(Exploring) Family Lore

A phrase my sister and I have been using lately is, "Family Lore." For example, if someone says to you, "omg you're so funny!" do you just respond "thank you" or do you unload the deep family lore that the reason you are funny is because you learned to use humor as a mechanism to defuse tense situations in your explosive household growing up? Get it? Family Lore.

I like using this term because of the whimsical connotation behind it. Not because I'm trying to minimize any trauma, but because somehow (for me) using "Lore" takes the charge away. And without the charge, I am able to look at situations and events from a far more neutral space.

With the holidays approaching, I am inviting us all to take a look at different parts of our family of origin's lore to see what sort of internal coding we might have (unintentionally) downloaded.

An example you say? But, of course!

Here is one that I talked about on last week's episode of the podcast. For as long as I can remember there was a largely unspoken (although sometimes explicitly stated) sentiment from my mother's side of the family to, "not overstay your welcome."

For me this meant reading cues that the host (wherever I was) was getting weary or fatigued, it meant rushing out the door as soon as possible from an event, and it meant allowing my hyper-vigilance to take over for any clues that I had hung around too long.

That might seem innocuous enough on the surface, sure. Through certain lenses it might even be called polite. But when I really looked at it through the lens of my own "family lore" I realized that the underlying messaging was that my presence was burdensome. I was "too much" to have around for any length of time. And it was critical for my safety to flee at the first sign (real or imagined) of exhaustion from whomever had invited me somewhere.

Why does this even matter?

The reason this matters is because breaking down family lore helps us to discover/uncover the unconscious coding we absorbed in our childhood. On it's surface my example above might seem pretty insignificant, but underneath there is a presupposition that in order to be accepted (in order to belong) I needed to make myself smaller, duller and less vibrant.

There are some really powerful underlying notions that we can use to understand, heal and free ourselves when we really start to examine the family lore we were raised with.

With Thanksgiving next week, it's a potent time to become curious about those stories as they inevitably arise throughout this season. I invite us all to greet these stories with curiosity, they are deep opportunities to better understand ourselves and the ways we (consciously or unconsciously) walk through the world.

My deepest of gratitude for you!

Lastly, as I reflect on all that I am grateful for over this past year. I'd like to also thank anyone reading this for how much your support means to me. Whether you have read one newsletter, had one reading or listened to a moment of the podcast... I truly am grateful.