Compassionate Boundary Setting for ACA’s & Co-Dependents

Overcoming Fear of Abandonment & Fear of Abuse at the Bottom of “The Bottom.”

"In all our relationships each one of us builds an image of the other, and these two images have a relationship, not the human beings themselves." - Jiddu Krishmurti

I have seen the phenomenon so many times now in the world of co-dependent adult children (see Anonymous, Anonymous, and Whitfield), that my sense is that it must be more than merely “widespread.” My sense is that it is a stage that many – perhaps most – in their recovery from “common cult-ural child abuse” must work through.

My not-okay inner child (see above plus Berne, and Harris) had become so normalized (see Henry) to the expectation of being abused again as a child that my sense of trust (as Erikson used the word) was largely compromised and twisted into an expectation of harm.

No surprise, then, that in a 12 Step world full of recovering abusers, as well as abusees, that not-okay inner child saw potential abusers, as well as abusees, in many of his fellow recoverees. Shortly after entering “advanced” 12 Step recovery two decades ago, I began to feel very ill-at-ease around many of the others in the meetings. Through Karpman’s eyes, I could see the “rescuers,” the “covert controllers,” and the “persecutors,” as well as the “victims” in the Drama Triangle (see Garrett, and Karpman) right before me in the meeting rooms. Without realizing it, my abuse-fearing, not-okay inner child began to set overly dense boundaries (see Anonymous, Anonymous, Beattie, Evans, Mellody, Schaef, Weinhold & Weinhold, and Whitfield) between itself and the others there.

It didn’t take long for the overly thick boundaries to morph into unrecognized, perfectionistic, judgmental disgust. Unaware of what was going on, my not-okay inner child led me right out of those meetings and back into its world of borderline-organized over-neediness here and suspicious distrust there (see Garrett, Kernberg, Masterson, and Meissner).

Recognizing a return to increasingly uncomfortable co-dependence some years later, I trotted my self back into CoDA and ACA, only to re-discover that same, distrust-driven judgmentalism and increasing disgust with the Karpman Drama Triangle dynamics I saw in the meetings. By then, however, I’d had the benefit of much further education and experience, which set me on a path towards un-covering and being able to define and describe the phenomenon I was not only seeing in myself, but in so many others.

As was my experience in other, more “basic” 12 Step meetings, I began to see that there tends to be a common path of progress in CoDA and ACA (as well as Alanon). And it is this: Having gone so long without functional boundaries and having played “doormat” for so many others, many recovering co-dependents parrot the new concept of boundary-setting... and start flipping back and forth from extremes of the overly thin, diffuse and porous boundaries to overly thick, solid and dense boundaries.

We pull others towards us, suddenly experience them as threatening (or at least, “disgusting”), and push them away. Then, of course, we get anxious and pull them back. And, and, and.

And no one points it out. The mass market and “conference-approved” literature, mostly from the 1980s and ‘90s, barely discusses the issue at all, and if it does, does not dig into it in any depth. Worse, however, I have seen that without illumination, discussion and regular reminders, the socially normalized polarities of all-good or all-bad, all-right or all-wrong, all-or-nothing flip-flopping become set in concrete.

My observation over 20 years is that it is so perverse, widespread, mutually reinforced and socially normal among recoverees of all types that it hardens into a unconscious pattern of flip-flopping between absolute boundaries here and total abandonment of boundaries there. (It looks to me like it’s a “way of life” in the large AA club or NA group.)

The men and women who cannot see, acknowledge, “radically accept” (see Brach, Hayes et al, and Linehan) their continuing sex and romance addiction (see Mellody) provide very obvious examples. They “talk the talk” but cannot “walk the walk.” They can parrot the homilies from the literature... and they should; it’s very often how we “get it.” Many may even share in depth and detail how they have “broken through” and “set firm boundaries” against a narcissistic or dependent – or abusive – mate, only to allow their boundaries to collapse again when the anxieties built on their other fear of abandonment begins to resurface.

Black and white, all or nothing absolutism works poorly in politics, in religion, and in personal relationships (see Beck et al, Dyer, Ellis et al, Knaus, Meichenbaum, Rokeach, Ruggiero, and Wessler et al). But it is very deeply ingrained in the unidentified, unexplored, unexamined, unaccepted and unowned belief systems (see all above) of those whose minds were so damaged by ACA childhoods and conditioned by over-exposure to the black and white, all or nothing thinking of the common cult-ure at large.

