The 7R’s

The 7R's of living in community are as follows: Rules, Roles, Relationships, Responsibilities, Respect, Resources, Returning Cycle.

Rules

Refer specifically to that body of information upon which we choose to govern our living together. Everything from traffic laws, criminal laws, social services systems to educational systems and a myriad number of variations in between are covered here.

Community or social rules are the vehicles through which we can fulfill our needs for food, shelter and clothing, as well as set into motion a safe environment where in we may begin to search out love and acceptance.

These Chosen Rules can set our direction and define our responsibilities to ourselves and with those that we share the system with.

Roles

• Roles relate to the many “jobs or masks” we wear within the family and our community.

• Roles are often determined according to community or family needs.

• Plse Note; just because it is what the family needs does not make it healthy

• The healthy roles we play provide us with our opportunities for learning and growth.

• Roles can be channels for expressing the truth about ourselves and our needs. BUT

• The problem in the system seems to be that we were trained to be who we think we are at very early ages and this training, often as not, contributes to the predetermination the Roles we will adopt in life and community and adult life. This training often demands that we give up true self ... or is a defense strategy ... for the sake of the system and its survival or another possibility is we adapt a grab and run technique for needs fulfillment. Often refereed to narcissistic depravation

Thus we cannot nurture our lost self unless we leave home figuratively and for some, both literally.

We leave home by giving up our scripts and rigid unhealthy roles. Those that were defined for us by a system because of it’s need to survive and Not the individual’s.

Those rigid unhealthy roles denied us our authenticity and we played these rigid roles out of mis placed loyalty to our dys¬functional family - community system(s). We got a sense of power and control from these roles, but they have cost us dearly.

Logically it is understood that each of us is an unique individual.

We were born to be ourselves.

To actually accomplish this, one must separate from the family systems designations and from our par¬ents' ( parents in the extended form include school teacher .. actually anyone the parent has abdicated authority to, to raise the child) beliefs and opinions about us. This is often called negotiating your adolescence.

Jesus Christ was strong in affirming the impossibility of finding God, much less ourselves, unless we left home. Matthew quotes Jesus as saying, "I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to put sons against fathers and daughters against mothers ... And a man's foes shall be those of his own household."

Leaving home means;

• separating from our family system.

• giving up the idealizations and the fantasy bond of being forever protected by our parents or their stand-in(s).. surrogates .. such as employers or social systems or friends or spouses.

Only by leaving and becoming separate, negotiating your adolescence/freedom of self can we have the choice of having a true relationship. This most basic of relationships .. with our parents .. demands separation and detachment for any possibility of a healthy relationship.

PLSE NOTE: For some, because of abuse issues it may be necessary to create some distance for a time from our family or its surrogate. For those who've been badly abused, you will have to make a prudent evaluation of how close you can get to your family or surrogate without violating your own boundaries.

Relationships

Relationships deal with the nature and quality of our interactions one with another(s). To form a rela¬tionship we must first be able to relate and understand how to set the relating in motion.

Our comprehension of how relationships work (or don’t) lay at the feet of our parents.... or those persons who parented us, Mom’s relationship with herself and dad’s relationship with himself and their relationship with each other lays the ground work for the child’s understanding of how relationships work (or don’t). Once this is appreciated or imprinted or impressed on to the child the message from the learned experiences plays like a tape recorder over and over again.

There are variances explained by personality and other outside influences but basically the parents and those holding parenting responsibility set the child in motion for how he or she can or will conduct themselves in their major and minor relationships.

Often to get to the root of the dysfunctionality we must plumb the depths of our own psyche to release those lost and buried hurts and pains and grief the losses we experienced so we can over come and undo the experiences of our childhood training.

Responsibilities

Refer to the level of maturity. How we handle ourselves, and how we handle getting our needs met especially our dependency needs met. Our inter play with other people, and the roles we have chosen to fill are simply and expression of that sense of or our abili5ty to fill our own needs.

Often as not it appears to do with providing inspiration and leadership to all who come into our spheres of influence but do remember here what Scott Peck point out. Life is what happens to you while you are busy doing something else. Assuming responsibility is a commitment to being involved with your life in healthy and fulfilling ways and it helps to understanding the difference between Wants and Needs. This is an essential aspect.

Respect

Starts with the individual. It was developed in the individual very early on in his or her life time and is a direct reflection of how that individual was treated in his or her first 30 to 60 months of life.

• It is true that it is necessary that we must first have respect for ourselves and the rules by which we agree to conduct our living but it is also important to learn that we learn how to express this into our community (micro or macro) by being respect for the unique individuals we were born to be.

If we do not have this sense of respect instilled at a very early age then ... it is with great effort and difficulty that we will move through our lives. It is something that is purely experiential and can be obtained anytime, but first we must know what it is that we are looking for and where it is we must search to find it. 12 Step programs help enormously here as do other self help programs.

