Family, Belonging, And Authenticity

Family relationships shape our deepest patterns of safety, belonging, and self-expression. In this session, we gently explore how early family dynamics influence our nervous system, emotional expression, and ability to show up authentically. Through somatic inquiry and reflection, we examine how we adapted to our childhood environment and where we may have hidden parts of ourselves to stay connected.

We pause with compassion to acknowledge pain, reclaim our truth, and welcome ourselves home. This is an invitation to deepen understanding of your origins while nurturing the freedom to choose who you are today.

Transcript

Let's take a moment to arrive.

This is a intense topic.

Working with our relationships within our families.

Look around the room,

Establish where we are and when we are,

Take a few breaths.

Sometimes people will ask,

Well,

Why do we do all of this inquiry?

It just stirs everything up.

The reason that we do it is because these things are operating underground and it's really helpful for us to see what they are.

One of the elements of healing trauma is to be here in this moment in time and to be witnessing what's coming up in our system,

In our nervous system,

In our unconscious mind,

Sensations,

Energies in our body as we're looking at something.

We might notice our shoulders tighten at different things or we're clenching our teeth when we're around certain people.

Some of those are probably family.

So we have all of these reactions and responses in our body,

But they just kind of get lost in the noise of conversation,

Of our nervous system's always scanning for am I safe or am I not?

And we live in a very challenging world right now.

And one of the things that's challenging about the world is that a lot of us have dysregulated nervous systems.

We're not really settled in our body.

We're feeling afraid or hypervigilant or there's something going on.

To look at some of the elements,

See what is it about this that gets me going?

What is it that I'm unhappy about?

So our families of origin or biological or adoptive families can be where we experience a lot of belonging,

Perhaps.

We experience a lot of wounding.

We could really benefit from looking into where do I hide?

Where do I not show up as myself?

Where am I afraid to speak up?

Our families are high stakes.

Keep yourself aware that we're doing a practice,

We're looking around.

If anything's getting too intense,

Open your eyes and connect again with your room that you're in,

The space you're in,

The year.

So we're not in the past in a family situation.

We're right here now.

Even if your family situation is something that's right in this present environment that you're in,

But it's not in this moment because right now we're doing a practice.

Let's do a minute of cyclic sighing.

It's such a great tool to bring ourselves into awareness,

Relax our body a little.

So that's that deep double inhale through the nose and then a long exhale,

Like we're breathing out through a straw.

Deep inhale.

And again.

And long exhale.

Curse your lips.

Relax your body as you breathe out.

And give yourself a moment of no thoughts other than the practice.

We're just softening your forehead,

Your jaw,

Your neck and shoulders.

One of the things I love about all the somatic awareness,

The practices that people have now is there's a lot of ways now that we know how to get back into this moment.

So anytime you're feeling too engaged,

Where you're losing awareness that you're looking at a situation,

As soon as you notice that,

Look around,

Maybe hold your own hands.

Just let yourself notice,

Here we are doing a practice and I got really engaged in that train of thought.

Maybe my heart's pounding or I'm feeling a lot of dread or something.

Keep coming back into awareness that we're here doing a practice.

When you think about your family,

There's maybe a certain person who stands out as a relationship is feeling difficult or unresolved.

Maybe it's the whole situation.

Maybe it's your family of origin from when you were a child.

Maybe it's your family of origin now that you're an adult.

We are helped as well by remembering to be kind.

There's a high charge,

A high level of importance in family relationships.

This is not a simple thing.

We're probably gonna have some memories come up.

We're gonna have some feelings,

Emotions,

Sensations in our body.

In families,

This is where we first learned about the world.

Love and betrayal and loyalty and safety.

We learned who we needed to be,

Could be quite performative in order to be loved or accepted,

What parts we had to hide.

We learned the family story.

In our family,

We do this,

We do that.

We are self-reliant.

We,

Whatever those family myths and stories are.

And it's also where we developed our nervous system.

If we had well-regulated adults and we had a fairly safe environment,

We probably developed neural networks for connection.

We turned to people for connection.

When we feel uncertain or overwhelmed or sad or grieving,

We turn to other people.

If our experience was not that,

We probably developed other kinds of neural networks that emphasized protection.

If I'm all on my own here in this family,

Then I'm gonna look for something else.

I might look for friends,

I might look for it in a bottle or food,

But we know we can't count on the people that are in our family.

As we're going through this,

We're not going to pretend that things were better than they are.

