How do you navigate family relationships?

Family life can be challenging and complex. There are many situations that can lead to ups and downs in our family lives. Everyone getting along can seem like an impossible expectation. One minute you are laughing and playing, and the next, everyone is yelling at each other. How do you keep calm amid the chaos?

Even if a family is close, there can be periods of missed connection. Personality differences, stages of development, and different levels of emotional connection and openness can all play a role. No one is to blame, everyone is doing the best they can. However, sometimes family conflict or crisis may greatly disturb a families ability to remain supportive and healthy.

Families can carry intergenerational trauma. This is traumatic experience that has been inherited, and passed down through the generations. It may have been that your great grandmother experienced a trauma, then your grandmother inherited that anxiety, and then your mother, etc. When we look at traumatic experience as an intergenerational issue, we start to connect the dots. We see that patterns of behavior are often replicated and repeated as a coping response. It is through this lens, and through an awareness of these patterns, that we can start to make a shift.

Similarly, emotional immaturity can run in families. You may recognize patterns of behavior you have learned or inherited from your parents, and they may have had patterns that they learned or inherited from their parents. These patterns have been adaptive in some way, and they have probably served a basic functioning for survival during times of stress. However, when these patterns repeat on auto-pilot, they can become maladaptive over time.

We start by learning and normalizing these patterned responses, within the context of family relationships. Once these patterns have been identified and normalized, we can work with them at a more complex level. This is where improved communication, emotional relatedness, and connection can open the door to deeper levels of healthy, open, and trusting family bonds.