Adult children: the secrets of dysfunctional families

4. 
Identity Confused (Diffused)
When we are in this state, we are in constant crisis but it is different
than when we are in a moratorium. The crisis goes in circles. There
is no direction to it. We jump from one lover to the next, from one

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job or career to the next, from one set of beliefs to the next and
from one lifestyle to the next. We are lost souls, wandering the
earth looking for a sense of security in a way that we never got it.
Some of us here are offenders and addicts who hurt a lot of people
in the process of wandering.
In college we may have been the Party King or Queen, but we
never quite get out of that role. Or we are the rigid, religious
fundamentalist whose entire identity is defined and controlled by
something outside of ourselves. While some of us here may speak
of being easy-going free spirits, we are far from that. We cannot
tolerate differences of opinion because any other opinion would
threaten our very sense of self and that is not tolerable. When we
are identity achieved, a good chunk of our sense of self is

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comfortably inside of us, and cannot be threatened by someone
else's point of view.
People ask us how so many people could follow Jim Jones to
Guyana and then commit mass suicide with him at his command.
We believe that they were identity confused, and that they needed
Jim·Jones so much for their own self-definition that they were
willing to give up the very essence of their self-definition their own
lives.
Getting beyond foreclosure or confusion requires that we have
strong, healthy building blocks when we reach adolescence. It also
requires that we look at our childhoods, have our feelings about our
childhoods, re-evaluate both the ''good" and the "bad", and take our
parents off the pedestals that we had them on as children. Our
parents are neither saints nor ogres they are human beings.
To take our parents off those pedestals and "let" them be human is
tremendously painful if we are Adult Children because we are
strongly enmeshed with them. We are enmeshed if they were
overindulgent with us, and we are enmeshed if they were abusive
and neglectful. In the latter case, we are enmeshed because we
keep going back to an empty well for water but there is none there.
We keep hoping and praying that it will be there, but it never is.
What we are going back for is something that perhaps our parents
will never be able to give us because their childhoods were abusive
and neglectful.
As Alice Miller so aptly stated (Miller, 1987), the pain of admitting
that our parents were not capable of loving us (in perfect healthy
ways) is much greater than the pain of believing that we were

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"bad" and didn't deserve love. And so we remain foreclosed, until
the pain becomes so great that we must change.
In other words, our symptoms, our addictions and our pain are
really our allies. They tell us when the Little Child Within has had
enough and wants some help to grow up.

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14 
Intimacy and Beyond
Erikson's next stage is called Intimacy versus Isolation and it is in
the arena of intimacy that so many of we Adult Children
experience our most painful crises.
We like to define intimacy as the ability to be in relationship with
someone without sacrificing our identity in the process. It is the last