Ask anyone what an authority figure is, and they are likely to give you a logical answer: anyone in a position of authority. But ask an adult son, who endured parental dysfunction, alcoholism, and abuse during his upbringing, the same question and chances are you’ll be asked an emotionally painful question. “Authority”, for him, significantly transcends the traditional definition of the word, and so does the concept of “father”.
Subjected, without choice, recourse, escape, or solution, to some two decades of betrayal and detriment, these adult children, though still physically intact, are not necessarily emotionally stable, but often appear confident and capable. Yet their years of vilification, demoralization, degradation, and dangerous exposure to parental infractions from which they could neither defend themselves nor protect themselves has left them broken and without the trust that otherwise allows people to connect with and love others in the world at large.
“Adult children often live a secret life of fear,” according to the textbook Adult Children of Alcoholics (World Service Organization, 2006, p. 10). “Fear, or sometimes terror, is one of the threads that connect the 14 characteristic traits. Two of the first three traits describe our fear of people. While many adult children seem cheerful, helpful, or self-sufficient, most live in afraid of their parents and spouses as well as afraid of an employer…They have a sense of impending doom or that nothing seems to work.”
That fear is the main parameter an adult child uses when trying to define an “authority figure.”
“(All) children look to authority to help them define what is real and make sound decisions in relationships with others,” according to the ACA textbook (p. 355). “The support of the responsible authority gives them confidence to develop their own capacity to live effectively in the world.”
“(However), the tragedy for children in an alcoholic home,” he continues (p. 355), “is that they are robbed of a pattern of life that is based on a responsibility to sanity… The attitude of abuse that Underlies all addictive behavior, dominates the family and children learn to accept this attitude in others and in themselves”.
Unknowingly negotiating the world with a pitchfork trigger, these people frequently trip them up by others, who can often be classified as “authorities” due to various factors.
Taller, heavier and/or stronger in appearance, those with such physical characteristics may place the person at a current disadvantage by suggesting or recreating their imbalance in the parental power play early in life .
Speech, tone of voice, volume, movements, actions, and gestures serve as behavioral features that remind or reactivate it.
“We have a negative ‘gut reaction’ when dealing with someone who has the physical characteristics or mannerisms of our alcoholic rater,” according to the ACA textbook (p. 417).
Mild imbalances, such as those manifested by a better job, higher salary, and greater comforts from someone else, such as a larger home or fancier car, can cause some degree of uneasiness.
The many functions, roles, and titles in life, including bank tellers, store clerks, teachers, supervisors, bosses, police officers, and judges, along with the broader agencies that create and uphold rules in customs, immigration, court systems, prisons Governments, and even God, are adorned with the word “authority” and put adult children at decided, almost impossible to win disadvantages with them.
Amplifying this authority and emphasizing their power are those who perform their duties in uniform, which can virtually dictate their superiority. People with a safer and more stable upbringing can confidently pass a police car parked on the road at a speed well over the limit, for example, but an adult child can take his foot off the accelerator even if he maintains a speed well over the limit. him, trying to avoid the gripping emotions that would surely result from a confrontation with him.
Having been routinely attacked by a predatory parent and given a “punishment” for doing little more than existing during his upbringing, he has grown accustomed to being held responsible for the uncontrollable behavior of others and taking the blame for infractions he never committed.
“Authority figures scare us and we feel scared when we need to talk to them,” again according to the ACA textbook (p. 417).
“We confuse our boss or supervisor with our alcoholic parent(s) or rater and have similar relationship patterns, behaviors, and reactions that are left over from childhood (ACA textbook, p. 417).
Forced to gorge, swallow, file away, deny, and even lie to himself about his past in order to believe that “it’s gone and forgotten,” an adult child doesn’t realize or understand that it isn’t and that a single authority figure can Gently press its “play” button, inducing your unresolved and sometimes traumatic recordings to come to life in your mind. These circumstances can result in various forms of insanity.
“Insanity,” according to the ACA textbook (p. 359), “begins when children are forced to deny the reality of pain and abuse. Once children have accepted the idea that alcoholism is not violent or dangerous, they have no basis for deciding what is real or for knowing how to respond to those around them. They no longer trust authority to guide them or protect them from harm.”
In fact, the “authority” created their harm, abandoning them in their greatest need, and no one then appeared to protect them from their original and only “authority”.
