Accomodation: A Self-Defeating Motivation
Posted by igootnick on July 7, 2008
You have developed mechanisms to survive your family. These mechanisms are behind the behaviors that you have and don’t like. The big three mechanisms are: accommodation, rebellion and mimicking. Once you understand why you use these mechanisms, you can figure out how to stop using them, and your behaviors – the ones that seemed impossible to change – will change.
In this post, I will address the mechanism of accommodation.
To maintain the important ties to our parents or siblings, to feel loved by them, we may accommodate to or comply with their reasonable and unreasonable expectations. When we comply with their reasonable expectations we are okay. But what about when we comply with their serious flaws and damaging expectations? Not so okay, huh? Too much accommodation causes us to ignore our own interests, goals and destiny. So why do we do this? Because their guilt provoking words and deeds show us that they’re hurt when we don’t comply or accommodate. Maybe they become agitated – he screams, she loses control, maybe they become violent. Their insults, screaming and other such behaviors are evidence that your parents are fragile and that you have wounded them.
They will often pout, withdraw, reject you as a sign of having been hurt by you.
Often they will tell you directly, “How could you do this to me?” “Just wait until you have kids.” “I hope that your kids do to you what you have done to me.” These manipulations are designed to get you to accommodate to their expectations no matter the cost to your best interests. If you don’t go along you feel guilty about hurting them and therefore continue to repeat a pattern of behavior that you don’t like in yourself.
In my next posting, I will discuss the mechanism of rebellion. If you have any questions about this post or any others, please feel free to ask. I will try to get back to you speedily.
This entry was posted on July 7, 2008 at 3:24 pm and is filed under accomodation, bad relationships, change, childhood, family experiences, guilt, manipulation, parenting, parents' guilt provoking behavior, resentment, self help, self-defeating behaviors, self-destructive behaviors, submissiveness, unconscious behavior. Tagged: accommodation, agitation, assertiveness, authoritarian parent, complaints, compliance, critical parent, criticism, damaging expectations, defiance, depressed parent, disagreement, expectations, family, flaws, goals, guilt, inability to enjoy achievement, inability to have fun, inability to relax, independence, insults, love, loyalty, moody parent, needy parent, parents, resentful parent, resentment, screaming, self help, self-defeating behavior, self-defeating motivation, siblings, stubborn, submissiveness, success, unreasonable expectations, violence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
