Andrea Anderson Polk - The Cuckoo Syndrome: The Secret to Breaking Free from Unhealthy Relationships, Toxic Thinking, and Self-Sabotaging Behavior

The Cuckoo Syndrome

The Secret to Breaking Free from Unhealthy Relationships, Toxic Thinking, and Self-Sabotaging Behavior

Andrea Anderson Polk

Licensed Professional Counselor

Andrea intimately understands the human heart and the heart of God. As a follower of Jesus and with over a decade of clinical experience counseling hurting people, she powerfully integrates Scripture, science, and psychology. Andreas words, equally elegant and surprisingly provocative, demonstrate that by facing our deepest heartaches and identifying the lies we believe, transformation and healing happen. You will be welcomed into an honest conversation with yourself, God, and others about your wants, needs, and desires. Youll discover what or who is keeping you stuck is not what you think it is. The Cuckoo Syndrome is driven by the truth of John 8:32 that the truth will set you free.

Mark Batterson, lead pastor of National Community Church and New York Times best-selling author of nineteen books including The Circle Maker, In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day, and Wild Goose Chase

Andrea Anderson Polks The Cuckoo Syndrome is a very personal story about overcoming toxic relationships and self-sabotaging behaviors to find the courage to be ourselves. Taking vignettes both from her therapy practice and her own life, Andrea uses the cuckoo bird metaphor to describe both the people in our lives who prey on our vulnerabilities as well as the unconscious ways we can prevent ourselves from acting upon our own best interests. This book is also a very accessible primer on emotion theory, providing the reader with many examples of how accessing core feelings provides a compass for living our lives. To find our true desires and lifes purpose, Andrea suggests that we must address the psychological defenses (the various disguises of the cuckoo) that we developed in childhood to protect ourselves from difficult relationships and experiences. These internalized cuckoo tendencies allowed us to survive traumatic and overwhelming experiences but result in a variety of destructive behaviors. Such a journey of the soul can be harrowing, and Andrea suggests that we can find resolve and courage by tapping into the unconditional love of past caregivers and by developing an open and deeply personal relationship with Christ.

Stuart Andrews, Ph.D., Faculty Chair, The Intensive Short-term Dynamic Psychotherapy Program at the Washington School of Psychiatry, and coauthor of Treating Affect Phobia: A Manual for Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy

One of the true blessings I have experienced as a professor is to see students grow and thrive in their calling. Through hard work and personal struggle, Andrea stands out among her peers as a gifted professional counselor, speaker, and writer. Andrea writes with compassion, empathy, and transparency. The Cuckoo Syndrome will help readers overcome false thinking and enable them to learn how to challenge their thinking, listen to their hearts, and trust their emotions to live fully and joyfully in the present.

Kathleen Arveson, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology and Counseling, Regent University

To My Mother

My eternal gratitude to you for taking a courageous stand for truth and paving our way to freedom.

M Y THERAPEUTIC WORK AS A licensed professional counselor has inspired this book. I have spoken to and counseled hundreds, possibly thousands of people about the subjects covered inside, all of whom have motivated me on this journey.

The Cuckoo Syndrome is a compilation of my story, the clinical experience gained from more than a decade of close attention and treatment of my clients in private practice, and the study of psychological research. All of which I have developed into an innovative strategy for breaking free from unhealthy relationships, toxic thinking, and self-sabotaging behavior (i.e., cuckoos). Consequently, this creates space for ones purpose to hatch and come to life and no longer be destroyed and suffocated by the cuckoo.

As a clinician, I strongly believe we can only take our clients as far as we are willing to go ourselves.

At the prompting and encouragement of my clients to write a book, I feel honored to present my work to you in this volume.

Sitting in your office was a healing balm for my soul. It was the first time I had ever had the courage to confront the truth that I was in an emotionally and spiritually abusive marriage. This healing journey to freedom released me from my prison. I no longer feel lost. I was stuck and suffering silently far too long. I have courageously and victoriously taken back my life.

T HIS CLIENT, LIKE SO MANY others, had sat under my counsel after seeing a number of professional therapists, pastors, mentors, lay ministers, and others who were all trying to fix her and her abusive marriage, yet she felt crazier and crazier. It was not until she realized she was sitting under the toxic weight of a cuckoo relationship that she was able to begin the process of freedom.

Did you know a cuckoo is a real bird?

Imagine it is a beautiful spring day, and you are sitting in your favorite spot at home and relaxing, and you notice a robin in her nest outside your window.

You also notice a large, ugly bird, a cuckoo bird, watching the robins nest from a nearby tree. As soon as the mother robin leaves her nest, the cuckoo bird swoops in, removes a robins egg, and while holding it in her beak, lays her own egg directly in the robins nest along with the robins other eggs. The cuckoo bird then flies off, devouring the robins egg as she makes her getaway!

In taking a closer look at the robins nest you are shocked at what you see. The cuckoos egg looks eerily similar and almost identical to the robins eggs; it is a light shade of blue with small brown speckles. The resemblance is uncanny! You are curious to watch and see what the mother robin will do when she returns to her nest to incubate her eggs. Surely, she would notice this foreign egg in her nest, even though it looks like one of her own. But once she returns, she sits on the cuckoo birds egg and treats it as if it were her own. Shes been tricked. In fact, she continues to sit on her eggs day after day and eventually one hatches. It is the cuckoo chick and only the cuckoo chick. The robins other eggs have not yet hatched.

Almost immediately upon hatching, the featherless cuckoo chick, with its eyes still closed, uses its wings to push some of the robins eggs out of the nest. Its almost as if it was born with innate knowledge to kill the other eggs in the nest. The robin returns with a worm to feed the cuckoo chick because she believes it is her young. Day after day you witness the mother and father robins exhausting themselves to feed the cuckoo chick, which has an insatiable appetite. It never seems to be satisfied as the cuckoo chick is constantly calling out for food and attention. Your heart breaks as you look on in shock at the robins who are feeding this thing that does not even belong to them, yet they believe it is their young! The cuckoo chick grows larger and larger, very quickly outgrowing the robin parents. Any remaining robin eggs are ejected or smothered by the cuckoo chick. Even after the cuckoo chick grows and exits the nest, the robins continue to feed it and follow its distinctive call,