, um-hum, okay, if you say so. I tried that once. Maybe...� Right? And you're like, �Hello! Is anybody home?� Living in fear, my goodness! Living in fear all of the time, and I see people do that. One of the things about co-dependency and living in fear is this: did you ever think that somebody living in co-dependency is paying some pretty high prices? Do you know what one of the best things to do when you're trying to work somebody through that is there is a wonderful price-fear equation for people? That is, a lot of times what happens is people are in denial, not about their situation, but people deny the prices they pay. �Oh, it wasn't that bad. It wasn't....� this and this. When I believe that my fear is stronger than the prices I pay, I'll continue to pay those prices, right? When the prices are stronger or greater than my fear, I'm probably ready to listen to you. So one of the things that we're trying to do now is to what? To facilitate people through their fear, to get them through their fear and not to turn around and look at the prices.
One of the things I did is that I went back in, and we've all heard and we've all seen this thing about what used to be called in adult children the �grocery list�...the �laundry list�...the characteristics of adult children, and it sort of looked like this. So I'm reading this one time many years ago, I'm reading this and the question is, �How do you know? How do you know that these are characteristics of adult children?�
Well, basically these are clinical observations. So what I did is I turned around and said, �Wait a minute! If adult children are in fact affected by the experience, if they are in fact different, then they aren't different by absolute; they're different by degree� because this was always written as �yes� or �no.� You would say, �Yes, I do this� or �No, I don't do this.� So I said, �No, no, no!� And I said, �How do you know that everybody doesn't identify with this?� So what I did was I put it on a Leichert-type scale � one to five. Then I went out and tested it in 38 states on sixteen hundred and some adults. About a thousand of them were adult children of alcoholics, and the other 600 or 700 were people raised in alcoholic families. So I had a control group in the study as well.
People were so excited about the study because there were so many adult children. It was the first time that somebody had actually sat down and asked quantitatively and qualitatively about their life. The study was going great until a lot of the adult children found out there was a control group. I got all kinds of telephone calls and E-mails and messages that said, �I heard there was a control group in this study.� I said, �Well, yes there is,� and the adult children said, �I want to be in the control group.� <Laughter> I said, �No, it's not that kind of group. This is for methodological purposes.� �Well, I think I have problems with that, too, and I'm not going to be in your study unless we can come to the control group.� I said, �All right, I'll tell what, we'll have Control Group A and Control Group B. Will you stay in the study?� They got together and called me up and said they'd be glad to if they could be in the �A� group. So much for research!
So here we have, and we've all seen this laundry list of what's normal, and I'm reading this thing. Iinitially, it's like, �I'm concerned about intimacy in my relationships.� I'm thinking to myself, �Well, I hope so! No offense, I don't want to be in a relationship with you if you're not.� About the most flaming co-dependent statement I ever heard was in the 1970s, no disrespect to this author, Erich Segal. What was the statement? Yeah, isn't it interesting, it's always the women who know that! �Love means never having to say you're sorry.� Oh, there's a great, wonderful, flaming co-dependent statement. Boy, do I want to be in a relationship with you! You can do anything you want whatsoever, and you're never accountable and you don't have to apologize. It's in the DSM under �sociopath.� It's like, �Oh, please, date me!� <Laughing.> Whoa! I hope you're concerned about intimacy in a relationship.
So what I did was I went out, and I tested these things on a Leichert Scale. What I found out were some very, very interesting things. One of the things I found out was guess what? All adults identify with these things to a certain degree, but what I did find out is that adult children identify with these characteristics 28 percent more than those from non-alcoholic families. When I tested it for test of significance � and again, I don't want to bore you; you can get the journal article � those differences were, in fact, statistically significant.
Now I turned around and said, �Wait a minute! The control group has to score higher on some of these 20 items.� See, I know the control group is going to score higher. What happened in the study was this: Twenty out of twenty times, the ACOA's always scored higher. Not only did they score higher, but the higher scores were statistically significant twenty out of twenty times. So what I was looking at and what I think we were coming up with was not a clinical diagnosis to put in the DSM. I think what we were coming up with is what I'm going to refer to as an ACOA Syndrome.
