Saturday, December 30, 2006

Growth, Stability or Stagnation: The Dilemma of Family Ties

The festive season is nearly over and I feel relieved about that. I guess that I'm not alone in that!

So many articles, features in the media focus on family disharmony during the Christmas period and it is true that relationship counselling organization receive a big increase in enquiries about their services in the New Year.

I read an article by Bel Mooney in the Times about family ties and she talks about why Christmas can be so stressful for some of us. Pivotal to this is our role within the family. She says that we get locked into roles within our families of origin and revert back to these in family get togethers. The family members find it difficult to see and understand each other beyond these roles.

These roles are limited and have been outgrown, but the residue hasn't fully been released, so it is triggered and projected again within the family arena.

She doesn't mention this in the article, but it sparked off the idea of homeostasis. It is:

"The concept of homeostasis means that the family system seeks to maintain its customary organization and functioning over time. It tends to resist change"

What this means is that in order to maintain stability everyone must stick to their role within the family's original organizing principle. When someone wants to change their role, it threatens the family's stability and often members of the family will turn against the "rebelling" member and try to force them to change back.

Elaine La Joie, spiritual healer and intuitive writes about being an intuitive person within the family often means a renegotiation of family roles. Family occasions often trigger the emergence of unhealed traumas and it is likely that the intuitive sensitive person will take on the family's issues and try to solve them, often to their own energetic detriment.

In Bel Mooney's article, she mentions a teenage girl trying to resolve family conflicts and that:

"the sensitive daughter has tried to manage the situation in a way which has placed a burden on her when she ought to be concentrating on university"

The family, above all else, wants stability even when it doesn't look very stable and doesn't seem to be working in the best interests of all the members. Family get togethers with adult children can seem fraught because the adult children revert back into their childhood identity and depending on their original family role can feel powerless and immature.

But when does stability become stagnation?

Things are changing every day in the Universe, to resist that change is to resist growing and developing. Especially those within the healing professions, separating from the family of origin energetically, as well as physically, and removing damaging beliefs incurred during childhood is essential to becoming an effective practitioner.

Family ties are energetic ties and energy work often provides a way to loosen those ties when they become overwhelming, suffocating or just out of date, blocking growth and potential. Once someone takes responsibility for changing their vibration and energetic state, then it affects the family connection and provides a much needed release and eventually transforms and renews their existing relationships and provides a template for developing healthier new ones.

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