Menu
TAR Anon Promises are the outcomes and results of successfully working through TAR Anon Steps, and attending meetings on a continual basis.
These Promises serve as guidance around the path of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) recovery. Following the format of TAR Anon Meetings and working the Steps with a TAR Mentor increases the chance of lasting CPTSD recovery which will serve as an emotional corrective experience for ourselves and those around us.
The first Promise lets people in recovery know that TAR Anon meetings and its support system will allow them freedom and serenity after following the road less traveled – the road to recovery.
You will be free from making unhealthy relationship decisions when you encounter people who reveal TAR traits.
To achieve this Promise, we must come to terms with the fact that life has become unmanageable and that we’ve been stuck in TAR, re-entering the TAR Pits of untreated and unhealthy relationship patterns, and remaining loyal to the constant toxic need to change others, rather than focusing on our own healing.
Working the 12 Steps of TAR Anon brings a new self-awareness. This awareness helps us understand how someone else’s toxic behavior has harmed us, awareness of the results of our trauma symptoms, awareness of our potential future risk, and the need for recovery.
Awareness is the first step for change in our recovery – recognizing we can’t change another’s embedded behavioral patterns and/or personality traits – and that we can only change our response and exposure to them. Awareness teaches us about ourselves and why we keep entering TAR, helping us to prevent suffering in the future.
This Promise states that you will be in charge of and make sense of your own life, gain self-awareness and self-transformation, and ultimately find self-love and authenticity.
Regaining autonomy over your life will empower you towards growth, hope, and neurological safety — leading you to a trauma-informed state of being, rather than doing.
To achieve the second Promise, we must search inward and conduct a fearless moral inventory which involves looking over past mistakes, gathering lessons, and making amends with ourself and those who have been affected by our mistakes.
Past mistakes may be embarrassing to recall. You might feel defined by the mistakes you’ve made. But mistakes are a key element of learning, growing, and building self-awareness.
Working the 12 Steps of TAR Anon can help us to understand our past traumatic experiences. We may have blamed ourselves for these experiences without understanding the harmful motivations of others behind toxic behaviors. We may not have known how early experiences influenced the development of these patterns, or how our personalities can be easily targeted. We may not have known how to change our responses to our experiences to have different outcomes.
Mistakes can also help teach us about what we value. Step by step, we can work towards focusing on those values instead of on destructive behaviors and addictive cycles.
Embracing mistakes allows for growth and change. Avoiding or denying mistakes only inhibits potential growth. Embracing mistakes with self-compassion, and self-forgiveness, and understanding why the mirages of our life looked like an oasis is the promise of fulfillment in working these steps. This new perspective allows us to place responsibility on abusers – without repressing or overly-focusing on the past – so that we can use our energy for recovery.
People struggling with TAR and narcissistic abuse feel engulfed in inner and outer chaos. Achieving balance and calm is a constant struggle. They are TARred and Feathered – wounded by excruciating experiences and collateral damage from toxic individuals.
At its core, the word serenity represents peace of mind and well-being. Having this as a focus can help you avoid people and behaviors that bring about chaos and destruction.
Complex PTSD changes the makeup of the brain, and disrupts its natural equilibrium. When the brain becomes dependent on old tapes, old patterns, and our default to fight, flight, freeze, and fawn response it needs the drama that CPTSD provides to continue functioning.
This cycle causes the opposite of peace and serenity. Promise 3 reminds us that it’s possible to manage our lives by working the 12 Steps leading to healthy choices – seeking outpatient and/or inpatient treatment and remaining in our TAR Program of Recovery are good ways to start.
Working the 12 Steps of TAR Anon can allow us to heal childhood attachment wounds that might have contributed to toxic patterns or our development of trauma/CPTSD.
The results of interrupted attachment can bleed into our current relationships, harming ourselves and the people in our relationship circles.
We can build stronger future relationships with ourselves and others by healing our attachment patterns through working the TAR Anon program.
The fourth Promise introduces the concept of peace and recognizes that it is attainable. It speaks to neuro safety and the minimization of neuro triggers.
Once you’ve decided what peace means for you, you can take the steps to achieve it. You might focus on healing relationships, embracing a new future, or reaching out for support and understanding of the red flags of TAR Pits we are about to step into. You will work the step of rebuilding a healthy relationship with yourself primarily before you engage in relationships with others.
The fifth Promise acknowledges the importance of supporting others throughout the healing process and gaining belts in the TAR Dojo.
Belts are achieved following a prescribed manner of being in recovery, successfully working a program of no contact or modified contact, and understanding that befriending our neuro systems through effective neuro regulation and co-regulation gives us the ability to recognize that our life choices are the product of our being TARred and Feathered.
Healing our lives – despite adverse childhood experiences and subsequent dysfunctional relationships – is achievable when we learn to establish empathic boundaries with ourselves and people who value and support us.
An essential resource during recovery is peer support, which is rooted in shared experiences. Others understand us because they’ve also been there. Becoming a TAR Mentor is an important part of the TAR Anon experience, as it allows us to help others who are emerging out of the fog of psychological war to come into the light. TAR Mentors, as volunteers, allows TAR Anon to grow around the world – providing free, supportive access to meetings to so many people in need.
Once you’re able to heal and embrace the fullness of life, those difficult experiences will certainly help someone else to heal.