Now, I think there's a big difference between being an adult child and being co-dependent. For years what happened was people were treating those as almost as if they were one and the same. One of those is situational; the other is developmental, and I think we need to keep that clear. You are born or raised in an addicted family and you are a child of an alcoholic; that is a situation you found yourself in. Co-dependency is developed; it's not situational. Do you understand what I'm getting at? There's a lot of disrespect to many children of alcoholics or adult children of alcoholics by assuming that the individual is suffering from co-dependency. No, we don't know that. You don't diagnose a situation; it's just a situation.
What do I know as being in the field? Sure, there is a high probability of certain types of outcome, but do you know that almost 75 percent of children of alcoholics do not develop a chemical dependency? Now they're still four times more likely than the population at large. They may have other types of issues and other types of things. Does that make sense to you why I'm pointing it out? One is situational; the other is developmental. So let's take it easy in our earnestness.
The other thing is I turned around and I said, �Look, maybe this instrument is gender biased.� That was another question we looked at...maybe it was gender biased. See, and I thought it might be biased towards whom? Women. So I went out and checked that out again. What I found out was in the control group the scores were dead even. I mean to the thousandths of a point, the scores were dead even on ten items. Women scored higher on six; men scored higher on four. For all intents and purposes, you throw that right out the window. But in the adult children of alcoholics group, women scored higher 19 out of 20 times, and those differences were statistically significant. We're going to have to go back to this: We either still don't know much about men coming from addicted families and we have a biased instrument and we need to improve it, or women were much more honest about their feelings, their situations, etc. I don't know, but what I do know that it was an indicator; and as an indicator, we've got to do a little more work.
Now just because we have these out there, so what? What does this really tell us? Does it tell us anything whatsoever? So what I wanted to do, I wanted to go a little bit further and measure � you know, what's actually being measured here when we look at these. And what we come up with is a variety of things. Just because we have these 20 characteristics, what should you look for in your work? What I found out is that these things actually measure seven different dimensions for the adult child. What happens is that these seven dimensions can give you kind of an idea of what to look for � where the problems are.
By doing factorial and discriminative analysis, I was able to collapse this down and take a look at it, etc. So for example, one of the things that's being measured is perceived isolation � and again, you have this in your handout so you don't have to write it down � one of the things being measured is perceived isolation, and I have which items correlate with that. So if you score the test, you can take a look at that. Perceived isolation, what's the buzz word there? �Perceived,� that's exactly right. Most of the time people talk about �isolation, isolation,� but the buzz word there is �perceived.�
Two of the things that I've seen for a very long time with adult children, two things that seem to really stand out is there are a lot of adult children having a tremendous belief that they're very unique and a feeling of being isolated. �My belief is I'm unique; my feeling is I'm isolated.� When I ask people, �Do you believe you're unique?� most adult children would say, �No.� If I said to them, �Do you believe you're different from other people?� what did they say? �Yes.� Right away they would say �Yes.� Now, watch what happens: The more I think I am different from you, the less I am going to interact with you; the less I interact with you, consequently, the more isolated I feel; and the more isolated I feel, do you know what it does? It validates my thinking because the more isolated I feel just indicates to me how different I am in the first place. Does that make sense to you?
