INFP Introverts: The 64-Color Box

“Alcoholism is something that affects the entire fabric of your life. Its long-reaching tendrils always find you and tightly twine themselves into your thoughts, feelings and actions. They define and color all of your life in a way that leaves you feeling like life is a constant flat tire. The air is always leaking out no matter how many times you try and patch it or replace it. Your life does not travel on a smooth road because of it, but is constantly bumping itself from side to side.

“It is not true that children ‘forget’ as they grow. If anything, those memories are vividly cemented into place for life, complete with the original feelings, fears, hate, resentments, confusion, inability to function and reason, inability to feel good about oneself, the inability to trust yourself or others, and the ability to remain invisible. It becomes a lifetime job to undo what was caused by living with an alcoholic parent and, often, the struggle to overcome it can leave you as exhausted and deflated as a flattened old tire. It takes phenomenal strength to fight your way to a healthy life, forgive the past, and grow into an adult who has finally become whole and able to extinguish the anguished voice of the child who fought to survive.”

Continue reading “Adult Children of Alcoholics”

“What I realized was that I had come from several generations of victimized women and abusive men. Though the cast of characters may change, the repetitive cycle of toxic behavior can remain for generations on end. The family drama may look and sound different from generation to generation, but all toxic patterns are remarkably similar in outcome: pain and suffering.

“Maybe the reason you can’t see red flags or pink elephants is because you grew up in a toxic family environment where red flags or pink elephants were the norm. I, personally, couldn’t see the red flags of toxic relationships because I grew up saluting those red flags every day.

“As a matter of fact, I saluted and pledged allegiance to those red flags everyday. I could not see the big pink elephant because the pink elephant was the family pet. I took the pink elephant for walks every day. I fed that pink elephant every day. I cleaned up after the pink elephant that wasn’t house broken. I loved the pink elephant. This was the cycle of toxic behavior that I was involved in.

“I loved my family. I grew up and left home. When I decided to get married, I went looking for a woman who had—red flags and pink elephants. If a woman did not have red flags and pink elephants, I didn’t feel at home with her. How could I marry a woman who didn’t feel like home or family? To me, these red flags and pink elephants weren’t warning signs. These where signs that were leading me home. However, these signs were leading me into the same types of toxic relationships that’ve run in my family from generation to generation.”

—Michael Eaton

“All beings are the owners of their karma. Their happiness and unhappiness depend on their actions, not on my wishes for them. This does not mean that we do not care. We do and we should care. We choose to open our hearts and to offer as much love, compassion, and rejoicing as we possible can, and we also let go of the results. The example might be given of a friend who is engaged in extremely self-destructive behavior. We wish wholeheartedly, with great intensity, that they be free from suffering, that they be happy. But, in the end, we have to recognize where the boundaries actually are, what our responsibility really is, and where the source of happiness truly lies.

“If that friend does not change their behavior, they will suffer no matter how long and ardently we wish otherwise. Still, we continue to offer them metta and compassion, but we do this with the wisdom and acceptance that they are ultimately responsible for their own actions. In contemporary psychological terms, we would call this the release from codependency.” —Sharon Salzberg

Amazon.com: Ricky is a drug dealer but, of all the characters, he seems to be the most levelheaded and the most sure of who he is.

Alan Ball: He’s certainly the most, I think, evolved. You look at Ricky and you look at what he’s grown up in, the environment of repression and brutality, and it’s amazing. What is it that kept him from becoming one of those kids who goes to school with a gun and just starts shooting? Something—his ability to see the beauty in life is what kept him from just shutting down and becoming twisted and brutal. I think everybody has that ability, and we all make choices.

Amazon.com: There’s something so simple and poetic about Ricky’s encounter with the plastic bag that just keeps whirling in the breeze. You’re not sure what it means, but the simple beauty of it has a profound effect. How did that come about?

Alan Ball: I had an encounter with a plastic bag! And I didn’t have a video camera, like Ricky does. I’m sure some people would look at that and go, “What a psycho!” but it was a very intense and very real moment. There’s a Buddhist notion of the miraculous within the mundane, and I think we certainly live in a culture that encourages us not to look for that. I do like, though, that Ricky says, “Video’s a poor excuse, but it helps me remember.” Because it’s not the video he’s focused on; it’s the experience itself. He’s very connected to the world around him.

“There’s an old proverb that says you can’t choose your family. You take what the fates hand you. And like them or not, love them or not, understand them or not, you cope. Then there’s the school of thought that says the family you’re born into is simply a starting point. They feed you, and clothe you, and take care of you until you’re ready to go out into the world and find your tribe.” —Meredith Grey (Grey’s Anatomy) 

“I am a great believer in found families and I’m not a great believer in blood. Although I love my family, even the ones I grew up with, to me I’ve always felt that the people who treated you with respect and included you in their lives were your family and the people who were related to you by blood might happen to be those people but that correlation was a lot less [strong] than society believes it is. I’ve always been an outsider—in any group I was part of. I’ve always felt like the outside part: the ‘Y’ in the vowels; the Young in Crosby, Stills and Nash. I just never felt like a part of some place until it was something I built myself. That sense of alienation brings with it feelings of both inferiority and superiority…” —Joss Whedon