Dysfunction can come in many forms. Sometimes it comes in the form of someone who knows it all. Such people may not even realize they know it all, but they apparently do since they are always ready to tell us how to do something or to do it better.

A kind suggestion now and then is appropriate, but when people tell us what color to paint our kitchens, why we need to buy a bookshelf, which school we should send our children to, how to vote, and how to trim our rosebushes, they obviously have a problem. They are control freaks, and if we’ve learned anything in recovery, it’s that controlling is a form of codependency.

Control freaks and know-it-alls deserve a little sympathy. That doesn’t mean we do what they want. That doesn’t mean we let them take over, but as people in recovery ourselves, we can realize they probably have low self-esteem issues or suffer from feeling their opinions are not of value. They are looking for gratitude and praise for sharing their ideas and making a difference in our lives. If they give us a good idea, we can thank them. If we implement the idea and it works, we can let them know it made a difference—after all, there’s nothing wrong with letting other people feel good about themselves.

Sometimes, however, we don’t care for their suggestions, and we can say “Thanks, but no thanks.” If they become insistent, we need to set a boundary with them. If we tell someone, “I don’t want to shop at Dick’s Family Foods even if the prices are lower because I like shopping at the FastMart” and the other person keeps telling us about the great prices at Dick’s Family Foods and tries to push the store’s coupons on us, then we can politely but firmly tell them to drop the subject. If we need to, we can also ask them why it matters so much to them and ask them why they feel the need to control us. Hopefully, it won’t come to that, but we don’t have to put up with people badgering us to do what we don’t want to do.

If we need to, we make it clear we do not want the person in our life. Such people may start out acting helpful but pretty quickly it can become clear that they live by the rule “It’s my way or the highway.” If that’s the case, wish them a nice journey and take the highway—you’ll get where you want to go faster without them. Even if they “know-it-all” that does not mean they know what is best for you, and even if they did, being controlled by someone else is never best for us. We are adults who can make our own decisions. We got this far in life without such people’s help and we will continue to do so.

We can part without anger—we can keep them in our prayers hoping someday they will know the one thing they still haven’t come to realize.

Irene Watson, MA,  is author of The Sitting Swing: Finding Wisdom to Know the Difference, and co-editor of The Story that Must Be Told: True Tales of Transformation, and Authors Access: 30 Success Secrets for Authors and Publishers. She is a workshop leader, managing editor of Reader Views, and president of a non-profit Higher Power Foundation. Irene lives next to Barton Creek in Austin, TX, with her husband Robert.

When we start recovery, it’s common to go to a counselor or therapist or to attend a support group such as a Twelve-Step meeting, but another wonderful way to find support from other people is online. Numerous support groups exist as email listservs or online forums through Yahoo, and through Twelve Step group websites. These groups can be especially helpful for people who live in small towns where support groups may not exist as well as for people who feel resistance or may hesitate to attend a group in their community. A simple Google search can bring up many support groups, and the Yahoo directories list several groups at http://groups.yahoo.com/

Online groups do differ from Twelve-Step groups where we meet in person. While Twelve-Step groups do not allow crosstalk, online groups are there to ask questions, share experiences, and get feedback from others. While you do not have to reveal anything you do not want to, people will see your email address, but at Yahoo you can create a new email address to be whatever you want to protect your anonymity.

Confidentiality is as important in online groups as groups that meet in person. Many of these groups require that before you join, you send an email to the group moderator explaining why you want to join the group. This prerequisite is to make sure only people who legitimately want to belong and are sincere will be added to the list, and to protect the privacy of the group. You will usually have to agree to the terms of the group, particularly being confidential. You agree not to repeat what the group shares either verbally or by forwarding emails. The moderator will have to approve your membership, and the moderator also has the right to remove people from the group if they become belligerent toward other members or are in violation of the terms of agreement.

Time is also a difference with online groups. People can post messages at anytime day and night, and the members can then read them at their convenience or not read them as they choose. Informative subject lines help people weed out what they do and do not want to read. The result is that conversations on one topic can continue twenty-four hours a day and continue for days rather than be limited to a one hour live meeting. You can also go back and reread what was said so you can better remember it.

Online etiquette is important in online groups. Because people respond to each other, we need to remember to be polite to one another. We also need to remember that the written word can be interpreted differently than speech, meaning we cannot hear the person’s tone of voice or read his or her body language. We do not write in capital letters because this is considered equivalent to yelling at someone.

Community is just as important in an online group as a group that meets in your town, but you will have a wider chance to meet people from other cities and even countries that can often help to widen your perspective. You also don’t usually need to worry about bumping into these people around your hometown. You might make new friends, but just as at a Twelve-Step group, you do not have to exchange phone numbers with people unless you want to; you do not have to agree to be contacted outside the group by email or any other form.

Whether you are nervous, have time constraints, or just prefer talking online, joining an online support group can be a rich and rewarding form of recovery. Take the chance to begin your online recovery journey today!