This was amazing. Years ago I'd turn around, and you'd be doing stuff, children of alcoholics or adult children, and reporters would interview you. Sometimes it's amazing the questions that they would ask. I mean, I used to make answers up just to yank their chain to see if they were paying attention. I did. People would say to me, �Why did you do anything on children of alcoholics? Why something on children of alcoholics?� I'd think for a minute and kind of wrinkle up my brow and pull my beard, and then I'd say, �Well, you know, there are more children of alcoholics in the United States than there are alcoholics,� and the reporter would write it down like �That was the most insightful statement I've ever heard in my life!� But the other thing is I would get somebody saying, �Where are all of the children of alcoholics? Where are the adult children? I don't see them.�
Well, secretly we all have T-shirts on that say ACOA underneath. Actually, I did find out where most of them were in those years. I'm much better now; it took me awhile to learn, but I'm much better now. I used to be dumb enough...when I got on an airplane, I used to be stupid enough to tell the person next to me what I did. Oh, I have learned! No way! Just like the person sitting next to me, all I wanted was that empty seat. When I do a workshop or something, it may not look like I'm working, but I'm going to give you everything that I have. I'm going to leave it all on the floor, and when I get on the plane I'm good for about five minutes and then I just melt. I just want to be left alone. Oh, I used to be so dumb. The person next to me would say, �What do you do?� and I'd say, �Well, basically I just try to help people put their lives back together and maybe feel a little bit better about themselves, and particularly those who come from really, really, troubled families.� Well, guess who was raised in an alcoholic family?! I'm like, �I don't want to hear it. Excuse me, I'm on an emotional diet right now, and I'm not...� I just goof people around because you can't believe what people would say to you. I goof people around all of the time. People say the most unbelievable things to you, and I just want to be quiet. I knew what it was leading up to, like �What do you do?� I didn't want to hear it, so I get on the plane...people will just...it's amazing; they have scripts. Years ago, transactional analysis � games people play...you know, scripts. You get up in a plane...I'm up in the air for an hour. I am 35,000 feet in the air, and the person next to me says, �Where are you going?� <Laughter> I don't want to talk to them, and I say, �Gee, I'm learning to self-actualize. I'm learning to make a lot of choices in my life, but this is one of the times I'm not choosing. I'm going wherever the plane goes.� <Laughter> They look at me like, �What a weirdo!� and that's what I wanted. I didn't want them to talk, but sometimes they won't quit. They're persistent, and they go, �Oh, no, no, really! Where are you going?� �Well, Boston , of course.� It's great. They jump up. They run down the aisle; �Flight Attendant, I'm on the wrong plane. What am I going to do?� The flight attendant tells them the truth. They come back, they're mad, they get their stuff, and they move � which is what I wanted all along! <Laughter>
But you've got to start thinking about, wow, so many people up there. So many people...22 million adults in this country minimum were raised just in alcoholic families, let alone all of the other types of families with trauma. It is the largest group of unique people I've ever met. But sometimes the message has to be subtle with people for breaking through. You know that working with clients. How do you get them to break through? For example, look at the person next to you. Oh, go ahead, risk! You should see your faces. <Laughter> People are going, �This isn't going to be one of those close experiences, is it? I don't want to go that far back. If he uses the word �share,' I'm getting up to leave.� <Laughter> Look at the person on the other side of you that you didn't look at.
Okay, judging from some of your responses, the person you looked at second was a little weirder than the person that you looked at first. That's all right; I get paid to interpret these results. But think about this: If you look to your right, left, front, back, sideways, whatever it happened to be, there is a person sitting next to you or relatively close to you � someone you know, someone maybe who dragged you here today, maybe a friend, a relative, a colleague, a person you work with, or maybe it's just a person that you're occupying time and space with right now. Think about this, and I would challenge you from this moment, and from this afternoon, and from this conference, and from this day in your life in Las Vegas, and from this moment, if any of you by any chance are in a dysfunctional situation where you come from pain or trauma, unless you now choose to be, you are no longer alone. Sometimes the message needs to be that subtle, doesn't it? Because I now gave ourselves or gave us something that we didn't think we had growing up, and that was what? Choice. And it makes it...you know, to break that isolation.
Another thing that's being measured is inconsistency. I saw in the recent inconsistency a lot of adult children appear to be very, very consistent, but their consistency was in meeting other people's needs. Very consistent with �I'll help you and you and you� but highly inconsistent in self-care.
Another problem that's being measured is self-condemnation -- self-condemnation when you're being very, very difficult on yourself.
