Howdy again my lovely folks! If you all know me (or even if you don't) you will quickly find that I love family. It's no secret that families are complex ecosystems that develop future generations and perpetuate systems of society, but they aren't always easy. With that in mind, I must confess that my upbringing was turbulent and not the healthiest – something I reckon many of you can sympathize with. This leads to a major question: How can we create a healthier culture for our family of creation that doesn't perpetuate the flaws of our family of origin?
When your family situation and upbringing are less than ideal, it's not uncommon for you to feel broken and out of place. Often this is a type of social cognitive dissonance that we experience when the actions or values of our family of origin do not match that of the societal expectations and standards. Family culture and systems help influence how we interpret our worldview, and when facing any form of cognitive dissonance, we must choose to either change our values or change our actions to address the discomfort we feel. I'd like to cover some steps that can hopefully help to launch you on your journey to better horizons.
The first step I'd like to emphasize is that of figuring out what your family culture is. When addressing a wound, you have to first acknowledge that you are hurt and find where you were hurt. Once upon a time, I was trained to become an Emergency Medical Technician, or EMT for short. Part of that training was learning how to rapidly triage a patient, and that training emphasized how asking questions, paired with observing responses, environmental factors, and "negative space". These put together paint a more complete picture, so we know how to best help. The process is similar when figuring out what to address when dealing with breaking the cycle of generational issues.
Generational issues are hard to really notice without taking an outside perspective, so it's good to find multiple outside examples to get a good frame of reference of what's within – that's what negative space is. What's amazing about this approach is you get to choose what you want to perpetuate, and what you want to do away with. Life stops being a force that acts upon you, and to a certain extent becomes a thing to be acted upon. Once you find what can be acted upon, then comes the responsibility to act, or to let things slide. A simple rule I've learned to adopt in relation to this is that you can't be mad with the outcomes of the things you refused to address.
Part of addressing things is to acknowledge the efforts of your family with the acceptance that they were doing the best they knew how. Now I know, in many instances, it feels like they should have known better, but the truth is there is a disparity between knowing what something is and applying it. An example I would like to use is that of knowing what tools are versus using those tools to build a house – you can know what tools are but not know how to apply them to build a house. Likewise, people can know the "tools" used for building a healthy family dynamic but not know how to apply them to building a home. It is your responsibility to observe what made the home broken and learn how to apply the tools to build a new, better home and dynamic. I know that the pain of the past can't be changed, but the power is in you to change the pain of the future – I believe in you, my friends.
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