Ep. 331: The Hidden Rules You Learned Growing Up and How to Rewrite Them

This week I want to talk about the four internalized modes of thinking and acting that are characteristic of adult children. Since this month’s theme is family, this feels like the perfect time to explore what so many of us absorbed without knowing it. 

And for some of you, these patterns did not come from your family of origin, at least not directly. They might have come from the culture you grew up in, from your neighborhood, or from a very influential organization that shaped your beliefs.

The four modes of thinking that show up again and again in adult children are perfectionism, control, all or nothing thinking, and judgmentalness, which in ACA is often called the inner critical parent.

Before I dive in, I want to say a word about ACA. If you are not familiar, ACA stands for Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families. It is a twelve step recovery program, but it is also a reparenting and trauma recovery program. I did not know I qualified for ACA. And honestly, when I first heard about these modes of thinking, I thought none of them applied to me. Over time I realized all of them did.

In ACA, step one says that we are powerless over the effects of growing up in an alcoholic or otherwise dysfunctional household. The main effects, according to the literature, is fear and distorted thinking. So learning to notice the ways you think, learning to accept that this is how you have been thinking, and learning how to change it is absolutely central to recovery.

And since the source of the problem is a lack of power, the solution requires a power greater than ourselves. For some people that is God. For others it is not. It might be nature, the universe, or even the power of the group. But the point is that it is not you. You do not have to generate all of this change by yourself.

Perfectionism

I want to start with perfectionism. I am going to read a short excerpt from the Big Red Book. It says:

There is a difference between parents challenging their children to reach higher and improve and the damaging perfectionism in which the bar keeps being raised beyond reason. Perfectionism is a response to a shame based and controlling home. The child mistakenly believes she can avoid being shamed if she is perfect in her thinking and acting. However, expectations are continually raised in these kinds of homes. Shame, or the feeling that we have failed our parents, seems to occur no matter what we do. During these moments a critical inner voice begins to form. This is an early sign of internalizing our parents or caregivers hypercritical attitude. These are the seeds that lead to a lack of self acceptance.

So that is the excerpt. And I want to tell you, I never thought of myself as a perfectionist. In last week’s episode, my guest Renee said she always thought a perfectionist was someone who got all As. So even her definition of perfectionism was perfectionistic. It took her a long time to see those tendencies in herself. And I was very much the same way.

I still do not call myself a perfectionist, but I absolutely have perfectionistic tendencies. And I did not see them until I had been in recovery for a while.

Here is how I finally caught it. As you may know, I have kept a nightly gratitude journal for twenty five years. I have also done other types of journaling over the years. A few years into recovery, I realized that even in a journal I never go back and read, where no one is ever going to see what I wrote, I would not allow myself to misspell a word or misuse punctuation or use the wrong capitalization. I would literally go back and fix it.

And then one day, I do not even remember what triggered it, I just let it go. And now when I misspell something in my journal I almost get giddy. I think, who cares, I know what it means. I am not going to read it again. Letting go of that was a huge shift for me.

That moment helped me see that I had unreasonably high standards for myself in a lot of areas. One of the places it shows up the most is in overgiving. Twice this week, colleagues pointed out to me that I was overgiving again. I have this internal pressure to give people way, way more than they expect or even want. Because I want to eliminate any room for criticism. That is perfectionism in disguise.

Perfectionism is not the same thing as having high standards. High standards stay in place. Perfectionism means the moment you reach the bar you set, it instantly moves higher. You get a millisecond of relief and then boom, now you have something else to judge yourself for.

Growing up, my dad was hyper focused on grades and college. I used to think I made the honor roll all the time until I found my old report cards and realized I really did not. What I remember though is him saying things like, these As and Bs are nice, but let’s talk about this C. The message underneath all the well intentioned lectures was basically, you could do better and you are not doing it. You are failing. It was never good enough.