Two things that really, really stood out from the research for a lot of the adult children from trauma were varying degrees of depression and issues of self-esteem. That's over and over again through a lot of different research, varying degrees of depression and issues of self-esteem. Self-condemnation. You can fairly well bet the ranch that the person who comes to see you many times who has survived trauma and is coming to see you clinically, at that time you can pretty much bet the ranch that they don't like themselves too much. They really don't expect too much of themselves, do they? Have you ever been in a situation where people don't expect much of you? Some of you in here are probably great about everything. Do you remember being a kid picking up sides for a team? Do you remember that? People have different ways of doing it, and you use baseball bats and all of that stuff to pick up sides. Did you ever notice, or did you ever think about this � it tells you how cerebral I am because I lie awake at night coming up with this stuff � did you ever notice that the next-to-the-last kid is actually the last kid who's really picked? Did you ever notice that? The last kid is never picked; it's the next-to-last kid. Some children will turn around, and they'll do this...someone's going to pick up sides, and you'll get some children as soon as someone is picking up sides, they'll start counting...ten, eleven...eleven...because they were counting to what? See if it's odd or even. Isn't it interesting, a lot of those children did not count themselves first. They didn't go �One, two, three...� they counted everyone and then said they were eleven. So what did they want to do? They wanted to save face. They wanted to save pain. They wanted to save trauma. So what did they do? They turned around and said, �Hey, listen, I couldn't play the whole game, really. I'll stick around for a little bit and keep score, and then I've got to go.� Gotta save face, right?
How many people come out of addicted families, and do you know what's going on? It's that feeling that you're not as good as other people. You mimic things, you go through the motions, you this, this, and this, but you don't feel as good as other people. Then you turn around and wind up as an adult sitting in the therapist's thing, and you've got self-esteem issues all over the place, low self worth. Your self-concept is, �I'm not as good as other people, and it makes me feel...� So what happens is you're going to play some basketball or something. You're going to play some ball out on the playground. So the kids are picked up. As soon as they pick the ninth person, five people start going down to that end of the court; the other four don't do anything; they start going down to their end of the court. Some of you were great; but some of us, remember, we were just standing there going, �You guys got me.� Right now, what did they expect of the last kid? Not too much. What did the last kid expect of him or herself? Not too much. Even though we're talking adult children now, I'm going to tell you what: Expectations, expectations, expectations�self-condemnation, self-condemnation, self-condemnation�I'm going to tell you what, expectations need to be high...need to be high in therapy, and in practice, and in working. No one under any circumstances whatsoever rises to low expectations. No child rises to low expectations. I don't want to hear it. They'll tell me you come out of this background or this background; you're talking to the wrong marine here. I don't want to hear it. And maybe I'm never going to get there, and maybe I'm not going to have this or this or this, but I don't want to see it in your eyes, I don't want it in your treatment program, and maybe I won't get there, but at least I have the right to try. That's enough. Self-condemnation.
Sometimes what happens is cognitively � behavior cognitively � and you get people to re-frame their thinking, don't you? Baseball, Little League...most of the men in here, if you weren't any good in Little League, where did they tell you to play? Right field, every guy knows that. There's even a wonderful song, �Here In Right Field.� Well, there I am a young boy in Western Pennsylvania out there in right field one day, eleven years old, watching the dandelions grow knowing that years from now I'm going to write a book about this. I had a lot of time to think in right field. The other team's screaming at their players, �Hit it...� where?
AUDIENCE: Right field.
ACKERMAN: Right field. My team's praying no one hits it where?
AUDIENCE: Right field.
ACKERMAN: Right field, that's it. It's called cognitive dissonance. When you're a kid, you don't know what's going on. I'm out there one day in right field figuring out no one ever expects anything of me; but then I'm being a boy, Little-League raised in Western Pennsylvania, and I'm out there thinking one day, and I said, �Wait a minute! A little re-framing here!� I thought to myself, �The greatest baseball player I know plays right field. As a matter of fact, in Pittsburgh on the Pittsburgh Pirates, he's called The Great One: Roberto Clemente.� I thought about that out there in right field, and somehow I walked in differently after that inning. Somehow I was a little different when I ran into people, and they said, �Do you play Little League?� �Yeah, yeah.� �Where do you play?� �Oh, me and Roberto, we play right field!� It might be facetious, but you know, it's not just as simple for someone to believe in you. You've got to learn to believe in yourself. It's very, very hard when you think everyone is better than you, and I don't mean that in a narcissistic sense. Do you understand what I'm getting at? And we see that with our clients all of the time. We see it in our clients all of the time.
