Family Roots (Earth)

Family Roots – the soil from which we all grow. We all come from somewhere,  born into a family with its own systems, rules, roles, and expectations. This is our origin story. The family dynamics in which we grew up, along with the lessons we learned from those experiences, will have shaped us in more ways than we are aware, and although we may have left those families of origin behind long ago, the roots of our personalities reach all the way back through time, to our very earliest memories. 

Just as a tree sucks nutrients from the ground through its roots, we absorb lessons, through our experiences, which shape our identities, relationships, personalities, habits, and much of what makes us who we are. Some of these lessons will have been nurturing – experiences of safety, love, creativity and encouragement. Some will have been less than perfect – neglect, rejection, dismissal or abuse, and these may have left us with unhelpful coping mechanisms that made sense years ago, when we were young and powerless, but make no sense in our adult lives. Do you ever find yourself asking questions such as “Why do I act like this?” or “Why can I never stand up for myself?” – the explanations (and the first key to unlocking change) will often rest on the question of “How did I get my needs met when I was young?” Our family of origin sets the template for how we interact with the world around us, and how we expect to be treated back.

Whatever was ‘normal’ to us when we were growing up becomes an expected pattern which we play out again and again, often sucking those around us into roles and dramas that made sense when we were young, but which we should have left behind us long ago.

The family we grow up in isn’t just our parents – we must also consider the impact of siblings, grand-parents, teachers, our local culture and community – we all grow up swimming in a strange and unique soup of different ideas, values, and social rules. Take a moment to put yourself back to your youngest years and try to recall how it felt – were your early years characterised by safety or by threat? Did care-givers give you love or discipline? Was there space for exploration or were the rules rigid? Hopefully you had a healthy balance, but much of what we will explore will be based on one fundamental question:

Was there too much or too little?

Too much safety stifles independence, too little breeds chaos. Too much encouragement may lead to a critical inner voice, but not enough may lead to low self-esteem. It’s not often straight forward to see exactly how your experiences may have affected your development, but they did affect you. The ideal parent will have provided the right balance of love, safety, guidance, space, encouragement, accountability, and discipline, to allow the child to feel rooted in a sense of both safety and possibility – free to explore themselves and the world, and grow into what Jung called individuation – the fullest, most whole version of who we were born to be. But our roots may be a tangled knot, buried in the dirt of memories we can barely recall – who can remember what it was like as a two-year old infant? We can instead turn our attention to the here-and-now, and work our way backwards. By analysing our present-day adult relationships, we may get an idea of our patterns, and then be able to look for clues in the childhood memories that we do have. John Bowlby gave us Attachment Theory – the idea that early childhood bonds create a template for how we relate with others throughout our lives. He gave four broad categories:

Secure Attachment:

This is the ideal state. A ‘securely attached’ infant will feel the safety of a predictable and reliable bond with their adult care-giver (usually, but not necessarily the mother). When they cry, they are soothed. When they are hungry, they are fed. When they smile, the care-giver notices and smiles back. This gives the infant a ‘secure base’ from which they can go out and explore the world – they can play and crawl and interact with strange people and objects, safe in the knowledge that if anything should go wrong, they can return to safety and be loved and protected. They feel attached to someone bigger, wiser, stronger, and more capable who can protect them physically and emotionally, allowing them to grow and develop into a capable and confident adult. The securely attached adult will tell themselves “I am worthy of love, and protection is reliable”. As the child grows, they will internalise this message and it will form the foundation for how they see the world.

Anxious Attachment:

Sometimes though, the care-giving is unreliable. Perhaps there are too many siblings and love becomes stretched too thin, or the parent is dealing with their own personal problems and can not meet their child’s needs often enough. Modern living often demands both parents work, leading to stress, absence, and fatigue Then a child may learn that love and protection are available sometimes, but not all the time. Sometimes it’s there, and sometimes not. But the child will not be able to understand the complex reasons for this, will not be able to predict it, and so may come up with a simple explanation like “Love can disappear at any moment” or, “Love is only available if I’m good enough to earn it”. An insecurely attached adult may be needy, clingy, desperate for reassurance. Or they may fly off the handle at the slightest upset, believing it to signal something like “You don’t love me at all”.

