Connecting to what we want: Part 4 – Community

The surface illusion: Why parental isolation is hard to spot

It took me a long time to understand how my family of origin struggled with community because it wasn’t obvious at the surface. There were often people around. At least one of my parents appeared to have friends. And there were regular gatherings at our house.

It can be hard to understand what the patterns our parents lay down for us in childhood are really about – because we have nothing to compare them to. Only by examining my own relationship to the experience and idea of ‘community’ and looking for some better models as an adult did it become clear how my parents struggled with it. I picked up what they modeled, and I still carried it around with me.

Company without intimacy

It’s true that we had people around when I was a kid, but nobody was close emotionally. People were kept at a certain distance, and there was no intimacy. My father had no friendships, and my mother had friendships mostly with people who were unavailable in important ways.

A lot of the people my parents had around were ‘charity cases’, people who needed somebody, anybody, and who therefore couldn’t criticize my parents. In fact, I think this is why nobody was allowed too close – they might have something to say that could be perceived as critical, even if it was just to help.

When I got a little older, some of my own troubled friends hung around in this ‘charity’ category. Other people in the ‘community’ were emotionally distant, loner types who my mother would essentially badger into having a relationship with her, but who, left to their own devices wouldn’t have a relationship with basically anybody.

The last category were people to whom we were the ‘charity case’, who might be trying to help my mother or father in some way. These could be grifters, only appearing to want to help, but who in the end stole from the family, or they may have really wanted to help, and it would take them some time to realize that neither of my parents was capable of accepting help in a real way (or even acknowledging the need for it). This type would stay for a season and naturally (and healthily in my opinion) drift away.

What does the total picture of all these characters paint? The ‘community’ of people who existed around my family were not equals, and were not intimate. As a result, they couldn’t really criticize either of my parents or in some cases even see the truth of the family dynamic. People were kept, in clever but sad ways, out of the range of intimacy. This was not community; it was, in the barest sense, company.

A lost social technology

Community is a word that is popular in the modern lexicon, ironically, as we live in an age where the broader society in industrialized countries has largely lost any meaningful tradition of community.

I have saved talking about this element of connecting to what we want for last because it is the most complex, and it is so for that reason – it’s not just a childhood trauma issue. Even people who don’t grow up in abusive or neglectful homes are struggling to find and maintain community in our present age. You could consider it a lost social technology, or a lost element of the art of living.

Redefining connection: Interdependence vs codependence

What is a community? An easy, meaningful definition to me would be that a community is a group of people living in interdependence, bonded by a common goal or set of values.

In RRP group work, our community might be defined as follows: we need each other but do not expect each other to do for one another what we can do for ourselves (interdependence, not codependence), and we are bonded by the value of taking responsibility for recovering from abuse and reclaiming our lives.

A community like this can be very helpful and might be the beginning of establishing a different relationship to the community in our own lives, but it is not the end goal. Many of us have a desire to be a part of a group of people who live near to one another and who care about each other. People who will notice when you’re not there, who will help you when you’re struggling, and celebrate with you when you’re doing well. People with whom you might share friendship and reciprocal relationships and who share certain core values that allow you to navigate conflict and share space in a way that has identifiable boundaries.

Stepping out of childhood isolation

Healing our inner child around how they were let down around community is the key to getting our inner adult in place to make changes in the present. This can be challenging, but it is possible. It’s unfair when a child is made to feel different and not a part of the society around them because of their parent’s dysfunction, and it makes sense if there is a lot of unfelt anger, frustration, and despair there.

The safety and meaning of being a part of a broader community was often taken from us as children, which causes so much pain and makes it hard to have hope in a meaningful, connected life.

The job of parenting a child who has been through this involves a lot of patience, understanding, and willingness to keep coming back to the false beliefs that our families of origin installed in us, and having a process to get to the grief that is there. It also, very importantly, involves our inner adult taking charge of our present relationships and noticing how our inner child may have been running them up until now.

It’s natural that our inner child may be used to running our life and beliefs around this stuff because, growing up, they had to fight for some control of it! However, they long for an inner adult who will parent them, help them grieve, and plot a manageable, step-by-step path towards a better present where we have good enough connections with healthy enough people who align with our values.

As featured in Patrick Teahan's Healing Community.