We turn around, and control needs is being measured. Here's our old friend, control needs. Here's a good one! For years I thought one of the most incredible things fabricated on adult children was the issue of control. What's the operative word here? How many of you think it's �control�? How many think it's �needs�? Okay. I'm not running for office with you people; you don't vote! <Laughter> Yeah, the disproportionate word here is �needs.� What you find is it's a disproportionate need for control. I think one of the greatest myths fabricated on adult children is that they are very controlling people. No, negative, get rid of it! Throw that away. What happens is most children of alcoholics, most children of addicts, are raised in a situation that's out of control; and the best that you attempt to do when you're in a situation that's out of control is attempt to become a counter-controller, isn't it? Remember our old homeostasis models and balance models and systems models in family therapy? So what happens is when a situation is out of control, someone attempts to become a counter-controller. Some of those counter-controlling behaviors are doing things that you typically wouldn't do because the situation is out of control. It's like turning around and saying if we're all an alcoholic family � I'll just use that as an example � if we're all one alcoholic family here and we're all grown up, and you handle it this way, and you do this, and you do this and this, and I do this, there are some similarities and differences, but what we learn are adapted patterns of interaction. That's what we learn.
Now, if we could step outside of ourselves and see ourselves in the context of this addictive family, would we think our interactive patterns are positive or negative for us in this context? We'd see them as positive. Quite simply, why? They work. Don't rock the boat. It gets me through the day. It gets me through the day, right?
For example, when I was growing up, we had the exact same thing for dinner every night. Seven days a week, 365 days a year, we had the exact same thing for dinner. Some of you are saying, �Well, what did you have?!� What we had for dinner every night was tension. Man, that's what we had for dinner. You'd stay away from the table for as long as you could because you didn't want to be there. And you'd stay away for as long as you could until if you didn't show up, you were going to get clobbered. You'd finally show up, keep your head down, and east as fast as you could. And you hoped what? No one says a word; don't notice me, don't say a word, because if anybody said anything, here we go, �You're dumb. You're stupid. You don't know what you're talking about. When are you going to learn anything? You're just like your mother.� Lots of pain, but you'd sit there as fast as you could, eat as fast as you could, and get out of there. Now let me ask you a question: At the time, did I think that was functional? Absolutely and positively, okay?
Now, you come out of here, and you're saying to yourself, �I'm never going to be like that. No way! If I'm ever involved, I'm going to be there. I'm going to be there for my partner. I'm going to have intimacy, and I'm going to do this. And if I have a family, I'm going to be involved in this and this and this, and I'm never going to be like that.� And so I'm going to come out here and interact with you folks. This is great! You people represent potentially positive relationships � better known as healthy people. If you've never been around one, try it. It's an incredible experience. I keep trying to diagnose them because I'm not used to this stuff!
But anyway, I'm going to interact with you using which skills? The ones I learned over there. In this context, are my interacting skills positive or negative? Yeah, you say negative right away; but you know, hopefully if you hang around with me long enough, you're going to say �positive.� You bring a lot of great qualities and a lot of great strengths with you. But if your self-esteem is low, if your depression is there, if your self-condemnation is there, would we really acknowledge our assets and our qualities? Probably not. What we're going to do is we're going to accentuate what we think is negative. We're going to have some problems, etc., etc.
So I see this, control needs, and one of the things I see, too, is the disproportionate need for control usually falls in three areas. One, some come out of it and have a disproportionate need to want to control situations. They do not feel comfortable unless they're in a situation where they feel in control. Secondly, there are some who absolutely think that they want to control relationships. And third, there are some who turn around and say that they believe that they must maintain total control over what, what about themselves? Feelings or emotions. They believe they must maintain control over their feelings or emotions. Why? Because maintaining control over those feelings or emotions has allowed them to survive.