“We carry that fear (of abandonment) into our adult lives, and we fear our employers, certain relationships, and group situations,” according to the ACA textbook (p. 11). “We fear authority figures or we become an authority figure.”
In the latter case, the abuse spreads from the abused child, who becomes an adult child, and then to his own offspring, if he has not undertaken an adequate recovery, repeating the only behavior to which he has been introduced.
An adult child’s definition, in the end, of an authority figure has little to do with what the figure does, but with what they unconsciously believe they do to them, and this involves several subtle factors.
First and foremost is the fact that an authority figure wears the displaced visage of his parent or primary caretaker, seeming to gently uproot the sediment of his past that he thought was well buried.
Secondly, it ignites the affective bond, like a thread that extends from the present to the past, or between him now, as an adult, and him then, as a child, generating the anguish, fears and fears that initially caused the experiences of their parents. original betrayal of him, or the one that inadvertently placed him on the “enemy” side of the fence with him and created the mistrust that separated him from them and ultimately from most everyone else in the world. Instead of attracting, he repelled, ultimately leading him to disconnect from them and the God or Higher Power of understanding him.
Paradoxically, what he needs most now to heal his condition – reunification with others – what he most rejects.
Although several decades may pass since the original violation occurred, regenerated emotions can cause similar or even identical reactions, returning you to a time when you were physically, psychologically, and neurologically undeveloped, and resulting in impotence and paralysis. of the current time.
Finally, the neuropathways, or connections between his brain cells or neurons, may be so dense and established that he automatically takes them back to their origins, effecting the return at the age of three, four, or five when he may now be 30 or 40. or 50.
“The abuse of authority figures in childhood has left us on our guard as adults about authority figures,” according to the ACA textbook (p. 379). “We tend to place people in the categories of an authority figure when they may not be… Our past experiences tell us that any leader, employer or official is inherently an authority figure and should be distrusted.”
If a loving, caring and protective father treated me like this, an adult son can reason, then how will others in the world treat me, who have not known me since Adam and therefore owe me nothing?
The purpose of the brain, above all else, is to promote and ensure a person’s survival and it processes any potential danger, whether perceived or real, into its primitive or reptilian part, causing a flood of stress hormones that must be harnessed to the person is adequately fueled for fight or flight action which will improve his chances of survival if he does so. An abused child, forcibly confronted with a hopelessly unbalanced power game, can do nothing but flee inward creating an inner child sanctuary and thus virtually drown in the physiological reactions elicited within him, defeated both for this unhelpful response as for the harmful father. you stumbled upon the circuit of it.
It takes several more milliseconds for your circumstances to arrive and register in the higher reasoning portion of your brain. But, programmed to be “better safe than sorry,” the lower part often reacts in the same way with authority figures who represent parents later in life, bypassing the path to higher roles and leaving the person with no choice but to fight him waves of fear and terror stirred within him. The repeated betrayals and dangers of the original incident create chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Forced, prior to insight or recovery, to negotiate life through survival traits that attempt to minimize the danger to which he believes himself to be subject, he implements a people-pleasing strategy to calm, soothe, and appease his authority figures displaced by parents. and thereby create the illusion that he is kind, helpful, and benevolent; in other words, that he is a friend and not the enemy he seemed to become in the eyes of his parents or his primary caregivers. The motivation, in all cases, is to improve his chances of survival in his emotionally weakened state, despite the fact that the danger exists almost exclusively within his mind and not outside of it, in the world.
Two of the 14 survival traits echo the fearful state of an adult child: “We isolated ourselves and feared people and authority figures” and “We became approval seekers and lost our own identity in the process.”
According to the ACA textbook (p. 11), “Becoming a people pleaser is one of the solutions adult children use to avoid being criticized, shamed, or abandoned. Adult children also try to disarm people.” angry or frightened with Approval Seeking Behavior… We believe we will be safe and never abandoned if we are ‘nice’ and never show anger.”
The authority figure and people-pleasing dynamic are by-products of being forced to deal with defamatory, dysfunctional, and sometimes dangerous parents or primary caregivers, and without knowing or understanding the reasons behind their actions, as abuse it was never identified or labeled as inappropriate. The adult son, in the end, was led to believe that her parents represented everyone else in the world.