It is not uncommon for the sins of the father to suffer upon his offspring. The family you come from, the environment in which you were raised, can have a profound effect upon your adult life.
Here are a few examples of the types of issues that could stem from your Family of Origin:
– If your father was a drunk, then that will affect how you view others, perhaps by always being on the alert of anyone ready to abuse you.
– If you were raised in a tough neighborhood, then you may keep expecting anyone trying to get close to you has ulterior motives.
– If you were physically or sexually abused as a child, then as an adult you may resort to alcoholism, which in turn passes another problem down to your kids.
– If your parents had a high quality marriage then this will transmit into your own relationships as well.
There are more, but you should get the idea. We are all a product of our environment.
Family of Origin issues affect not only how we live our own private lives, but by extension, how we engage with others. How you make sense of your past experiences and adjust to them will influence the quality of your current and future relationships.
Family of Origin issues affect our current emotional needs and attachment styles. If your father was an angry abuser, your mother fearful and controlling, then your problems will most likely revolve around anxiety and fear; you will seek someone who can give you a feeling of comfort and security. To advance beyond your Family of Origin issues, you first need to become aware of them. Be honest with yourself; take a look at your past and what your upbringing left within you that you may need to work on.
Being unaware of the issues that lie beneath the way you act and respond is like a computer running its program on full automatic; you have no control and are not acting as a fully thinking being. However, by becoming aware of your core issues, of what lies beneath the undercurrent, you can break free of your trap, program yourself, and rise to the ranks of a fully thinking being. You will be in charge of your present instead of being ruled by your past.
[box type=”warning”] Understanding your Family Of Origin issues is a basic fundamental to understanding yourself and is the key to fixing today’s relationship challenges.[/box]
Imprints From Our Past
We often create a story that we keep telling ourselves, one based on something from our past. Quite often, an event justifies how we behave and why we keep past issues alive in our relationships. These issues show up as problems in our Intimacy Triangle. These are imprints from our past. Is our story serving us or can we change the story in order to have the future that we want?
Stop selling yourself the same old story.
An imprint can happen from something in our childhood, a past traumatic experience, or a chronic ongoing influence from our environment. Imprints can affect us subconsciously and change our view of ourselves and the world. Whatever the perception is, whether we understand it or not, the message gets internalized, digested and becomes a part of our being. What comes next is a sense of not belonging, not being a part of something. The final stage of not belonging is the feeling of being alone.
1) We are affected subconsciously
2) We feel broken
3) The message gets internalized
4) We feel that we don’t belong
5) We feel alone
At that point the genesis of our imprint is complete. We may keep testing different situations to see if the pattern changes our story. But without a new set of tools to fix the cycle, nothing changes. History repeats itself. Our vicious cycle affects how we interact with other people and how we let other people interact with us. Regardless of how absurd or illogical the situation is, what we believe becomes our truth.
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Let’s explore an example of a person with early disconnection and rejection. This individual has a need for security, safety, empathy, and the desire to be accepted. He could come from a background of rejection, abusiveness, or where affection was withheld. These beliefs are internalized as feelings of abandonment, mistrust, emotional deprivation, shame, and social isolation. The individual feels defective or alienated in any relationship. This person’s method of dealing with these feelings becomes internalized as an emotional imprint. The person seeks security, safety, and empathy, but no matter how much security and safety is offered, he fully expects to be rejected sooner or later and so prepares himself for “the inevitable” which he then proceeds to cause to come about.
He becomes the cause of his own rejection.
Invalidation is a big one for most people. Everyone has been invalidated in some way, so there is an expectation that one’s desire for a normal degree of emotional support will not be sufficiently met by anyone and they will thus feel deprived.
There are three major forms of deprivation:
1) Deprivation of nurturance
2) Deprivation of empathy or validation
3) Deprivation of protection
Lacking one of them becomes an internal need to acquire it, to be admired or loved by another. We begin giving to another person to get what we lack in return, but since our lack stems from some unfinished business, that other person can never fulfill our need and so he then becomes the problem. We continue to feel incomplete.
For example, if in our past we had been abused, lied to, humiliated, or hurt in some way, then we have an expectation that the other person is going to do just that to us now; if he happens to do so (even unintentionally) we perceive the harm is intentional and thus our fears are justified. We then have our excuse to break up the relationship because we “saw it coming.”
From Savannah:
I was working with a couple where the gal had come into her relationship with a lot of abuse from her mother and father. The father was physically and emotionally abusive, very demanding, and an alcoholic, so there was a lot of instability in her upbringing. Thus she would color the actions of the man that she was with in light of her past, which caused him to become more defensive and shut down and withdraw.
If he was running late, he had problems remembering to call and let her know, and so she would text him again and again, then scold him later, which would cause him to withdraw from their conversations and communicate even less. He wasn’t doing anything more than reacting to her constant texting, which she did in fear that he was actually cheating on her the way her father would his mother. He was madly in love with her, there was no way he was going to look at anyone else, but she kept testing to see if he was there for her until it became too controlling and smothering. She had an expectation that he was going to hurt and abuse her and so saw everything he did as evidence to that fact.
If he said, “No, I’m just running late at work,” she would think that a lie and evidence that he was indeed cheating on her. She always felt she was getting walked on or abandoned, and in a way was allowing that to happen to her in fulfillment of her own imprint. The more he would try to connect with her and fix things, the more she would see it in the light of her imprint and discount it as something negative.
When dealing with a case like this, as I listen to the couple talk I am paying more attention to the emotional cues beneath their words than to the words themselves; the undercurrent that drives the words, for it is this current that can be followed back to the past imprint that created the feelings in the first place. When there is a problem with your partner; listen to the emotions beneath the words and consider the real reason behind them, of the imprint from their past that is creating the emotion in the first place.