False self, from daily mailing

 "The dysfunction is encoded into our souls as the false self."

Many of us couldn't be ourselves as children. In order to survive, we bought our parent's negative messages, and then as adults, we repeated their dishonest justifications for crazy behavior. We remember our destructive false pride that wouldn't allow us to admit mistakes or feel vulnerable. On some level, we always knew what we were doing, but our false self was in charge and we didn't have the words or thought processes to do things differently or to express true feelings.

What hurts the most is that for those of us who have children, we modeled this dishonest behavior for them. As much as we tried to stop ourselves, we just couldn't see our way through to show them a better side.

In recovery, we now see that our wounds were so deep that it's hard to imagine that we had a hole that big in our soul. Today we can see that our lack of honesty for so long is constant proof of the trauma we suffered as children, and the reason we need to break the cycle. This is where we strip away all the layers of shame that created our false self. We now more readily admit our shortcomings because as adults we can handle any fallout. In doing so, we help keep the family craziness from growing.

On this day I release my false self and have the courage to admit when I am wrong. I do this so that the hurts stop piling up, for both myself and others.

Recovery language (from daily mailing)

"We may be speaking program lingo, but we are not talking about what truly bothers us."

In the beginning, many of us found great comfort in the new language of recovery. It shielded us against the old way of thinking. But some of us found that "talking the talk" without "walking the walk" did not change our actual behavior. We damaged ourselves and those around us by treading lightly. As we learned when we were children, we did not make waves, and the consequences still hurt us deeply. What we needed to see was that we were in a fight for our very lives.

As we recognize our complacence, we begin to free ourselves. We embrace our choices as adults with a firm backbone. We grow up. We do for ourselves what no one else can do: we rescue ourselves. We do this by surrendering our controlling grip and letting other people into our lives who can help us ... whomever we need.

We are not looking for perfection, but progress. We put aside our doubts and walk into the light of a new truth. It may feel painful to be honest and try something new, but not as painful as staying where we are.

6 Listening Tips from Erich Fromm

Listening, Fromm argues, is “is an art like the understanding of poetry” and, like any art, has its own rules and norms. Drawing on his half-century practice as a therapist, Fromm offers six such guidelines for mastering the art of unselfish understanding:

1. The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener.
2. Nothing of importance must be on his mind, he must be optimally free from anxiety as well as from greed.
3. He must possess a freely-working imagination which is sufficiently concrete to be expressed in words.
4. He must be endowed with a capacity for empathy with another person and strong enough to feel the experience of the other as if it were his own.
5. The condition for such empathy is a crucial facet of the capacity for love. To understand another means to love him — not in the erotic sense but in the sense of reaching out to him and of overcoming the fear of losing oneself.
6. Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.

In the remainder of the The Art of Listening, Fromm goes on to detail the techniques, dynamics, and mindsets that make for an optimal listening relationship, in therapy and in life.