Promise 6 is centered on accepting mistakes and learning from experiences, both of which can help mitigate feelings of self-pity. Untreated self-pity can negatively affect your recovery.
Re-parenting ourselves through our neurological systems will eventually give way to gratitude for the journey and the realization that we have lived our lives in a cognitive fog that only we can lift by leaning in with our program of recovery.
Accepting the wisdom of our TAR Mentors will help us to finally understand that we can change – and through effective neuroplasticity – we can retrain our brains to make better choices and concentrate strictly on always taking our oxygen first!
Being a member of the TAR Anon recovering community, and other recovering communities at large, can also help us concentrate on the relationship of mind, body, and spirit first and always feel needed and valued without having to get someone else’s validation.
Remember that your experiences can help you become self-aware, and help others – recognizing that you can be a light for others in recovery.
When people see themselves as worthy and useful in the community, they begin to let go of selfish thoughts and actions. They let go of attachment styles learned in childhood and gravitate to security and a more authentic response to the world around them.
By understanding that you are worthy of love and acceptance, you can begin to believe in your capacity for mistakes and growth without judgment. There is less of a focus on the pain within and greater self-awareness, self-compassion, and love for who we are and the child within who needs so much more.
By being focused on healing and understanding and meeting our needs in healthier ways, we become less focused on destructive, selfish behaviors – and our intimate choices begin to reflect what we deserve in our lives and less on the roller coaster of toxic relationships.
The need to focus on ourself and our problems no longer serves. We have a greater capacity for compassion and develop an interest in others, and we’ve found either the higher power or the eternal (more secular) internal power.
Working the 12 Steps of TAR Anon can help us identify the values, core beliefs, and principles that are foundational for our well-being.
Our past may have contributed to living by other’s beliefs to prevent conflict. We may have never identified our values from which to choose. We may have lived an unauthentic life that ignored our own needs because we were coerced into someone else’s distorted value systems.
We can honor our values in our decisions to change the trajectory of our well-being.
We will never compromise our newly gained values once we stay strong with our value system. It will be the force field that will allow only healthy people to be rewarded with our value-based life. Our most important value is the premium we place on our emotional intelligence rather than our immaturity.
No longer preoccupied with the pain of others because our values say we are not here to fix others but only to transform ourselves and become authentic, we will improve our relationships with others by improving our relationships with ourselves.
When we focus on our values and what is important to us as the foundation of our lives, we’re better able to show up and even allow others around us to feel safer with the value-based boundaries we establish for our inner empathic selves.
The more you focus on growth and notice the positive influence that you’re having on the world, the more you’ll begin to see why these are promises and not just wishes.
The more we focus on a value-based self-awareness, transformational life that exudes self-love, the more we become authentic in our lives and are no longer susceptible to love bombing, gaslighting, trauma bonds, and the childhood chains that bind us and our capacity to be who we are in this world.
Just as good trauma-informed and DBT therapy involve treatment to help people reach healthy goals, these promises work similarly. They help people attain better health – mentally, physically, and spiritually – in response to adding the TAR Anon program to all transformational programming in one’s life. This brings about a new way of life.
When we become aware of the benefits that we bring to the world, even in challenging times, your life will change.
As we experience positive interactions with ourselves and other people, we will learn who we can trust and with whom we can feel safe.
Without TAR partners getting in the way of financial independence and security, doors to greater opportunities will open. Life for yourself and those you prioritize in the values of your own authentic life will stabilize. You will create a strong and healthy foundation to build your new home that is filled with love, understanding, acceptance, patience, and self-awareness.
Working the 12 Steps of TAR Anon brings empowerment to our sense of perpetual victimization. As a result, self-image improves as we build a healthier relationship with ourself and find more self-compassion.
As we apply the 12 Steps and principles of recovery, our self-transformation brings us from victim to survivor – strengthening the self-care and self-respect needed to enhance our relationship with self and improve our relationships with others.
Slowly but surely, you will know who to let into your home without jeopardizing your inner peace or endangering your closest ones.
The more we stay in the neuro-safe world of recovery from TAR events, people, and TAR pits by working closely with like-minded peers and treatment teams, the more we learn how to cope with situations that we thought were previously unmanageable.
We will accept that our TAR recovery works well hand in hand with other programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Codependents Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, or others. Other recovery programs don’t exclude each other – instead, each program supports the overall recovery.
Unhealthy relationship traits stem from untreated adverse childhood experiences and CPTSD. We were victims in childhood; however, on our paths to recovery we learned to grow up and hug our wounded inner child with adult hands, not taking the role of a victim anymore, but working towards becoming a Spiritual Warrior and survivor.
Ultimately, we will accept that our progress of three steps forward and two steps backward is the road to true authenticity, neuro safety, and emotional regulation and co-regulation.
These promises are the treasures at the end of the rainbow, if there is ever any true end.
Through these steps and TAR Anon recovery, we commit ourselves with grace, forgiveness, compassion, and the laser-focused attention of self-love to bring us – and hopefully the people who truly love us — by allowing us to shed the mirages of our lives, peel the layers slowly off of ourselves with love, and – more importantly – steadfastly remain on the road to authenticity knowing full well the only person we can stay in control of is ourself.
According to TAR Anon, all things are possible and achievable.
As we delve into each of these Promises, we showcase their purpose and how they help us reach self-awareness, inner transformation, and self-love.