Irene Watson, MA,  is author of The Sitting Swing: Finding Wisdom to Know the Difference, and co-editor of The Story that Must Be Told: True Tales of Transformation, and Authors Access: 30 Success Secrets for Authors and Publishers. She is a workshop leader, managing editor of Reader Views, and president of a non-profit Higher Power Foundation. Irene lives next to Barton Creek in Austin, TX, with her husband Robert.

Marie Curie once said, “Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”

As recovering codependents, alcoholics, or drug addicts, we know about fear, and we know that when people fear us, they reject us. Our clingy behavior made people label us as “needy” and it frightened them away. Our rage that came out when we drank made people label us as angry drunks, and we lost all our friends.

We know how labels and rejection can hurt, especially at the times when we most need love and understanding, yet how often do we label people just because we do not understand them? What we don’t understand can be frightening, but learning about it can also be enlightening and make our fear disappear.

Today, many things that people feared in past generations make us laugh or shake our heads at the absurdity, even the racism or prejudice that resulted simply from fear of someone who was different.

When Michelangelo carved his statue of Moses, he gave Moses horns because he believed Jews had horns and tails, being akin to Satan. Such racist ideas culminated in the Holocaust of World War II; today we realize how wrong it was to allow fear to lead to hate and murder. For centuries, discrimination against Africans was justified by a belief they were descended from Ham, the son whom Noah cursed, and consequently they were lesser people and deserved to be enslaved. A Civil War and a Civil Rights movement were needed before this kind of thinking was no longer acceptable. Even in the last century, alcoholism was considered as a sign of moral depravity until groups like Alcoholics Anonymous helped people to understand it was a disease so sympathy and knowledge could create healing for thousands of people.

Still today, we allow fear to stop us from loving people and treating them with respect. Just the other day, I read a letter to the editor in the newspaper that said because gay men were allowed to become priests, children had been sexually abused. This writer equated being gay with being a pedophile. That’s the kind of slippery slope thinking that labels people resulting in racism and discrimination. It’s just as untrue as assuming all blondes are dumb. Similarly, after September 11^th, every Muslim became a terrorist suspect. We can’t stereotype or label people or make sweeping generalizations. Instead, we need to learn to understand and respect them as individuals.

Do you not like that kid with the skateboard because you assume he’s a punk? Do you automatically think that girl with the nose ring at the grocery store checkout must be a slut? Why do we jump to these conclusions? It’s mostly out of fear. Sometimes, it’s so we will feel better about ourselves by putting other people down, so we don’t have to look at the pain and dysfunction within ourselves because to do so is too frightening.

If we live in fear, we will see the world through narrow glasses. If we are open to loving people for whom they are and accepting them, we’ll find the world a better place, and we’ll attract people willing to accept us. Instead of fearing the gay neighbor, we can talk to him about gardening when we see him working in his yard. Instead of fearing the Muslim woman, we can talk to her about her religious beliefs without being judgmental. We can take an extra minute to talk to the checkout girl with the nose ring—we might be surprised to find out she’s a loving mother and wife. And what about the skateboard punk? We might find him holding open the door for us as we go out of the grocery store.

When we make an effort to understand other people, we can build relationships, we will feel better about ourselves, and everyone will benefit. We will find we have more in common than we have to disagree about; after all, we are all human with the same basic needs to be loved and understood.

Irene Watson, MA,  is author of The Sitting Swing: Finding Wisdom to Know the Difference, and co-editor of The Story that Must Be Told: True Tales of Transformation, and Authors Access: 30 Success Secrets for Authors and Publishers. She is a workshop leader, managing editor of Reader Views, and president of a non-profit Higher Power Foundation. Irene lives next to Barton Creek in Austin, TX, with her husband Robert.

In my last post, I talked about researching the codependency, addictions, and dysfunction in our family trees. I also warned that sometimes our older relatives will not want to share information with us.

Every family has its secrets, its skeletons in the closet. People even just a generation or two back were much more secretive and private than today. An unmarried mother was a disgrace to her family. An alcoholic wasn’t talked about. Morals were different in those days. People hid more often behind shame and fear rather than trying to understand dysfunction and work through it.

While we might choose to think people did a better job of behaving themselves back then, more likely, they were just better at keeping secrets, and those secrets often broke up homes, led to unwanted children being given away to protect the family, led to more domestic and child abuse because no one would talk about it, and if people knew, they wouldn’t rat on their neighbors.

Today, we still keep secrets. Sometimes we have our own secrets, things we are too ashamed to tell other people. It is okay to keep secrets so we can protect ourselves, but it also helps to find someone we can trust to talk to. Secrets often destroy us inside. We make them out to be worse than they are until we find ourselves living our lives in fear, denying who we are from fear someone will find out about the one awful thing we did, or perhaps simply something about us that isn’t even that awful, but we are afraid people will disapprove of it and we will be rejected. Finding a counselor, an anonymous group where secrecy is respected, or a trusted friend is a good place to start to let go of the shame, to refuse to let a secret control our life.

