For many, many years, I told myself my relationship with my family was working.
I ignored how I was feeling, what I needed, what people said and did, what I said and did, and on and on it went. Everything got dumped into my psychic basement in service of maintaining the illusion of connection and happiness.
>> This is a continuation of my last post. I recommend starting there if you missed it!
To be sure, it’s not like there weren’t any joyful times or heartfelt connection with my family. It was just that those elements came inextricably bundled with a lot of stuff that wasn’t working (for me).
I recently got a message from a relative after I communicated that I need to step back from that side of the family, and they included paragraphs and paragraphs of “happy family updates.” It was like watching a bizarre commercial for my family, and it felt like a not-so-subtle message: What you’re experiencing isn’t true. This commercial—this is the real family. If you leave, you’ll be missing out on all this happy family stuff, and you don’t want that, do you?
For decades, I blamed the lack of connection I felt to my family solely on myself, something that was even easier to do when I began to have less in-person contact with them. But I was neglecting the fact that the reason I wanted less in-person contact was because that contact often didn’t feel good. It was common for me to feel incredibly lonely in a room full of family in a way that I don’t feel when I’m alone, or with my husband and friends.
I can’t speak to their experience, but from my POV, it feels like the family system requires everyone to stay on the surface in order to maintain “harmony.” This means disconnecting from your inner world, which will invariably contain things that could upset the outer illusion of the happy family—feelings, needs, memories, etc.
Learning to disconnect from myself in order to stay in the zone of acceptance…
…cultivated a penetrating loneliness, one that I tried to fill with all sorts of compulsive behaviors in my teens and twenties. I also had no clear sense of what I wanted to do with choices big or small, because I’d essentially thrown my inner compass in a shoebox under the bed.
It was only when I began to listen to what I was actually thinking, feeling, and needing—not what I was supposed to think, feel, and need—that I realized how much things weren’t working for me in my family relationships.
This pattern of, well…gaslighting myself, basically, made it easy to do the same thing in business. If things weren’t working, the unconscious pattern kicked in, and I’d immediately blame it solely on my personal failings. Then I’d have to double down even harder to get it to work, otherwise it would prove that I’m an utter failure.
Nowhere is there room to ask, Huh, do I actually want to do this, though?
Until very recently, this wasn’t a question I believed I was allowed to ask about my family relationships, which means that the question was stuffed into the unconscious. Of course I want to be a part of my family! *ignore all evidence to the contrary*
Because this question was unconscious, it was easy for it to bleed over into other areas. In my life as a whole, I couldn’t ask whether I wanted to do a thing, I just had to do it.
If someone else wanted me to do a thing—just do it.
If a thing was part of an official-y protocol—just do it.
If other people were doing a thing and I seemed to be the only one not on board—just do it.
Um. Not the best life strategy, eh? 😐
In my third and final post on this decision-making theme, I’ll outline how this off-limits question (Do I actually want to do this?) kept me locked in relationships that were incredibly draining, and how I began to untangle myself.
See you in a couple days.