Now, if you want to scare an adult child to death initially, one of the worst things that you can do first, one of the worst things that you can do with children in a situation or adolescents or adults is to say, �The problem with you is that you're not in touch with your feelings.� �Well, thank you for adding to my litany of behaviors. Do you want to scare me to death? No, not being in touch with my feelings has allowed me to survive, and now you're telling me that the problem with me is �you're not being in touch with your feelings.'� So take it easy; you'll get there with it. You'll get there with it, but a disproportionate need for control.
Sometimes you've got to look at it differently. If you work with children and someone comes up to you and says, �Do you work with children?� and a child comes up to you and says in some capacity, �Hey, if I tell you something, will you promise not to tell anyone?� in a lot of things you can't do that because of your occupation. So the child goes away, and you think, �Wow! The child really didn't share. I wonder what the problem was.� Well, you think the interactive problem is trust; but with people coming out of very traumatic situations, you have to look. You might think the issue is trust. Don't waste your time many times trying to convince people in traumatic situations that they can trust you. �Really, you can trust me. Honest, I'm very trustworthy,� because do you know what's going on with them? There's something even stronger than that issue of trust. What's really, really permeating is this issue of control. The scariest of all trust is not cars, money, or reputation; the scariest of all trust is personal trust. �Can I trust you with information about myself?� and what I'm going to have to trust is that at a later point you won't use that information against me or to harm me. But watch this: Do you know what I believe? If I don't share it, I control it. Once I share it, I believe I no longer control it. So sometimes you've got to look a little deeper.
Approval needs. Disproportionate need for approval. We can see the ones that are correlated here.
Rigidity was being measured in the instrument. Rigidity: Locking yourself into courses of action without looking at the consequences. Avoiding conflict or aggravating it, but you rarely deal with it. Tremendous amount of rigidity and a tremendous fear of failure.
These were the seven things that came out of that instrument. Now what we did was the last thing, and you can see it, and that was what we did with that instrument was we actually tried to validate it as an instrument. You know that methodologically that's a very tedious process that takes a long time. But what happened was we were able to validate that as an instrument, and we were able to get some really good stuff and publish it, etc. What we found out � don't be running off to therapy if you added up your score � but what we found out is that there was a cutoff point in there. Where we had somebody with a 56 or higher, there was a two-thirds probability that you have an adult child. As the score would go up, so did the probability factor go up. So it was nice to see that what a lot of the early clinicians were talking about, we were able to validate that.
One of the things that I wanted to mention with the little bit of time left is one of my favorite things, and that is about adult children. So much of my work over the last 15 years has been looking at not just children and adult children, but trying to do this, and that is obviously not all people who come from dysfunctional families are affected, nor are they all affected the same way. As a matter of fact, years ago I was absolutely amazed. I've met more adult children of alcoholics whose siblings do not consider themselves to be children of alcoholics. I thought that was a pretty neat trick. You've got four people growing up, four different outcomes, and four totally different perceptions of what was going on.
That's why years ago I wrote a book called Same House, Different Homes . There were eight different dimensions; you have them on the back page of your handouts so I'm not going to go through those, but one of those things certainly is cultural considerations. Very, very important for who we are. You know, we turn around glibly and say we're all the same; but no, we don't have all of the family cultural things that are the same. We don't have the same opportunities. If I'm an Irish-Catholic, is that different than if I'm African-American, if I'm Hispanic-Latino, if I'm Native American? If I'm Baptist and I have somebody who's an alcoholic, is that different? Certainly people say that they want an appreciation of who they are in their families.
