Carl Jung once said that “Unless you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”

That, right there, seems to be the core of so much of the work that so many of us who come at the world from the perspective of adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional households are doing every single day.

When we grow up in an environment that’s unpredictable, chaotic, we learn certain survival skills. We learn how to read the terrain. We learn that we either have to keep ourselves low – to stay out of the range of fire – or we learn to lash out in anger in order to make ourselves bigger, stronger, and less vulnerable.

And until we start to explore these things – even later in life, because they’re rooted so deeply, we find ourselves involved in the same types of situations over and over again, the same dysfunctional relationships.

It’s like we walk into the same story again and again, only the names have changed, and the characters are slightly different…