As I said, I can’t really comment on the parenting aspect. My own perspective is strictly “use the behavior as a model to envision alternatives to fix fucked-up parenting” in the minds of people (like me) who had certain kinds of fucked up parenting.
(That this seems to produce good results does not really prove that doing those things would be good parenting, though, especially since human beings can fuck anything up if they really want to, and turn the most wonderful things into weapons of abuse with even just a little effort.)
I came across the CC at a point where I was researching developmental psych in order to find out what could be done to fix the kind of crap I had in my head and came across in others’. Mostly books tended to give advice like “love yourself” or to “love”, “protect”, “care for” etc. one’s inner child. The best ones talked about re-living past scenarios with good parenting.
But none of those books ever explained what any of that was, so if you didn’t experience love or protection or good parenting, they were kind of useless.
CC and Cycles of Power (by Pamela Levin) were the only books I found that made a significant effort to show just what functional parenting might look or sound like. (Though Weiss & Weiss’s “Recovery from Co-Dependency” deserves an honorable mention, but I get the impression a lot of its inspiration actually came from Levin’s work.)
I now have a mostly-good-enough model of what functional parenting looks like that is based on more general principles of responsibility, trust, and clean communication, but in difficult cases I still reach for Levin or Leidloff on rare occasion.
(Again, “functional parenting” not meaning actual parenting, but “what kinds of parenting experiences do people need to imagine as alternatives in order to repair their own functioning by realizing what they were missing and why they don’t need to keep running coping mechanisms to work around their dysfunctional parent.”)
As I said, I can’t really comment on the parenting aspect. My own perspective is strictly “use the behavior as a model to envision alternatives to fix fucked-up parenting” in the minds of people (like me) who had certain kinds of fucked up parenting.
(That this seems to produce good results does not really prove that doing those things would be good parenting, though, especially since human beings can fuck anything up if they really want to, and turn the most wonderful things into weapons of abuse with even just a little effort.)
I came across the CC at a point where I was researching developmental psych in order to find out what could be done to fix the kind of crap I had in my head and came across in others’. Mostly books tended to give advice like “love yourself” or to “love”, “protect”, “care for” etc. one’s inner child. The best ones talked about re-living past scenarios with good parenting.
But none of those books ever explained what any of that was, so if you didn’t experience love or protection or good parenting, they were kind of useless.
CC and Cycles of Power (by Pamela Levin) were the only books I found that made a significant effort to show just what functional parenting might look or sound like. (Though Weiss & Weiss’s “Recovery from Co-Dependency” deserves an honorable mention, but I get the impression a lot of its inspiration actually came from Levin’s work.)
I now have a mostly-good-enough model of what functional parenting looks like that is based on more general principles of responsibility, trust, and clean communication, but in difficult cases I still reach for Levin or Leidloff on rare occasion.
(Again, “functional parenting” not meaning actual parenting, but “what kinds of parenting experiences do people need to imagine as alternatives in order to repair their own functioning by realizing what they were missing and why they don’t need to keep running coping mechanisms to work around their dysfunctional parent.”)