We're acknowledging that we are here now as adults and we're looking at this,

Not from that position of vulnerability that we had as a child.

Some of this comes from Dr.

Gabor Mate.

And I've learned a lot from him about developmental trauma.

As children,

The only way we're gonna survive is if we're connected with adults who are caring for us.

It could be parents,

It could be aunts and uncles,

Extended family,

It could be a neighbor's parent or something like that.

The adults in our home need to have the capacity and the interest in taking care of us.

If there are things that we're doing that are threatening that bond,

We're not gonna do them.

So if in order to be protected and included in the family,

We need to act a certain way,

We need to get good marks in school,

We need to be heterosexual,

Whatever that is,

As a child,

We're gonna ditch authenticity because survival is a higher priority.

That one thing is the root of a lot of the problems that we have as adults.

We give ourselves away.

We don't develop a knowledge and a connection with who we are,

We disconnect.

So if love in our family is conditional,

We have to perform a certain way or we have to act a certain way,

We have to have certain values in order to be accepted and be part of the family.

We're gonna be aware of that,

We're gonna work with that.

Some people might be defiant around that.

No way,

I'm gonna be who I am,

I don't care.

So when we're younger,

We're gonna have some urgency around fitting in because that's how we survive.

And the other thing that happens in families,

If your safety in the family is unpredictable,

So if there's violence,

Abuse,

Alcoholism,

Drug addiction,

If parents are really in chaos,

Really struggling,

We're not gonna feel safe enough to challenge that bond.

We're gonna do whatever we need to do to preserve that bond.

Let's sit back with that now,

With that basic understanding of childhood developmental conditions and what happened in your family that required you to adapt in ways that probably don't serve us as adults.

What were the dynamics set up in your family that made you adapt in a certain way to maintain that connection?

And if you're thinking in particular about one person,

You could bring their face to mind perhaps.

Maybe you have an example.

What were some of the things you had to do to stay connected in your family?

And we're gonna go through detailed questions.

So you might wanna have a journal so you could write things down,

Make a mental note.

What emotions could you express?

What was safe to express emotionally in your family?

And this is very gender-based as well.

Boys don't cry,

Girls don't get angry.

What were some of the messages around what you were allowed to feel and allowed to express?

And your family.

Some of these were communicated in words.

Don't be a baby.

And some of them were just in the air.

So you might not have a memory of hearing something like that,

But you might've known that was the rule.

And what did you learn to hide?

So if you weren't allowed to be angry,

You weren't allowed to be sensitive,

What was it that you learned that wasn't okay to bring forward?

You had to keep that to yourself.

And some of these are things that we knew that we're consciously aware of.

And some of them are things that we suppressed or repressed.

I'm not even gonna go there.

Some of it is,

I know that it's not wrong for me to feel angry,

But it really makes them uncomfortable or they get mad at me.

So it's not a good strategy.

We didn't talk about how we felt.

These adaptations were intelligent responses to our environment that we were in.

It's not like we were being stupid or foolish.

Why did we come up with that?

That's the environment that we're in.

And we were trying to survive in that environment and trying to maintain a connection.

What were the boundaries in your family?

Did you have a boundary of,

We have to stay really connected and I need to know everything about you and you need to know everything about me.

And we're always gonna do everything together and you have to come every Sunday and you weren't allowed to say,

No,

I need some space.

Was that the culture in your family?

In my family,

There were a lot of emotional barriers,

I would say,

Not even boundaries.

We weren't allowed to feel or cry or talk about what was upsetting us.

My parents never volunteered something like that.

They never talked about that.

What parts of yourself did you have to put aside or exile?

The one that was outraged by injustice.

Whoever told you life would be fair.

There's a lot of that in families.

What were you carrying?

Many times children will fawn or be really supportive.

We're trying to maintain that connection.

It's a survival level need to be connected to our parents or our adults.

To be fawning,

We'll kind of give ourselves away.

Many children become parentified where they listen,

They're the sounding board for their parents.

If their parents aren't emotionally steady enough to have other friends that they do that with,

Sometimes they'll do that with their children.

Children are trying to keep things better.

Some children are the ones at 10 years old who have to make sure there's money for groceries.

And some,

It's a little bit more stable on the surface,

But there are still a lot of ways that we're not taken care of,

We're not nurtured,

The adults in our life weren't able to really provide that safe nurturing environment for us.

