LEARNING TO DANCE TO YOUR OWN TUNE

We learn behaviours as coping strategies ... in our families, when we are children. 

These behaviours serve us well. They keep us safe and make it possible to get along with the adults in our lives - people who appear all powerful to us in our smallness and vulnerability. 

Helplessness is a learned behaviour (see my blog March 21, 2013). 

Helplessness has us believe we have no choices but submit. Even when there are other possibilities, when we believe we are helpless our only choice is to do the same thing over and over again.

Compliance is another example of a learned behaviour. 

“We see a number of clients who have learned to be compliant because of how unpredictable the adults were in their life, says  Robert Neri, Senior Vice President/Chief Clinical Officer of the WestCare Foundation in St. Petersburg, Florida - they realized the best strategy was to blend into the woodwork, and not to make waves or test anyone,” he says. 

“Most kids test the adults around them, to stretch and make their world bigger, but in children living in families with substance abuse, compliance is a survival tool.
  

Survival tools serve people well, they help them survive. 

But sooner or later we come to realize that simple survival isn't enough. We want some enjoyment, some sense of well-being, some peace and even joy in our lives. 

The good news is, learned behaviours can be unlearned. No, on second thought, nothing can be unlearned. But change in attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours is possible.

The only way to unlearn a behaviour is to learn a new skill - and that skill is a new behaviour which hopefully will bring deeper sense of relational well-being.  

Learning a new skill means that first we must become aware of what we are doing that is damaging to us and our relationships. Only then can we make every effort, one day at a time, to do something different. 

Simple, but not easy.

Robert Neri again: "Children raised in a household with one or more parents struggling with a substance use disorder often use compliance as a coping mechanism—a skill that often no longer serves them well in adulthood..."

So, what new skills will help an adult transcend the learned behaviour of compliance?
Neri suggests four:

1. Learn how to make mistakes

We have to realize that mistakes are a wonderful opportunity to learn. Making mistakes allows us to learn how to tolerate frustration.

2. Learn how to play

Children who grow up in a family with substance abuse become pseudo-adults, learning how to take care of their parents. They’ve missed their childhood.

3. Learn who to trust

First, we have to acknowledge that not trusting people has, in many cases, probably kept [us] alive, but now [we] need to expand [our] interpersonal tools to learn how to trust...

4. Learn we are free to make choices ....

[People] who have spent years viewing themselves as victims can break the cycle of substance abuse by learning [we] are free to make choices. This gives [us] a model of empowerment, so [we] can take control and change the script.

Just as we are not determined by the genes we inherit, we are not determined by behaviours we have learned in order to adapt and survive in our addicted families. As long as we are alive we have the ability to learn new things - and new ways of behaving.

We don't have to dance to the tune of addiction, the past, or other people.