Perfectionism creates this tension in your body. It makes it very hard to relax. You feel rigid and tight all the time. The antidote is practicing good enough, B minus work, as Brooke Castillo says. Dan Martell puts it another way. Eighty percent done is one hundred percent awesome. If someone else does something in your business eighty percent as well as you, that is still awesome because it frees you to move on. Learning to live at that eighty percent mark has been liberating for me.

Control

Let’s move on to control. I will start with another Big Red Book excerpt from page thirty nine.

Of all the modes of thinking adult children developed to survive childhood, control seems to be the most troublesome to address. Fear is the root of this toughened element of our personality. We either seek control or we feel controlled by others. Control affects our choices and our thinking. It affects our interpersonal relationships and our relationship with a higher power. To ask an adult child to surrender control is like asking someone to leap from an airplane without a parachute.

This is so true. If you talk to anyone in any twelve step program, we all have control issues. We honestly believe that if things would just go the way we want, everything would be fine.

As a codependent, my main form of control was people pleasing and overgiving. What I was really trying to control was what you think of me and how you behave toward me.

One of the sneakiest versions of control in my life is what I call controlling to be helpful. I jump in to help so things will go the way I want them to. Luckily I have people in recovery who know me well enough to say, Barb, I think you are being controlling to be helpful here. I need that feedback because I often cannot see it.

What sits underneath control for most adult children is this belief: I can only be okay if you are okay, and especially if you are okay with me. So all our energy goes outward toward managing other people’s emotions and behavior. The work is turning that energy inward and learning to make ourselves okay.

This is internal safety. It is the foundation of healthy boundaries.

When I worked at Yale, I got feedback from everyone that I took on too much and did not delegate. When I finally asked myself why, I realized it was about control. One example was when my boss brought me last minute tasks. I would not delegate them because I wanted to buffer everyone else from her last minute nature. I thought I was helping, but I was controlling their workload and their perception of her and their perception of me. I didn’t want them to think I delegated at the last minute, but then realized, they KNOW it’s not me, it’s her! They were grown adults who could say no if they needed to. I had to learn to let people manage their own lives.

I also believed no one could do things as well as I could. But my colleagues were highly competent. Some of them were better at certain things than I was. Once I really saw that, things opened up.

The antidote to control is learning to control yourself. For me, nothing has helped more than building healthy boundaries. They showed me that I have far more choices than I thought I did. They helped me realize I actually do have the ability to shape my life. I have the ability to have way more control over my life than I ever imagined and it’s so freeing

All or nothing thinking

The next mode is all or nothing thinking or black and white thinking. Here is an excerpt from the Big Red Book.

With perfectionism and control as our guideposts, most adult children operate with all or nothing thinking before finding ACA. In codependence, options melt away and compulsion takes over the thinking process. ACA makes a distinction between being decisive and all or nothing thinking. Being decisive means we have seriously thought about our options and picked a course of action. In all or nothing thinking, we usually do not consider options. We push forward with fear or closed mindedness.

Black and white thinking shows up both externally in what we say and internally in what we think. In unhealthy homes, opinions are often attacked with sweeping statements and everything becomes absolute.

The phrase I hear the most that signals black and white thinking is this: I did not have a choice. That is the epitome of black and white thinking. One option. One path. No alternatives.

But that is never true. You might have two shitty options, but you always have options.

Let me give you an example. Someone says, I cannot call in sick because I have no sick time left and I will get fired. I did not have a choice. Actually, you did. The choices are stay home and possibly get fired or go to work sick. They both suck. But you still get to choose. And when you realize you are actively choosing, you get to stop complaining about the boss or the policy or the company. You get to simply go to work, do your job, and conserve your energy instead of draining yourself with resentment.

I once worked with a woman who said she had no choice but to take over her family’s business as a young single mom. I gently pointed out that she did have choices. She could have let the business fold. She could have taken a job elsewhere. She could have hired help. She could have found a partner. I came up with five options in about three seconds. What was sad was not that she had believed she had no choice back then, but that for twenty years she still believed she had no choice.

