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Family of Origin Issues

Many of us grew up in ways that hurt us in some ways, due to dysfunctions in the ways the people in our families related to each other. These patterns of relating are very powerful in our lives, because this is how we learned about relating, when we were so young we didn't even know we were learning anything. Over and over again, our parents or our siblings acted in the same way toward us or said the same things in the same tone of voice. And, if there were some hurtful things done or said, we needed to find a way to survive emotionally. This is all done unconsciously, without anyone in the family being aware of what they were doing. But a pattern is created, and out of this we develop our belief systems about the world around us and about how relationships work.

The belief systems don't necessarily reflect any objective reality, but they are "reality" to us and stay with us into adulthood. Later, in adulthood, when friends, colleagues, romantic partners say things or act in ways that are even slightly similar to the words and actions of our family members, we assume it means what it meant with our families and we react in the same ways. This often creates trouble in relationships because neither we nor those around us know our assumptions. Out of our unawareness, cycles of conflict arise.

I can bring awareness to these beliefs and automatic emotional reactions and help you change them so that your relationships become more fluid, more "reality based" and happier. Working on family of origin issues can also help you, individually, live more freely and happily.

Family Roles

There are certain roles that seem to be inherent in families—or any group—and they crop up powerfully especially when there’s stress or anxiety. These roles are passed down from generation to generation, unconsciously being assigned to family members. Some roles are easier to inhabit than others. It would be great if parents were to choose the hard ones and leave the easier ones for their children. But this isn’t what tends to happen—at least in part because the process of choosing and assigning roles is unconscious. I help you discover which role you were "assigned" and help you to move out of being trapped in the role to being able to choose how you want to relate to others so that you feel more fluid and free to be yourself.

(Click on the "EFT Articles" page of this website to see how I use EFT to work with family issues).

Step-Parent and Blended Family Issues

Becoming a stepparent is about the hardest thing many of us ever do. Being a divorced parent of children and deciding to bring another person into the “family” often feels like being torn in two. Finally, imagine being a kid in this situation. “I never asked for any of this! I don’t want to live with her/him, and I’m going to let you know it in any and all ways my imagination can dream up.”

Step-parent and blended families are created because two people fall in love, but complications can soon set in. Often, there’s a lot of pain: children have their basic sense of safety knocked out from under them; parents are overwhelmed by their children’s pain and by their sense of loss and failure; stepparents come into an established family with high hopes for love and friendship and fears of being rejected. To make it work, everyone needs to create an entirely new model of “family” that is most likely not going to feel like what “family” has always meant before.

Bringing Together Two Different “Cultures”

One of the reasons that step-parent and blended families are so difficult to create and maintain successfully is that each “natural” family has a culture, a whole environment that’s unique to them. Outsiders don’t automatically fit in. And the outsider comes from a family with a culture, too, and finds it difficult to embrace another family’s culture.

As a therapist, I support each person in the family, help each one acknowledge their culture and the strangeness of bringing in a new person; to create a combination of individual value and belonging for each person, and to help each family member welcome the others while still allowing for the unique closeness that children and parents feel with each other.

Contact me at 303.444.1195 or at zoeric@comcast.net