Parental Communication Study Thanks ACoNs!

Norman Rockwell

Prior posts referring to this study:

ACoNs: Research Study Needs Your Help!

Final Week for Research: Breaking the "NO Talk Rule"

Valerie Berinice Coles contacted me yesterday about the ACoN research study. She said (with double exclamation points) that "people helped out from 32 different countries!!" There were 978 respondents which surpassed their greatest expectations and mine, too! Thank you for being willing to participate in this research. Maybe we can find new ways to stop the transgenerational transmission of narcissistic traits and behaviors ("fleas") and trauma. 

Untreated, un-countered narcissism reduces the quality of everyone's lives; especially children born into an upside-down and backwards reality where Mom and Dad demand care-taking, not the reverse. A family where self-reliance is idealized and interdependence belittled. It may take decades, or even the rest of a child's life, to claim their full authenticity as a worthy and lovable human being. The narcissistic dysfunction marches through families from one generation to the next, through learned behaviors and/or psychological and physical traumas. 

While prior generations frowned on egocentricity and self-promotion, today's culture reinforces narcissism as a normal and even positive behavior. This makes it even more imperative for people like ourselves to recognize pathological relationships, especially our lineage on a crooked family tree. If Lizzie Borden is our grandma and Captain Hook an uncle, all the more important to understand how we might be affected, what we can and cannot do to heal the family tree. 

Families. Aren't they fascinating? Check out your genealogy and see who your ancestors were! My recovery work goes all the way back to my great-grandmother who I hope, at this very moment, is smiling down on me. 

As soon as the final results of the study are available, I'll post them on this blog. The following is a copy of the email sent to me by Valerie Bernice Coles (one of the researchers in this study). She wrote: 

"We have received a number of emails from individuals who missed the survey the first time around.  We did close data collection on February 27th. However, we will have a smaller study soon available to those who did not participate the first time. Anyone interested may email me at vcoles@uga.edu. The link for the large study that you helped us with has been discontinued. THANK YOU AGAIN FOR ALL OF YOUR AID! 

"...We are truly amazed and humbled at how many ACONs took our survey.  We had 978 respondents from at least 32 countries, 16 websites that we personally contacted to participate, and then many more websites that you and your readers, our respondents, forwarded the survey to.  Never in our wildest imagination did we think that so many ACONs would step up and help us out.  We are examining our findings over the next six weeks and when we have a summary of the results then.  As I mentioned in previous emails, I will be sending this summary out to all the known websites that participated as well as to any individuals who requested a summary.

Meanwhile, we did the drawing today for the ten $100 gift cards.  Anyone who entered their email address at the end of the survey was eligible for the drawing.  There were 711 emails in the drawing! The ten winners were contacted today via email to get their full name/address so we can mail the gift cards to them.  At the start of the study we had agreed not to publicize their names (as ACONs may not want narcissistic family members to know that they are part of an ACON site) but, of course, if one of the winners is part of your site, we hope that person will let the rest of the group know s/he was a recipient.

Again, we truly appreciate your help and we hope through this study that we can create a short useful questionnaire for people to use to help identify narcissistic parents. The success of this study would not have been possible without you."