Why Families Matter

Why Families Matter

“Emotional access to the truth is the indispensable precondition of healing.” 

Alice Miller

Families today are rich, blended, confusing, filled with memories and ideas.  Our relationships are close, neglected, angry, nostalgic combinations of all emotions and ideals.  In my experience, there is no such thing as a “normal” family, or said in a different way, all families are normal with various states of health and harmony, distress, and disharmony.

Families of origin matter.  To know your family, how it functions and to know your family members is a pathway to knowing yourself.  Knowing yourself is a pathway to emotional and spiritual healing and inner peace. 

The family dance is one of differentiation and integration, bonding and separating and re-bonding.  The dance is to tell the truth about me and reconcile with you while I learn your story.

To attach to another requires that we become vulnerable.  In this vulnerable state, we often begin to fear loss of another and in this fear above all, we fear our own unresolved grief.

Often what brings families together is a family member with a problem.  It may be addiction, mental health crisis, or physical crisis.  I often hear people say that the only time the whole family is together is at a wedding or funeral.  How much better it is for families to come together before the loss of a loved one.

Here is the dilemma, examining yourself as you grew up in your family, while at the same time, understanding that no problems in the past can be solved.  Only problems in the now can be resolved.  The reality is that how you defined what and how you learned as you grew up has its own set of consequences.  If those consequences are still affecting you, the problem is not the past but the present.  And, in the present we can learn and choose to heal.  It is most often true that we can heal best with our family.

Next week I will address childhood and attachment.

“You cannot find yourself in the past or the future.  The only place where you can find yourself is in the now.”

Eckhart Tolle