This is day 4 of the 100-day writing challenge I’m doing with other Twitter mutuals.
Hi, my name is Alex and I’m an Adult Child of an Alcoholic.
I go to ACA 12-step meetings via Zoom. I am going through the process of “working the steps”, as they say.
Going to ACA meetings has been valuable to me in a way that therapy never has been. I’ve been going to meetings since August and I’ve grown a lot.
Why do I mention this?
Because there’s one ACA adage in particular that I think of, in relation to the tweet above, and in relation to the concept of shadow.
If you’re not familiar with the concept of shadow, it’s a term coined by Jung to describe the repressed parts of ourselves that we hide.
The ACA adage in question is “Don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel”.
This is the norm in both dysfunctional families, and dysfunctional groups.
So, one way to read the above tweet, “Community is a function of shadow”, is that any community exists both due to the things the group doesn’t talk about, doesn’t trust, and doesn’t permit themselves to feel.
I suppose the inverse is true with communities that would qualify as “healthier”, on a spectrum from “truly toxic” to “healthy”.
“Your choice of community may be a sign of what you are avoiding”–in a way, that’s exactly it.
I am obsessed with the question, “What is sacred to you?”, and this is something I would ask the members of any intentional community I’m considering joining.
And the inverse to that is “What is taboo?”, i.e. “What does this particular group of people living in this particular intentional community consider taboo?”
I realize that these questions might be challenging, hard to form consensus around, or unanswerable because of the shadow of that particular group.
Which would say a lot about that particular group I think.