It is not their fault. But as many in Narcotics Anonymous wisely point, “We are not responsible for our disease, but we are responsible for our recovery.” To clear the hurdle of our deeply conditioned fears of both abandonment and abuse – the conflicting fears that keep us stuck in co-dependence – we will have to identify, acknowledge, radically accept, own and consciously experience them as regular events in our emotional experience (see Dimeff & Koerner, Hayes et al, and Linehan).

The essential conflict between those fears of abandonment and abuse is barely touched upon in the mass market literature, although Whitfield mentions them briefly here and there in his 1991 book, Co-Dependence: Healing the Human Condition. He does not, however, see them quite as Mellody did in her 1992 book, Facing Love Addiction, even if she did not dig into as deeply as others have. Complex classroom texts like Kernberg’s Severe Personality Disorders and Meissner’s The Borderline Spectrum gave the two conflicting fears sufficient description that I could run with it and develop the concepts further in my own work on “borderline organization” (see Garrett).

I now understand the conflict to stand at the very foundation of most forms of behaviorally conditioned (as opposed to genetically caused) mental illness, regardless of the “official diagnosis.” The not-okay inner child is actually two inner children. It is actually two, separate and distinct, systems of core beliefs, values, ideals, principles, codes and rules.

One is frightened of being neglected, isolated and alone, and will do anything it can to avoid the emotional experience of anxiety (or even terror) that results from appraising itself as “intolerably alone.” The other is equally scared of being humiliated, embarrassed, invalidated, invaded, molested, incested, battered or otherwise abused… and will do anything it can to avoid the emotional experience of anxiety (or terror) of being subjected once again to “intolerable harm.”

Precisely as Mellody explained it for the first time in simple language in 1992, the ACA / co-dependent’s not-okay inner child is caught in a battle between the abuse- and abandonment-fearing, “split off parts” of itself (see Bion in Symington, Fairbairn, Kernberg, Klein in Mitchell, Masterson, Meissner, Scharff & Scharff, Whitfield, and other “object relations” theorists). The abuse-fearing inner child is easily angered by the abandonment-fearing inner child’s need to be “loved,” placing the abuse-fearer in the line of fire of some new seducer who’ll knock him or her around again. The abandonment-fearer is equally enraged by the abuse-fearer’s reluctance to engage in what the abandonment-fearer insists are “loving” relationships.

And they fight relentlessly over control of the body to do their respective will.

In borderline organization, these two, split apart, not-okay inner children never see, know or understand the other. This is because most people are quite understandably totally unaware of their inner children, their fear of each other gaining control of the body, and their projections of “awful things” when the other one takes control.

I understand that I have taken the “long way around Robin Hood’s barn” here. But without an understanding of the “psychodynamics” of co-dependence and ACA behavior, one cannot see the other conflict described 20 odd paragraphs ago: the one between the needy seeker of approval from others in the recovery group vs. the increasingly disgusted judge of the others in that same room. The conflict between the needy approval seeker and the needless disgusted judge is the conflict between the abandonment- and abuse-fearing, not-okay inner children.

And the recovering ACA / co-dependent will have to come to look for, recognize, acknowledge, “radically accept” and own this conflict in him- or herself before he or she can send it to the mental digestive system. The needy-here / needless-there (see Mellody, and Whitfield), love-addicted here / love-avoidant there (see Mellody), obsessed with connection here / obsessed with protection there, borderline-organized ACA / co-dependent will have to discover empathy and compassion toward his or her split-off, not-okay inner children.

And that discovery will have to be nurtured, developed and carefully tended to so that it can grow to become strong and sturdy enough to overcome the fears of those two, warring inner children. To “get there,” the recovering ACA / co-dependent will have to come to be able to experience and accept him- or herself as the separate, living, bodily container or “residence” for those two inner children and identify them as separate and distinct, not only from each other, but from the very, evolving consciousness that can now see and accept them (see Linehan, truly the expert on this).