Our fall down often comes in attempting to make happen something or series or something in our lives that actually require us to respect ourselves and others and if that is not a tool we carry then the job at hand becomes a very difficult task. The Basics of the concept is

• a person cannot respect himself unless he knows the truth of himself.

For most the truth about us is that It Hurts, and our every effort is to maintain the lid on that one so it does not get out to hurt again. The problem is that neurotic defense strategies themselves become more painful then the pain they were masking and our only defense is to build another neurotic structure to protect ourselves from our pain

Resources

They are available to us on many levels . It is necessary that you participate and utilize them for them to work. I quote John Bradshaw from Healing the Shame that binds you.

...methods have been adapted from the major schools of therapy. Most all therapies attempt to make that which is covert and unconscious, overt and conscious. These techniques can only be mastered by practice. You must do them, and reinforce them by doing them again. They will work if you will work.

Appreciating Compliance & Surrender

Compliance is motivated by guilt. It is in fact an attempt to surrender without giving up control. It is the attempt to appear to be doing what it is that is necessary to recover without actually doing anything that might inspire of the repressed pain to escape and hurt us again.

John Bradshaw cites this example in his life:

In the last year of my seminary days, I asked to see a psychiatrist because of my sense of hopelessness. I told him I thought I was an alcoholic and that I needed help. He spent considerable time with me discussing my relationship with my mother. During this period he gave me prescriptions for sleeping pills and tranquilizers. I began to feel a whole lot better. I even cut down on my drinking! I enjoyed our visits and felt a sense of relief about my life. At the end of about three months, I terminated my treatment. Gradually my drinking got worse and worse. One year and a half later, I committed myself to Austin State Hospital for alcoholism. On December 11, 1965, 1 surrendered.

Denial and delusion can continue in spite of the acknowledgment of guilt. Guilt can actually be a way to distract one from the real problem.

For example, it's not at all uncommon to hear a smoker or an overeater condemn themselves for creating a dangerous threat to their health with their addictions. This is certainly preferable to stopping smoking or overeating.

Alcoholic’s for example, frequently outwardly accept responsibility for the things they do when they drink. They felt guilt about them. It was a lot easier to admit to these harmful things that I have do than it is to admit My drinking .. My Life .. is/ was out of control.

By being guilty the Alcoholic can deny that their life was unmanageable and out of control.(step One). Guilt was a useful way to continue denial.

Plse Note: Compliance and guilt are ways that many an unwary therapist has been hoodwinked by an addict.

Shame-based people tend to seek and even embrace punishment. Admitting guilt and paying for it in therapy enhanced the denial of what I most deeply feared - quitting my .... fill in the blank. To have quit what ever it was ... fill in the blank .. that I do that is out of control ... drinking say .... would expose me as a flawed and defective human being.

The problem is that the only way out of the compulsive/ addictive shame cycle is to embrace the shame.

That is what it means to surrender

Surrender is motivated by the acceptance of shame. For an addict, surrender is the first true act of freedom since beginning the addiction. It is best embodied in the following:

Talking about our problems, mapping out our family’s dysfunction is not the same as taking action. Action means that I've let go of control and I'm willing to listen to someone else and do it his way, rather than my own way.

The problem of the disabled will is the problem of dishonesty and the pain that dishonesty ultimately brings. By the time most of us are ready to do something ... reached out bottom ... the pain has reached a point of great intensity. Our shame-based self goes deeper and deeper into hiding, the intensity of manufactured pretend false self increased proportionately. My addiction to hiding my shame created the chronic pain of knowing that I was not the person I pretended to be or was supposed to be. We literally are be-side ourselves.

It is the way of the form that the disease (co-dependence) had to wait until I dealt with its cover-up - alcoholism or chemical addiction or compulsive spending or what ever it is that I do to mood alter me away from my feelings. This point is crucial.

• For any acting-out substance abuser, the substance has to be stopped before one can treat the co-dependence (the disease of the disease). Alcoholism is caused by drinking alcohol. Alcoholism is a primary disease. That means it has to be treated first. The same is true for other drugs and chemicals.

Food, sex, work, and people addictions are somewhat different. You can't stop eating, drinking, sexing, working or peopling completely. Total abstinence would be death to self and the species. Each addiction compulsion or obsession has its own particular nuances for recovery but there are some commonalties. One commonality is surrendering the grandiose will.

Returning Cycle

It is actually I suspect a natural law of the universe. The process of returning cycle involves the process of giving and receiving.

• We get from life what we give.

• Or we reap what we sow.

• But then we give it back to life again.

• We give back what we receive, but we add our potential, character and talents to it before we pass it back into the universe.

Thus a returning cycle is not a punishment but it is the restoration of some community structure or form that is now enhanced by your effort rather then your resentment.

It was observed many years ago that if mankind lived according to the principal of returning cycles many of the rules and laws of man would be unnecessary.