Today, I want to explore another crossover between family estrangements and my recent business decisions, and it has to do with energy.
If you missed the first two posts in this series, I recommend starting there! (Here’s post one and post two.)
With family relationships, if even the simple act of talking to someone on the phone left me feeling drained—too bad! I needed to find a way to make it work, because, remember, I had an unconscious rule that forbade me asking: Do I actually want to do this?
This translated into letting my other relationships and pursuits slide, because I didn’t have enough bandwidth.
For example, when I made the decision to estrange from a family member for the first time, I was shocked by the positive changes I noticed in my marriage. Seriously, shocked. Same deal with my creative output. Once that relationship ended, I had way more energy and focus for projects that lit me up. (I explore this in my Unblocking Your Creative Flow mini course.)
Interestingly, if something brought me joy…
…like writing my romantasy novel, this is where it felt especially against the rules to prioritize doing that over participating in draining family relationships. Cultural and family conditioning really heap on the guilt in this department! It doesn’t matter if family relationships are detrimental to your mental health—“good people show up for family.”
When compared to following massively powerful, archetypally charged rules, devoting time to something like writing romance can feel downright frivolous, if not outright irresponsible. What I’ve slowly come to understand, though, is that not doing those passion projects is what’s truly irresponsible.
These projects embody what I’m here, in this life, to explore and create.
They have a lot of psychic energy behind them—as opposed to my med school plan, which required a constant input of energy while giving nothing back. These projects aren’t necessarily easier, but because they’re connected to deep wells of energy within me, they give back every bit as much as they require and then some.
As I begin to use this as my metric more and more—does this project, relationship, etc. nourish me or does it merely drain my energy?—it’s a little easier to make decisions. I can often feel in my gut when something is a total mismatch. It feels energetically clunky to me, like I’d have to force things six ways to Sunday to gain even a sliver of traction.
But this only works if I can give myself permission to honor what I’m feeling.
In the past, with family relationships feeling draining and believing that I had no choice, I was very used to ignoring my inner cues. Instead of questioning whether this was the best situation for my energetic makeup, skills, preferences, needs, etc. I jumped into forcing-it mode, believing if I couldn’t get it to work, that meant I was a failure.
Not everything is going to work for me. (Or for you.)
Not every project, not every relationship.
In Jungian psychology, individuation is the process of becoming an individual.
Not in the sense of “everyone out for themselves,” but in forging a deep relationship with your own psyche, understanding what you want and need, what you value, and learning how to live in a way that honors your individuality.
The paradox is that this helps us become better humans within the larger collective.
If we’re cut off from our inner world and repressing our thoughts and feelings, this material is guaranteed to come out. Only now, it’s showing up unconsciously. We project it onto our “enemies” and become hellbent on eradicating them. (Sound familiar? If not, just read the news.)
Or we’re unconsciously offloading our shadow onto partners and friends, engaging in patterns that unwittingly hide us from ourselves and our loved ones, and we feel lonely and misunderstood.
Individuating isn’t about reaching some state of perfection where we’re conscious of everything within our psyches (impossible). It’s about doing our best to stay connected to our inner world, a world that makes us uniquely ourselves, and finding a way to relate to the collective from this incredibly personal (and often vulnerable) place.
It’s a continual dance, one we enact with every decision we make.
Some days we end up swirling closer to the collective, getting sucked into isms and dictates that stifle the soul. Other days, we move out of the collective comfort zone and discover new dance moves.
You might not see the dance moves your soul wants to make in the world around you. Not yet. That’s why the world needs you—to bring those moves into existence.
No one else can do it quite the way you can, believe me, and the world will be a richer place if you try.
Making decisions isn’t about getting everything right, whatever that even means. It’s about learning, one choice at a time, what your inner compass feels like in real time. What does it feel like when you make a decision in alignment with who you are versus a decision that’s not in alignment?
It takes trial and error exploration to work this stuff out. You’re not falling behind. You’re just in it with the rest of us, trying our best to figure out what it means to be human, individually and together.
Here’s to the journey. 🙏