So these patterns of suppressing our feelings,

Gritting our teeth,

Not saying who we are,

What's going on,

Over-functioning,

These are all adaptive responses.

They're not flaws.

What they are is they're signs that we have unmet needs for safety and connection.

We need to feel safe physically as well as emotionally.

If you had a parent who was so-called teasing,

But was actually making fun of you,

Even more common,

A sibling who was allowed to do that,

We feel like we are not safe in that environment.

Look at this from a lens of kindness.

So let's pause here for a moment.

Take a breath.

What were the patterns that I developed?

And how can I see them in terms of my need for safety and connection?

What does that feel like in your body?

How safe did I feel when I was a child?

My physical environment was very safe.

There was no addiction,

No violence.

We were securely housed and fed.

Physical safety.

And many,

Many children did not have that.

They couldn't go to sleep at night because their body didn't feel safe.

Unpredictable,

What's gonna happen?

Maybe it'll be okay,

Maybe it won't.

Some families have enough money to provide for those kinds of needs,

But there's no emotional connection or support.

Sometimes it's because both parents are busy and active in doing other things and not really giving enough time to parenting.

I think that's quite common.

In my situation,

I had a stay-at-home mom,

But she was very emotionally unavailable.

And I had a very strong indication that in our family,

You couldn't do anything that would shame the family.

If you did,

You were gonna be kicked out of the family,

Ostracized.

Not only did I not have guidance,

As I was 12,

I had some really difficult things happen and I had no one to turn to.

That's a situation of emotional neglect.

That happens a lot as well.

It might look like it's okay on the surface.

A lot of times it's not emotionally safe.

We feel very isolated.

So let's sit with that for a moment.

Whatever that experience is for you,

Wherever you kind of land in that.

Connect with yourself at that age,

Whatever age is coming up.

See if you could allow compassion,

Some kindness,

Maybe put a hand on your heart.

Let yourself feel what's in your body and offer yourself some kindness.

One thing that Gabor Mate quite often brings forward is not to really be blaming the parents.

Parents are responsible and often the parents don't have the capacity to be good parents.

How can we as children and also we who are parents or grandparents,

How can we hold all of that complexity as we're doing these inquiries?

Right now our focus is on ourselves,

Our childhood.

As we're doing this kind of work,

We're often bringing in how we parented or what was going on.

If that is coming up today,

See if you can put that to the side a bit.

We're really working more within my childhood and my exploration of what it was like for me.

In a family,

There's usually a code of loyalty and silence.

What we're allowed to express when we're alone in the family.

A lot of it is what we're not allowed to say out loud.

So what was allowed and what was not allowed to be spoken in your family?

A lot of families have this code of silence of we're not gonna talk about what's really going on because then we might actually have to deal with it.

So we're not gonna talk it through.

We're not gonna admit that there are things going on.

Silence can be used as a weapon,

As a way to keep people from bringing things forward that need to be brought forward if it's gonna be a healthy relationship.

And a lot of parents have really changed and a lot of parents haven't.

It might be siblings,

It might be extended family.

A lot of the work around healing ourselves is to recognize what happened,

To stop blaming ourselves or feeling bad.

We develop a lot of core deficiency beliefs in families.

So how did you feel and were you allowed to talk about it?

And what were the pressures around what you were allowed to leak out into the rest of the world?

Could you say to a teacher,

For instance,

Environment now is very different from what it was when I was a child,

50s,

60s.

What was your experience?

Were there things that you kind of knew that you weren't allowed to say?

And what were you not allowed to feel?

So if we know we're not allowed to feel something,

If we know we can't share that,

If we know we can't bring that forward,

Sometimes it seems like the best option is just to not feel it at all.

If we don't feel it,

If we suppress it,

Then we'll still be able to get along.

So that's the deal we make as a child that often carries forward into our adult.

Right now in this moment,

What do you have to override in order to stay connected in your family?

Whoever it is you're thinking about in your family,

Parents,

Siblings,

What do you need to override?

Is it a need for space?

Is it a need for not being shamed?

What compromises are you making in order to stay connected?

Maybe it's that you're not connected with them anymore.

When my mom was alive about 20 years before she died,

I realized that I was kind of torturing her by wanting to talk about my emotions in real life.

And when I gave that up,

I realized that we could talk about horses and nature and birds and all that stuff,

But we couldn't talk about emotions because she was so uncomfortable.

And even though I really wanted to be able to talk to her,

Every time I tried to bring something up,

She would just change the subject.