She also told her daughters they would inherit the business because she believed she had no choice in inheriting it from her father. And he believed he had no choice when he inherited it. That is the legacy of distorted thinking. Entire family lines passing down the belief that they are trapped.

Black and white thinking is everywhere. It shows up in words like never and always. It shows up in phrases like I have to, I should, or I must. Shift that to I get to or I could and the world opens up.

One of the greatest freedoms of recovery and one of the greatest freedoms of healthy boundaries is the freedom of choice. And the number one choice we have is the freedom to choose what we think. We can change the channel. We do not have to let our automatic thoughts run the show.

Judgmentalness, also known as the inner critical parent

The last mode of thinking is judgmentalness, often called the inner critical parent in ACA. Here is an excerpt from page forty eight of the Big Red Book.

Anyone who doubts that they have internalized a parent’s behavior only needs to listen to the internal critic. This voice brings self doubt and second guessing. It turns us into reactors rather than thoughtful actors. The voice often repeats the exact words our parents used. We realize how harsh we can be toward ourselves. Sometimes this voice is subtle. Sometimes it is more of a feeling than a voice. The critical inner parent brings together perfectionism, control, and all or nothing thinking. Until we find ACA, we believe that something is wrong with us and this voice reinforces that.

For me, the part of this reading that really jumps out is that the inner critic can be more of a feeling than a voice. I had a deeply rooted feeling most of my life that I needed to shrink back, get smaller, back off. I never had words that went with that feeling.

It was not until I was in a Yoga Nidra class in a Yoga for Twelve Step Recovery program that something clicked. The facilitator asked a question, and I cannot remember the exact phrasing, but it opened something up in me. I suddenly realized I believed I was too much.

Once I could name it, I could work with it. My antidote became this statement: I am just the right amount of everything. And now I actually believe it. 

I might be too much for some people and that is fine. They are not my people. Other people are too much for me and that is also fine. I do not need to adjust myself for everyone else. I get to adjust myself for me.

I also want to add that I did not know I had an internal critical voice until I was in my late twenties. I read a book where the author wrote out some of the self talk her clients used and I thought, oh my god, I say that to myself. I did not even know it was happening.

The book taught a process. First you have to see the thoughts. You cannot change what you cannot see. Then you look at what is happening around you that triggers it. And then you replace it with something kinder. Once I went throught hat process, I thought I was fine. Then twenty years later when I got into recovery I realized, oh no, there was way more negative chatter in there.

I always saw myself as a powerfule women of agency, someone who liked herself. And those things were true. But underneath that, I had a constant stream of negativity that I did not even know was running.

I ruminated about the past. I replayed conversations and events over and over. I catastrophized constantly. That is what I call living into the wreckage of the future. Both patterns set my nervous system on fire. They triggered huge fear responses. And I did not know they were happening until recovery helped me see them.

Now I rarely ruminate. Catastrophizing has been reduced by about ninety five percent. When it does come up, I change the channel immediately. Often the signal is not the thought itself but the physical shift in my body. My chest tightens or my heart rate changes. That is my cue.

I also used to blame, complain, and gossip constantly. All of this comes from the inner critical parent. It is like having a factory of criticism inside your head.

Recovery is about coming out of denial about these modes of thinking. It is about looking at where they came from, not to blame our families but to state the facts and understand the causes and condtions that created them so we can unlearn them.

Sometimes you do not need to know where something came from. You just need to stop doing it. But sometimes knowing the root helps the healing land more deeply.

So I would love to hear from you. Which of these modes of thinking shows up the most for you? And what have you done to move through it?

They are all intertwined, and honestly it is hard for me to pick which one has been the hardest for me. But I wanted to share all this because this month we are talking about family. And this is not about disparaging your family. This is about seeing clearly, becoming aware, and choosing something new.

That is the work. And you deserve the freedom that comes from it.