Years ago I was speaking in Boston. I was doing an evening presentation on relationships, which I just love to do. I'm up on the stage ranting and raving and having a wonderful time. I call it �elbow talks� when you do relationships because I can see the audience. I'm up there talking about relationships, and people in the audience are doing this to their partners. People are going, �Man, quit hitting me!� �Well, he's talking about you. Pay attention to this!�
A woman turned around in the audience � you know, this was one of these auditoriums that had about 900 people; it was just packed � the woman turned around in the audience. She didn't put her hand up or anything, and she shouts out at me in the middle of the audience, in the middle of what I'm doing, she said, �What nationality are you?� and I thought � because it was at Harvard � and I thought, �I'm giving the wrong talk. I'm in the wrong.� And she said, �What nationality are you?� and she just kept interrupting me. I knew what she wanted; but since she kept interrupting, I wasn't going to give in to her. <Laughter> She said, �What nationality are you?� I said, �I'm an American.� �No really, what are you?� I said, �Really, I'm an American. I was raised here. I fought for this place. I served here. I am an American,� and she said, �No really, what is the origin of your ancestry?� and I knew she wasn't going to quit, so I said, �Well, if that's what you're getting at, I'm German.� She yelled back at me, she said, �You can't be German.� I thought, �Isn't that what I just told you?� She said, �You can't be German,� and I said, �Pardon me?� She said, �You're too warm, you're too animated, you're too passionate.� I said, �All right, I'm a recovering German!� Boy, do we label people.
One of the things I would like you to keep in mind and one of the things that I think has helped so much for me is trying to develop a gender appreciation in our work to help people. And I'm not talking about dichotomizing everything. I'm not talking about �Women are from Venus and Men Are from Mars.� No disrespect for John Gray, but you know what happens is here you have three clients. I'd just like you to think about this. You have three clients, the A, B, and C client. The A client has something less than the C and the B client. The hypothesis basically works like this: All of us in here are products of gender socialization. What I mean by that � not sexual preference but gender socialization � the ideas, the attitudes, and the expected behaviors that we think are appropriate for our gender, and we hold them for the other gender, don't we?
How old are we when this starts? Right here, right? You know, it doesn't start as an adult; it starts right away. Did you ever think of this: What happens to gender socialization when it occurs in a dysfunctional situation? We've just always assumed that it has no impact. No, no, no. When you look at some of the stuff in the research, one of the things that's very strong is gender socialization, and a dysfunctional situation often emerges as a rigid and extremely rigid stereotypic socialization. One of the things that many, many families where there's addiction are very rigid about is gender socialization: Women do this, men to that; girls do this, boys do this. So what I've thought about is this...my hypothesis works like this: The more the person that you're working with, the more that adult child that you're working with adheres to a stereotypic gender socialization about herself or himself, the more difficult it's going to be for that individual to work through his or her issues. Does that make sense? The more they adhere to stereotypic gender socialization, the more difficult it is to work through their issues. Why? Quite simplistically, because there's not a lot of room for growth. Do you understand what I'm getting at?
When I wrote Silent Sons , first I did Perfect Daughters , etc., etc. on women, and then I wrote Silent Sons , a companion book, and it compares men to men � men from functional families to men from dysfunctional families. I'm out interviewing a lot of men, and I'm interviewing this one man who I knew had been through all kind of stuff. Anytime I'd ask him about it, what did he say? A great guy quote. �I'm fine! I'm fine!� I wouldn't back off. I just kept hanging in there hammering, and finally he turns around and he says to me, �All right, all right, all right...� and he literally stood up. He got up, and he's posturing and drawing himself all up, and he goes, �All right, all right, all right...� and then he starts pointing at me, and he goes, �I do have a lot of issues.� It's like, �Whoa! Turn this tape recorder on. Here we go. We're going to write a book.� But he goes, �I do have a lot of issues,� and he's doing this to me and goes, �but let me tell you something else. I've got a lot of feelings about those issues.� I'm like, �Whew! We're on a roll now. Here we go. This is good.� But then he stops and he points at me, and he says to me, �I'm going to tell you something about me and my feelings. Before I feel anything, I want to make sure I feel like a man.� Then he pointed at me and he said, �Do you got that?� And every man in here knows exactly what he meant. Think of what he said. I thought right away when he said that, �New book! Here we go, titled Before I Feel Anything, I Want to Feel Like a Man , subtitled You Got That ?� <Laughter> I was excited because I knew it was going to be a short book; I could do it right away.