When I gave up trying to make her who I wanted her to be,

Our relationship was a lot easier.

I was well into my adult years by then.

And I realized that in fact,

I didn't need her to be someone I could talk with emotionally.

I had other people I could do that with.

I still wanted her to do that,

But that wasn't possible for her.

Maybe there's something like that.

We don't need to shame ourselves for the deals that we make.

You know,

Maybe the deal is,

I'm gonna just have this surface relationship because I know that's what is possible.

When many of us were growing up,

Avoidant attachment was something that we didn't have any idea about.

We just knew she couldn't talk about her feelings.

That's one of the ways that I'm able to have some compassion for my parents.

They were providing a safe environment for us to grow up in and they didn't even realize that emotional connection was part of it.

So they weren't trying to be horrible parents,

Even though they failed in some ways,

They just didn't know.

Remember,

There's a lot of complexity here.

If you're blaming yourself for some of that,

Or if you're shaming,

Well,

I was putting too much pressure on them and I shouldn't have.

And if it's anything like that,

See if you could let that go.

Do you feel responsible for other people's emotions in the relationship?

It might be your adults,

It might be a sibling or other people.

What would happen if you just showed up,

Said what you felt,

Acted like who you are?

What do you fear might happen if you were to speak your truth?

And this can bring up a lot of the feelings of shame,

Of,

Ooh,

That's not a good idea.

Or,

Well,

I know what would happen,

I'd be judged and I'd be given a hard time and I'm not willing to put up with that.

So I speak my truth other places and I just gotta keep my distance from them.

There's a lot of options that we could be having here.

We want it to work out and we have a lot of love and care and a need to have some validation that we may or may not ever get from our parents.

One thing Gabor Mate talks about a lot is that trauma is not who we are,

It's an experience of something that happens inside of us.

It's what happened to us,

It's not who we are.

So it's what we adapted to,

How we experienced our childhood.

We need to understand what we gave up,

What parts of us we abandoned in order to survive.

We shouldn't need to perform or to believe the very same things our parents believed.

We shouldn't need to do any of that in order to be loved and cared for and be included.

And yet in some families,

We do.

So we shouldn't have to disappear ourselves in order to be loved.

So with that for a minute,

What was your experience with that?

What did you give up?

What did you hide perhaps?

Some of that is very unconscious.

When I was a teenager looking back,

I can see that I was a lesbian back then,

But I didn't have any idea.

There wasn't anybody around in the 60s in Saskatchewan,

Canada.

I didn't know anybody who was,

Everybody was in the closet.

But when I came out and when I was in my 20s,

That was not welcome.

And at that point,

I was just like,

Well,

This is who I am.

If you don't like it,

Too bad,

But I'm not gonna pretend anymore.

But at that point,

I had the support of other people.

I had chosen family.

I had friends.

I had other people around me that gave me that stability and support.

So I didn't need to pretend anymore in order to be included in the family,

But it really had an impact.

So what's your experience around now?

What does it cost you to be the strong one,

The quiet one,

The one who disappeared?

What does it feel like?

Maybe I could take a risk and say more.

Maybe I could set a boundary.

I'm not gonna participate in gossiping.

Often it'll be one parent against the other.

I'm not gonna talk about my sibling that way.

I'm not going to sit here at family dinner and listen to you condemn me.

I'm gonna get up and leave if you do that again.

When we do these inquiries,

Part of what we're doing is we're just stirring things up a little to see what are some of the issues that might be still working in the background.

We notice how does that feel in our body.

That's welcome in.

Whatever parts of us we had to ignore or betray in order to be seen and welcomed in the family.

We had to pretend.

If we were to show up to ourself as authentic,

This is who I am and I can welcome myself home.

Put all of the rest of it aside just for a moment.

What would that feel like?

I could welcome myself.

I don't have to pretend I'm who I am not.

I don't have to hide who I am.

I could know who I am.

I could love myself now.

I'm an adult now.

I could love myself.

Let yourself feel that.

One of the things I love about these deep somatic inquiries is that we learn so much about ourselves and we develop this kindheartedness and compassion for how difficult it actually was when we were a child and how difficult it might still be.

A lot of these family dynamics don't magically change when we're adults.

I don't have to betray myself to be loved and included.

What does that feel like?

It's probably not universally true.

And if there's parts of your family where that is true,

Then we could make a conscious decision around,

I'm gonna pull back a little from that or I'm going to try speaking up.

