One key measure used by health professionals to determine how well a person "works" as a human being is to determine how well that person has succeeded in forming and maintaining long-term healthy loving relationships with other people.
The primary determinant for this ability lies in the quality of the relationships formed and maintained by your parents in your family of origin , so if you were raised in a dysfunctional family rife with addictions, then you are starting this process on an up-hill grade. And yet, there is ample evidence that this ability has a huge impact on your personal health...physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. For example, men and women who live an isolated existence have rates of debilitating illness that are FIVE TIMES GREATER than happily married people with a strong social network.
So how do you overcome this situation as an adult? First, you accept the fact that all change happens within long before it happens without. Your outer world of relationships will eventually always relflect your inner world of thought and feeling, so that simply has to change.Second, you have to realize that it is impossible to develop character by yourself. You can only be half of every relationship.You MUST find a safe harbor with other people who ware willing to grow up and mature along-side you.
Al-Anon is the most accepting, warmest, non-judgemental place that I have ever found for beginning and maintaining long-term loving relationships. We are, as Al-Anons, not interested in your last name, your profession, your degrees, your income level, your family tree, or any of the usual markers so commonly used by our culture to "size-up" each other. I entered the program an overweight, smoking, drinking, swearing, angry manipulative salesman living with an angry alcoholic wife. But the Al-Anons around me loved me back into health. It took a long time. It took hours of patience on the parts of many people. It took me working through all 12 of the steps with five different sponsors. But comparing my insides and my outsides this morning with my insides and outsides before I started attending Al-Anon meetings, I have to just finish with my favorite prayer.
THANK YOU GOD!
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