Do you know what he was telling me? He goes, �Yeah, I got a lot of pain. I've got a lot of stuff inside, and I've got a lot of stuff that's been there for years, but I'll tell you what. If in order to deal with this pain I need to change my image, I'd rather keep my image and keep the pain.� Of course, a woman could say the same thing, right? Could say the same thing. So when you go back and you think about that, if you possibly can, have an appreciation for gender and appreciation for how we see things and we don't see things.
I want to close and leave you. There are so many, many things out here to talk about, but one of the things about closing is that people are always out there, and for the longest time people would say, �Well, I don't know if I can take care of myself. I need motivation.� Oh, get out of my office, I need motivation! Just a lot of stuff out there. We can all have motivators and everything else, and they're all over the place when you look at it, but there's also a thing called de-motivators, and I kind of like them. These are some de-motivators:
Here's dysfunction: The only consistent feature of all of your dissatisfying relationships is you. This cuts through a lot of stuff with clients, okay? Trust me here! �It's not me, it's not me! I don't know, maybe I should be better. I don't know...� Mediocrity, and they go through life with mediocrity. Here it is, mediocrity. It takes a lot less time, and most people won't notice the difference until it's too late. People sitting there with their limitations. Yeah, you and your limitations, okay? Until you spread your wings, you'll have no idea how far you can walk. It's like �Come on! Come on! Come on!�
Anybody in here ever burned out? You're the kind of people I want to work with. I can tell you that because in order to burn out means that at one point you had to have been on fire. Mediocre people don't burn out, do they? No, they just sit in the office next to yours! <Laughter>
Burnout: Attitudes are contagious. Mine might kill you. Motivation. Yeah, we're going to get you some motivation. If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job � the kind robots will be doing soon.
Here's a de-motivator; we all have de-motivators: Sometimes the solution to all of the morale problems is to just fire all of the unhappy people. Then everyone is sitting around waiting for somebody else to do it, right? They're waiting for somebody else to do it.
Leaders: Yeah, yeah, leaders. Leaders are like eagles. We don't have either of them here.
This one I really love: It's not me, it's not me! Irresponsibility. No single raindrop believes that it is to blame for the flood. Aren't these some messages that you'd like to say to people?
Anyone in here a procrastinator? Well, we'll put yours up later! <Laughter> I'm sorry. Procrastination: Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now. Watch what kind of groups you put yourself in. [Idiocrasy]: Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Finally, I leave you with this. You know, it's like, �Come on! You've got to get going here!� Indifference: It takes 43 muscles to frown and 17 to smile, but it doesn't take any to sit there with a dumb look on your face!
Last, I do this. I thank you, and then we're going to take a break and then introduce our next speaker.
I want to close with this because I really believe it, and I like it...I wrote it! This is the very, very last chapter of the book Silent Sons . Don't worry, I'm not going to read you the last chapter, but I titled it �Pain, Power, Peace, and Potential,� which is really what I heard from so many adult children and from so many of the men: pain, power, peace, and potential. The first quote, of course, is from [Kamoo], that in the depth of winter I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer.
Then another couple of paragraphs are from me: Ludwig von Beethoven was a silent son. He was severely abused as a boy by an alcoholic father, and he had an alcoholic mother who placed him in a cloister. He suffered many of the emotions and physical injuries of all silent sons, yet he functioned, survived, and thrived in spite of his past. Even now his work survives him and adds great beauty to this world. Beethoven expressed himself through his creativity. He allowed his creativity to flow, but he constantly was plagued by his past. He himself struggled against alcohol use and other problems, but he went on to become one of the greatest composers. The worse thing that could have happened to a composer happened to Beethoven. He eventually went deaf as a result of the beatings he had received from his father. He could no longer hear his own works. This did not stop him. Instead, he reached inside of himself and continued to write music. In spite of all that happened to him, he was still able to find beauty in this world, and more importantly, in himself. He was able to rise above his past and reach his potential. He was not to be denied. He composed by listening to his own music. He composed by listening to himself. His last work was the Ninth Symphony, and it was in this symphony that this deaf silent son who knew addiction, pain, and despair included the immortal work �Ode to Joy.�
<End of recording.> |