We can work with that once we realize that.

I'm already enough.

I'm allowed to grow,

To have feelings,

To be who I am,

Even if it's different from everyone else in the family.

I'm allowed to choose my own path,

To be my own person.

Let yourself feel into that.

I'm enough as I am.

I don't have to fit myself into somebody else's idea of who I should be.

We are all okay.

We are all good enough as we are.

And that doesn't mean that we're not wanting to continue to develop and strengthen and build resilience.

We might.

I think that's one of the really exciting things about life as we evolve.

And it doesn't mean that we're coming from a place of being no good.

If we could really settle into that knowing,

I'm lovable,

I'm worthy,

I'm good enough.

And if my family doesn't make me feel that way,

Then I might not be able to look to them for that.

I can provide that for myself.

I can bring in other people who know me and who I can take that risk with.

And I can be known and loved and cared for in a wider sense than biological or nuclear family.

What does it feel like right now?

We don't live in a Disney movie.

We live in the real world.

And a lot of us had very difficult times that we grew up in.

And the world we're in now is not what you'd call supportive and kind and where we can really be ourselves.

We really have to establish a certain level of strength and emotional maturity to say,

This is who I am and I'm gonna show up as myself.

And one of the reasons that I have an inspiration to do that and a confidence to do that is because it feels so bad when we don't.

When we have that feeling of we're walking around,

We feel shame.

We just don't feel connected with ourselves.

We don't stay regulated enough.

We're always in a survival response.

We could use these tools,

We could come back in and we feel stronger.

We have the experience over time.

We can survive having less than perfect parents and a less than perfect childhood experience.

One of the really wonderful things about the brain is that it's neuroplastic,

Which means it develops.

As a child,

It's very helpful.

If your brain and your nervous system,

Your body developed in an environment where you felt safe,

I felt physically safe,

So that was very helpful.

I know other people who felt very emotionally safe,

Very emotionally connected to their parents in their families and they have a whole different environment and nervous system than I do.

So it's really interesting to see all of the patterns,

The complexity,

But also as an adult,

Generally,

We're not dependent on our parents for our survival.

And a lot of people have a mixed experience.

Our parents are different with us at different times of our life.

They're different also depending on what was going on in their life.

My mother was very unhappy when we were children.

She didn't want to be a housewife.

She wanted to be out in the world doing things and that was the 40s and 50s,

But that wasn't allowed.

So a lot of that frustration,

She wasn't taking it out on us,

But it was just part of the environment that we lived in.

That's one of the ways that I can have some compassion for my parents is when I look at the broad cultural experiences that people were having.

You know,

People my age,

A lot of their parents were involved in the World War II.

Wide social movements of history,

All of us here experienced what it was like to go through COVID.

It's so helpful to give ourselves some grace.

You know,

We're doing the best we can.

Could we give ourselves a break,

Settle into our body,

Settle into our heart,

Give ourselves some kindness.

Noticing our nervous system that we got wired for protection,

That's a really important thing to know.

And also now how we rewire our nervous system and build resilience.

This is what my parents are like,

Or this is what my family's like.

This is what I could get from them and this is what they're not capable of giving me.

And this is what I want from them and I know I'm not going to get it from there.

So how am I going to support myself?

And that's something that as adults we can do.

A lot more of than we could have when we were seven or 13 or whatever age that we were.

How we can work with letting them be who they are.

And that urgency to make it better and to stay connected is a survival response from childhood.

That's something that is not a character flaw,

It's just some dynamics of how things were working as a child.

As we complete this particular inquiry,

To walk away with acknowledging how complex this is.

Our families of origin,

Our childhood experiences are extremely important.

They're foundational in terms of our nervous system,

Our beliefs,

Our conditioning and how we move into our adult life.

In this series,

We're looking at romantic partnerships,

Friendships,

Family,

Workplace,

And then we're going to work with setting boundaries and creating more fulfilling,

Authentic,

Nurturing relationships in our life.

Reviews

So helpful in understanding my relationship dynamics! Grounded in how our nervous systems work and develop, which is important to me. Loved the concept of "making deals" in this session. Haven't even tried this thoughtful, intentional idea yet, but already feel some relief and a way forward with certain family members.

Lynn, as always, this is just what I needed. So helpful this evening as I'm navigating the passing of the family matriarch, my 96 yo grandmother, and seeing lots of family I have complicated relationships with for the first time in several years. 🫂 Thank you.