excerpt from When Good Men Behave Badly

The healthy awareness of the need for twinship would allow you to say to your wife or partner, You know, I feel really lost sometimes with out all the special times we used to have together. It just seems like having kids and get ting used to each other and money problems have really taken their toll. I guess you must feel the same way. Here you, as a man, shift from needing your partner to be a mirror reflecting you to recognizing the ways in which the two of you are profoundly alike. She is no longer the enemy, but rather a comrade along the difficult road of life. A comrade who is inevitably flawed, but no more fundamentally flawed than you.

by guest blogger Nina W. Brown, Ed.D., LPC, author of Children of the Self-Absorbed

Self-absorbed parents can intentionally, but mostly unintentionally, inflict wounds on their children. They do not see how what they do or say is wounding, and can become very upset and angry at such a charge. Nothing you do or say produces any empathy, understanding of your perspective, or acknowledgment of the wounding experience.

This pattern of wounding was set in childhood which has now carried over into your adulthood, and continues to exert it negative impact on you. Thus, even though you are an adult, you can still find yourself hurt, angry, frustrated and the like by something your parent said or did. You can even realize that you are reacting now just as you did when you were a child, but feel helpless and powerless to stop reacting as you do. It’s all very frustrating and unsettling. I’ll provide examples of this wounding, and give a couple of suggestions for coping.

Excerpt from The Family Recovery Guide

The seeds of healthy growth are sown in the transition stage; in early recovery, they begin to take root. Here, the foundation for the individual identity is set in place, bringing new found stability. Early recovery can be a time of unparalleled personal change, hope, and excitement; it can also be a time of trauma, especially at home, where the family members are still functioning with out a strong, healthy family system. Even as growth begins, tensions and set backs are to be expected. During early recovery, the alcoholic and co-alcoholic are still extremely dependent on their relationships with their recovery programs. Their main focus at this time is education about alcohol ism and the process of recovery in general, and on the specific ways in which each particular individual has experienced these realities. To facilitate this education, they learn recovery language, which helps them organize their past experiences and under stand their ongoing thoughts and feelings. By internalizing this new language and the abstinent behaviors that were set in place during transition, they begin to solidify their new alcoholic or co-alcoholic identities. The healthy behavior they practiced in transition starts to become less conscious and more automatic as their impulses to drink or take care of the drinker finally begin to decrease.

by guest blogger Judith London, Ph.D., author of Connecting the Dots

The appearance of Alzheimer’s touches relatives or friends, close or distant, to change every aspect of their relationship with a loved one who has this disease. As Alzheimer’s advances, the only constant may be the love that you have between you, and that you can still maintain, if you don’t give up on the person prematurely.

Excerpt from My Mother, My Mirror

I recently looked at an afghan my mother helped me crochet in the later years of her life. Her hands were too arthritic to do more than a couple of model stitches at a time, but the pleasure she got out of teaching me seemed to outweigh whatever encumbrance in her joints she experienced. And I got pleasure from letting her teach me. She felt excited when I’d finished it (so did I, after ripping out a particular part one time too many) and was happy when family members could wrap themselves in it to keep warm. Though I’d chosen the afghan’s colors and design, and done most of the work, it was a cocreation in which yarn interwove as did my mother’s and my feelings.

Excerpt from My Mother, My Mirror

When I began to think about mother-daughter relationships, I recalled my seventh-grade lunch table. One of my schoolmates, June, would often say, after slowly unfolding the foil wrapped around her sandwich and peering inside with what seemed like dread, "Damn, my mother gave me shit on rye again." Each time, I would think, "How could she say that about her mother? She must not love her mother. I’d never say that about my mother."

Excerpt from Home Without Going Crazy

Shaming signals, quite naturally, bring us to the topic of guilt, which is the internal version of shame. Guilt lock explains one of life’s great mysteries: how you can feel so bad about a given event and still do nothing about it. Guilt lock is the emotional equivalent to gridlock, and it is just as paralyzing.

Excerpt from Going Home without Going Crazy: How to Get Along with Your Parents and Family (Even When They Push Your Buttons)

Flooding occurs when an adrenaline over load over whelms parts of the brain. Have you ever been so upset you can’t think, can’t speak, can barely cope? That’s flooding. You may already know some thing about flooding from the fight-or-flight syndrome, where the more primitive parts of the brain over ride the more advanced parts. The result is knee-jerk fear or aggression and a distinct lack of level headed reason.

You can expect flooding to affect you both physically and mentally. Physical symptoms act like an early warning system.

Your ultimate goal is to control flooding rather than allow it to control you.