Adult Children - An adult child is a term commonly used to describe any grown adult who was exposed to emotional, physical or sexual abuse as a child.
Description:
The term "Adult Children" was first coined by self help groups supporting the grown children of alcoholic parents. However, over the years, the term has become generalized to include all grown children who grew up in abusive homes or dysfunctional families. Therefore, the terms "adult child" or "adult children" can refer to those who grew up in a home with a personality-disordered parent. At "Out of the FOG" and in other personality disorder support circles, we often refer to adult children as "Unchosen's".
Unchosen's are people who are in a family relationship with a person who suffers from a personality disorder. they are called "unchosen" because they had no choice in entering into that relationship. Unchosen's include children, parents, siblings or relatives of a person who suffers from a personality disorder.
Characteristics of Adult Children
The following 13 characteristics of adult children was created by Dr. Janet G. Woititz.in her 1983 book "Adult Children of Alcoholics".
Adult Children:-
- guess at what normal is.
- have difficulty in following a project through from beginning to end.
- lie when it would be just as easy to tell the truth.
- judge themselves without mercy.
- have difficulty having fun.
- take themselves very seriously.
- have difficulty with intimate relationships.
- overreact to changes over which they have no control.
- constantly seek approval and affirmation.
- feel that they are different from other people.
- are either super responsible or super irresponsible.
- are extremely loyal, even in the face of evidence that loyalty is undeserved.
- tend to lock themselves into a course of action without giving serious consideration to alternative behaviors or possible consequences. This impulsivity leads to confusion, self loathing, and loss of control of their environment. As a result, they spend tremendous amounts of time cleaning up the mess.
Feb 10, 2010 - The American Psychiatric Association today released their first draft of the 5th revision of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual (DSM-V) which regroups personality disorder diagnoses into 5 categories:
Antisocial/Psychopathic Type
Avoidant Type
Borderline Type
Obsessive-Compulsive Type
Schizotypal Type
There is also a proposed mechanism for scoring the severity and the match of each of the diagnostic traits.
The proposals are not final and the APA has a comment period starting today and ending April 20th 2010. The DSM-V is scheduled for release in May 2013.
Dec 30 2009 - Those of you who use the "stay logged in" feature of the Out of the FOG support forum will notice that you unexpectedly had to log in again today. Please don't be alarmed. This was caused by some updates to the board behind the scenes. Please excuse the inconvenience.
Nov 1 2009 - Out of the FOG is celebrating 2 years in bringing information and support to family members and loved-ones of people who suffer from personality disorders. In the two years since we launched, our traffic has grown exponentially and we are rapidly becoming one of the internet's premier sources of information on coping with personality disorders. Happy birthday OOTF and thanks to all our members and supporters around the world.
Out of the FOG Support Forum Zetaboards Upgrade
June 15 2009 - Please excuse our appearance while the Out of the FOG Support Forum upgrades to run on the new Zetaboards software platform. The new software contains a number of new features and improvements over our existing system which should become evident after the conversion is completed.
This upgrade will convert all our existing forums, posts, PM's, memberships and profiles. There should be very little interruption in service or loss of data. The only thing you will notice is changes to the appearance of the graphical interface. It will take 1-2 weeks to complete the conversion.
Our main Out of the FOG information site, here at http://www.outofthefogsite.com will be unaffected by the upgrade. Bookmark this site and visit here if you have any trouble logging into the board. Should any unexpected interruption in our service occur, an announcement will be posted in the "Latest News" Box at at http://www.outofthefogsite.com. Additionally, a temporary discussion forum has been established here which you can use should we experience any long-term interruption of service.
Please excuse any inconvenience you may experience as we perform the upgrade.
June 3 2009 - BPD author A.J. Mahari has launched a new version of her website called BPD INFO which has a section which invites members to submit website articles about BPD. Our own gary submitted an article to her site this week.
