This is http://www.essayz.com/a8809231.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %CODEPENDENT DAMAGE CONTROL REFLEXIVE IMPRESSIONS 880923 Jill is codependent in her relationships. Jill became codependent in her relationships as she and Jack became codependent upon each other; Jill helping Jack compensate for his addiction and Jack helping Jill compensate for her low self esteem. Jack became addicted to fixes in compensation for his low self esteem. Jill became an excessive care giver in compensation for her low self esteem. Each helped the other compensate for the other's own low self esteem as a means to compensating for their own low self esteem. Neither Jack nor Jill felt free to be themselves. Neither felt acceptable as they were. Both tried to gain control over impressions which others had of them as persons, and over responses which others offered to them as persons. Feeling unacceptable they sought to gain control over others' impressions of them and over others' patterns of acceptance or rejection of them. Each sought in their own way to achieve impression damage control. Attempts at impression damage control have to do with conceptions of good and evil. Good people are acceptable and accepted people. Evil people are rejectable and rejected people. Good people are people who are accepted into community, into heaven. Evil people are people who are rejected, excommunicated, alienated, shunned, dis-fellowshipped. Addicts and codependents seek to achieve damage control to prevent being identified as being evil people. In trying to achieve damage control they seek to control the impressions and emotional responses of other people to themselves as addicts and codependents. In efforts to minimize negative impressions and responses addicts and codependents work to achieve false favorable impressions. They think that they themselves are not acceptable and they want to achieve the impression of acceptability. Their goal is essentially dishonest because they want to achieve acceptability while continuing to believe that they are essentially not acceptable. The conception of low self esteem is a communal reality over which addicts and codependents do not have control. Their community has helped them to believe that they must be different than they are to be accepted into community. They have believed what their community has helped them to believe. They believe that they must appear to be different than they really are to be accepted into community. Jack and Jill cannot be different persons than they really are. They can only try to appear to be different persons than they really are. They try to appear to be different through patterns of behavior which attempt to control other people's impressions and responses to their behavior patterns. Their attempts to control other people's impressions and responses constitute their addictive and codependent behavior patterns. The behavior patterns of addicts and codependents are externally referenced. Their behavior patterns are not rooted in who they really are. Their behaviors are rooted in their impressions of other people and what impress others favorably; impressions which are not rooted in honest dialogue. Their conceptions of what it is to be a person are not rooted in self knowledge; they have no conception of self apart from impression control. Their own impressions of who they are are entirely rooted in their own impressions of others whom they see as engaged in similar programs of impression control. If everybody is engaged in impression control, what is the possible foundation for authentic human relationships? The notion of authentic human relationships is not real to Jack and Jill, it is inconceivable. Jack and Jill cannot realize authentic relationships, because they can not conceive the possibilities which exist for authentic meetings in open and honest conversations among people who really are who they are, and appear as essentially unique persons. Jack and Jill cannot accept themselves as they really are with significant self esteem, because they can not believe that other people can with integrity accept them as they really are. Jack and Jill believe that acceptance by other people must be based upon achieving an appropriate level of control over other people's impressions of and responses to one's own behavior. Jack and Jill try all kinds of "fixes" to achieve an impression of well being and health. They cannot be well and whole with personal and communal integrity within the context of their paradigm. The next best thing that they can achieve is an impression of well being and health. This they try to do by various technologies of personal fixing. There are many professionals who are in the business of helping to fix people: medical and psychological doctors, chemists making drugs, teachers in respected finishing schools, clothiers helping cloak people in respectability, cosmeticians, cosmetic surgery etc. Addicts and codependents are in search of effective fixes. If one fix does not succeed in achieving the desired kind of impression control, they try a different fix. If one drug, purchase, process, activity, relationship, achievement, etc. does not bring the desired impression and/or experience of well being and health, they try another one within the context of their addictive codependent paradigm. They are imprisoned by their paradigm within which each person must achieve an impression of being acceptable into community. The paradigm leads to disintegrative behavior. Jack and Jill need to escape from their paradigm. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================