Often we are raised in families with secrets. We may have a parent who continually tells us, “Don’t tell anyone…about your father’s drinking problem, about your brother’s cocaine addiction, that your mother has been cheating on me.” If we are children, it is inappropriate for parents to expect us to keep their secrets, but we may be burdened with them anyway, allowing them to make us grow up in fear. If we are adults, we can do better. We can be open and honest rather than creating families where secrets are allowed to prolong and feed shame. We can also help loved ones find a path to a better life beyond the shadows and closed doors where secrets force us to hide. While we can’t make anyone else do anything, we can let loved ones know that we still love them despite their secrets, that we accept them for who they are, and if appropriate, we can direct them to counseling, to a Twelve-Step group, or to literature to help them come to terms with whatever secrets they are keeping.

Secrets eventually can become our friends. Once we let go of the shame, we can step into the light and when light is cast on a secret, we often find that what we feared about the secret being known did not happen, that revealing the secret was not as scary as we expected. The secret led to our growth, to our opening the locked door and stepping forward into fresh air and a new day.

Irene Watson, MA,  is author of The Sitting Swing: Finding Wisdom to Know the Difference, and co-editor of The Story that Must Be Told: True Tales of Transformation, and Authors Access: 30 Success Secrets for Authors and Publishers. She is a workshop leader, managing editor of Reader Views, and president of a non-profit Higher Power Foundation. Irene lives next to Barton Creek in Austin, TX, with her husband Robert.

What does genealogy and family history have to do with recovery? Everything. Our family tree has the roots of our codependency, alcoholism, or addictions in it. Just as we get our genes from our ancestors, we get our dysfunctional behaviors, either inherited or through their influence. In recovery, it is helpful to understand where the dysfunctional behavior comes from in ourselves and in our immediate family members—parents, siblings, children. We need to understand the people who shaped us and the people who shaped them. Often, we find researching our family tree will fill us with healing, love, and understanding for our family.

I recommend you try to trace at least five generations of your family, starting with yourself and your siblings and then your parents, grandparents, and your grandparents’ parents and grandparents. Most of us knew our grandparents and they played significant roles in our lives. Similarly, who our grandparents were was shaped by their parents and grandparents so to understand our grandparents we need to understand the generations before them.

It may or may not be easy to find this information. Sometimes our parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles can fill in details. Sometimes we have no one we can ask. Sometimes our family members may not even want to talk to us about the family—they may feel those things are better left alone—that in itself is a clue of dysfunction and information we will be stronger for knowing. Family members are the best source of information but their memories may be faulty, or they may only know what their parents or grandparents told them, and that may not be everything. We can also consult birth, death, and marriage records, censuses and historical information about the community where our ancestors lived. But how does this information help us?

Say your father was emotionally abusive, and you have realized over the years he has low self-esteem, which he compensated for by trying to control you. You remember your grandfather as a mean, ornery old man. You might even know that he physically abused your father as a child. But as you research, you learn more. Your grandfather was an immigrant to this country. Back in his home country, he had to work as a young boy to help support the family because his own father died when he was twelve. He had a mother and younger siblings to help support. Imagine the burden on him. Imagine how difficult it must have been for him to leave his family to come to the United States to find a better life for himself. Imagine being an immigrant in a country where you didn’t speak the language and you knew no one. Imagine finding that life here was not much better than back home. You found a wife and had a family but you were still poor. Imagine living through World War II, daily fearing for your mother and siblings that you left back in Europe. Imagine losing one of your children in a fire. I would think that would give you some reason to be mean and ornery. It doesn’t excuse the behavior, but it does make it understandable, and grandpa then took out his frustrations on dad who in turn took them out on you.

It’s just a start. Remember grandma has her story too. Think about it—your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents—that’s thirty people whose lives have directly or indirectly affected your life. By knowing their stories, we can trace the dysfunction, the pain, as well as the positive aspects about them that we have today. It leads to a better understanding of ourselves, where our dysfunction came from, and how we can keep it from continuing to rear its ugly head by finding different means of dealing with life’s frustrations.

In the process, we will also see the triumphs. Maybe dad was emotionally abusive, but unlike his father, he never hit his children. In his own way, he tried to do better, to break the cycle. And grandpa—he didn’t know how to deal with disappointment but he still worked so life would be better for his children than it was for him. That’s love even if not spoken. When we understand our family members, we can see them as whole, complicated people, but people who tried to do better, just like us, and we can continue that family tradition, not of dysfunction, but of trying to do better. Whatever we end up finding in our family trees, we will better understand how dysfunction began and worked in our families and we will be better prepared to deal with the imprints that have been passed down to us.

Irene Watson, MA,  is author of The Sitting Swing: Finding Wisdom to Know the Difference, and co-editor of The Story that Must Be Told: True Tales of Transformation, and Authors Access: 30 Success Secrets for Authors and Publishers. She is a workshop leader, managing editor of Reader Views, and president of a non-profit Higher Power Foundation. Irene lives next to Barton Creek in Austin, TX, with her husband Robert.