Licking the Razor's Edge (2015)

And, because most families are anything but “perfect” or “enlightened”, it makes sense
that children would learn dysfunctional ways of dealing with their stunted personal
growth. These are the families where it is not acceptable to talk about worries or desires
or problems, where feelings are not expressed openly, where communication is indirect at
best (where concerns are relayed to another either passive-aggressively or by a third
party), where children are strongly encouraged to be almost always successful or right or
good, where play & frivolous behavior is discouraged, and/or where children are told to
“do as I say not as I do”.
In essence, this is almost every family in the modern world today.
In essence, almost every one of us is innately “dysfunctional” in this way …
In essence, almost every one of us is addicted to love.
“The point that I am making is that our understanding of codependence has evolved to
realizing that this is not just about SOME dysfunctional families … Our very role models,
our prototypes, tend to be dysfunctional themselves. All of our traditional cultural
concepts of what a man is, and what a woman is, are twisted, distorted, almost comically
bloated stereotypes of what masculine and feminine truly are.” ~ Robert Burney
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