You will not read about this war anywhere in the ACA or CoDA literature. It is not there. The bits and pieces of scientific research on human nature that has made the descriptions in this article possible had, for the most part, occurred by the time those books were written. But until the advent and widespread use of the Internet in the later 1990s and early 2000s, very few people knew of the fragments I have described here.

And no one, to my knowledge, anyway, had put them together in this fashion.

So. Acquiring such grasp as I have had to acquire for my own recovery from child abuse and resulting borderline organization, I have been able to come to see how far in the “right directions” Pia Mellody and Charlie Whitfield had come 20 years ago. Mellody’s incredible simplification of borderline organization into the push-pull dynamic of “love addiction” and “love avoidance,” and Whitfield’s equally astonishing distillation of object relations theory into the notion of the “split apart inner child,” were seminal works. Sadly, however, they both became so caught up in bright lights that shown upon them for so doing that they seemed to have lost the thread.

I am trying here to regain it. And in so doing, point squarely at Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance and the discourse therein on compassion as seen through the eyes of a practicing Buddhist, as well as way back to Carl Rogers and the descriptions of “empathy,” “emotional congruence” and “unconditional positive regard” in his On Becoming a Person. For it is in those descriptions that I see the light at the end of the tunnel of the combined fears of abuse and abandonment.

And I will call that light “compassionate boundary setting.”

In the simplest words I can come up with: “Neither too much, nor too little.” For too much of any good thing is not necessarily a “good” thing. (The law of too much and too little applies all over the place, of course.) With mindfulness skills developed from direct, meditative experience of one’s feelings and appropriate distancing from one’s beliefs, values, ideals, principles, codes and rules (see Hayes et al, and Linehan), anyone can learn to set compassionate boundaries that ere neither too thick nor too thin.

In my own experience of discovering, acquiring and utilizing “CBS,” I have come to see that the idea provides me with an instant grasp of my emotional and behavioral steering wheel. Regardless of how afraid my inner children may be of either abuse or abandonment in any present moment, my practice of being aware of their thoughts (be they approval seeking or judgmental) and emotions (be they fearful or disgusted) reveals them to me. When I can see and feel them, I can acknowledge them, own them, comfort them, and calm them down. And as a result, experience that my inner children can let go of the need to overly attach or detach from others whose inner children are just as wrapped up in their fears of abuse and abandonment as mine are.

Working from Table 2 in Chapter 13 of Paul Gilbert's Compassion Focused Therapy, I developed the following schematic to differentiate "compassionate self-correction" (CSC) from "shame-based criticism and attacking" (SBC) of myself and others:

1) CSC focuses on the desire to have a better realtionship with myself and others; SBC focuses on the desire to condemn and punish myself and others.

2) CSC focuses on growth, maturity, expansion and enhancement; SBC focuses on punishing past errors.

3) CSC is forward-looking and aimed at a better future; SBC is backward-looking and stuck in "shameful" past.

4) CSC is given (to myself and others) with encouragement, support and kindness; SBC is given with frustration, contempt, anger, disappointment and discouragement.

5) CSC is self- and other-empowering; SBC is self- and other-disempowering.

6) CSC is about responsibility; SBC is about blame.

7) CSC rewards (and reinforces); SBC punishes (and reinforces).

8) CSC focuses on specific attributes and qualities in oneself or another; SBC globalizes the self or another as "all good" or, if not all good, then "all bad."

9) CSC focuses in hope of a better future; SBC focuses on expecting the worst.

10) CSC embraces a confidence in success; SBC is rooted in fear of failure.

11) CSC embraces "healthy guilt," personal responsibility and engagement in the recovery process; SBC wallows in shame, fear of reprisals and avoidance.

12) CSC is a display of courage; SBC is a display of caving in to learned helplessness.

13) CSC accepts sorrow and remorse for the results of one's conditioning by others; SBC rejects the truth of our social programming.

14) CSC supports amends and reparations; SBC compels avoidance or aggression.

Are we stuck forever in the multiple, repeated conditionings of a cult-ure of shame-based criticism and attacking? Or can we learn a new intra- and inter-personal paradigm and compassionate self-correction, as well as compassionate, but appropriately boundary-setting, tolerance of others who are only acting as they do because of psychic aches and pains that very closely resemble our own?

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