Detachment - Al-Anon Family Group

mosaicmax · Member

Detachment

java · Senior Member

A good reading is in Courage to Change todays reading, pg. 168. Look up detachment in Courage to change, there are 14 readings in the index.

I like this best approach best: Detach with love. It's best said in Al-Anon Faces Alcoholism,

"Detachment did not mean distinterest...I considered detachment 'respect for another's personhood.'"

Java

Mobirdie · Senior Member

As Java said CTC is excellent material as well as the One Day At A Time in Al-Anon daily reader. You can also ask who is in charge of books and materials at your meetings.

The first thing I had to do in working detachment was to realize that I was dealing with two people, the addict and my loved one. I still loved the person but did not love the addict. This gave me freedom to love my son and to remove or detach myself from any situations that the addict living within him created.

Detachment is not an easy thing to accomplish but it can be done and is an essential part of our recovery.

Christy · ~*Service Worker*~

This article on emotional detachment explains detachment well.

http://incestabuse.about.com/cs/mentalhealth/a/emotiondetach.htm

Christy

kismetstrand · ~*Service Worker*~

Oh boy.. one of my favorite topics!! Teehee. There is a chapter in How Alanon Works. "Detachment, Love, and Forgiveness" - it starts on page 83. The very last paragraph of that whole chapter is very powerful.
Also, someone handed me a slip of paper when I was having a detachment issue.. it read,
"Detach from the problem, but not from the person, the purpose of emotional detachment is to keep myself from drawing into crises of others."
For some reason that little sentence got through to me.

Luv, Kis

mosaicmax · Member

Christy, thanks for that article. It really helped. It's the same thing I had heard, but it helps to see it in B&W.

Ifnotforgrace · Veteran Member

Detachment is the:

Separation of emotion from situations.

It is a Process by which we stop taking on emotions/responsibilities that do not belong to us. There is a difference between compassion or empathy & actually taking on anothers emotions. If you are angry I do not have to be angry too. The same is true for pain, depression or grief.

Detachment is the Ability to allow people, places or things the freedom to be themselves.
It involves:
* Holding back from the need to rescue, save or fix another person from being sick, dysfunctional or irrational.
* Giving another person "the space" to be herself.
* Disengaging from an over-enmeshed or dependent relationship with people.
* Willingness to accept that you cannot change or control a person, place or thing.
* Developing and maintaining of a safe, emotional distance from someone whom you have previously given a lot of power to affect your emotional outlook on life.
* Establishing of emotional boundaries between you and those people you have become overly enmeshed or dependent with in order that all of you might be able to develop your own sense of autonomy and independence.
* Process by which you are free to feel your own feelings when you see another person falter and fail and not be led by guilt to feel responsible for their failure or faltering.
* Ability to maintain an emotional bond of love, concern and caring without the negative results of rescuing, enabling, fixing or controlling.
* Placing of all things in life into a healthy, rational perspective and recognizing that there is a need to back away from the uncontrollable and unchangeable realities of life.
* Ability to exercise emotional self-protection and prevention so as not to experience greater emotional devastation from having hung on beyond a reasonable and rational point.
* Ability to let people you love and care for accept personal responsibility for their own actions and to practice tough love and not give in when they come to you to bail them out when their actions lead to failure or trouble for them.
* Ability to allow people to be who they "really are" rather than who you "want them to be."
* Ability to avoid being hurt, abused, taken advantage of by people who in the past have been overly dependent or enmeshed with you.

Like anything else it is a process and we get better at it with practice.

The material presented here is not Al-Anon Conference Approved Literature. It is a method to exchange information, ideas, feelings, problems and solutions on a personal level.