Avoidant Attachment:

Sometimes, the care-giving is almost entirely absent. If a parent is emotionally unavailable, then the child learns either “I am not worthy of love at all” or “Love isn’t worth pursuing, it only leads to disappointment”. The avoidantly-attached adult will then fear emotional closeness. They may pull back when their partner grows close, experiencing deepening connection not as love and safety, but as a threat to be avoided. Avoidant adults may yearn for closeness and connection, but find themselves running away from it as it feels too overwhelming. 

Disorganised Attachment:

In the worst case, a child’s early years are marked by abuse, trauma, or severe dysfunction. The parent is a source of both love and danger. There may be violence, anger, shouting, physical or sexual abuse, but when the child looks around for safety and protection the only person they have available is the very same parent, who can now switch into loving mode, and provide the soothing, the love, and the care that the child needs. The child then learns that this is what love looks like – it is violent, abusive, dysfunctional, and so they expect that in their adult relationships too. A disorganised-attached adult may find themselves in abusive relationships again and again (either as victim or aggressor) as it fits the template they learned when young – this is what love looks like.

The first step to understanding ourselves is to understand the soil in which we grew. Only then can we answer the question “Is this who I am, or just how I learned to be?” To assess your family roots, think about how your family’s presence still lingers today – what patterns do you carry? What roles do you still play? Do you feel grounded in safe reliable soil, or do you become uprooted in every storm? Ask yourself:

What was it like growing up?

Guide to exploring your Family Roots

Step one – Recall:

Take a few minutes to recall powerful memories from childhood. They don’t have to be significant, just something that you still recall with an emotional charge. Start with a moment of love, tenderness, security. Let it settle in your mind, feel into it and see what comes up – what echoes are stirred? What sensations do you notice in your body? Try to name the emotions that you experience. Dig around in your memory to find other examples of this feeling – when did you feel safest? When did you feel loved? When did you feel valued and understood? Who were you with? Allow these feeling-memories to come alive again – you may feel you want to comfort yourself. Stay with this feeling for a while, and remember it as your place of safety.

Then, if you can, also recall a painful memory – something that even now you try to keep hidden, or don’t understand. If you can’t tolerate it then stop the exercise and go back to your place of safety. (You can try to dip your toe into a painful memory from there, but not if it will overwhelm you. Never go further than you can tolerate.) Allow the pain to come, and sit with it for a while – what are you feeling and how do you know? What does the feeling feel like? Where is it in your body? If the feeling was an object what size/colour/shape/texture would it have? Try to lean into this feeling, get to know it, and reassure it – you want to understand it and learn from it, not get rid of it. This feeling is part of you – it’s one of your many roots. We don’t want to cut it off, but it may have become twisted. 

When you’re ready, come back to your place of safety, then back into your present.

Step two – Repetitions

Now ask yourself – where do I experience these emotions in my adult life? How do they get repeated? Were my early memories just one-offs, or were they repeated patterns? Where have my childhood experiences echoed today? This week? This year? You may find that these feelings come up often in the presence of romantic partners, or family members, or authority figures. When do you feel grounded and in control of yourself, and when do you feel hijacked by anxiety, frustration, or rage? Can you connect the dots between your earlier emotional memories and present day situations? If authority figures trigger anxiety – when have you felt this before? If you don’t feel safe in relationships – how reliable was love when you were young? When spending time with your family of origin are you your authentic self, or still playing out familiar roles from decades ago?

Step three – Rework

Finally, if you have identified an echo, rework it. This echo will live in you as a learned process – an implicit memory – some way of being in the world that your unconscious has filed as an automatic reaction to certain known triggers. Something like:
 “If authority is present, so is danger. Engage the threat response”
Or,
“If love is present it may disappear without warning – be extra nice and tread carefully”

To rework this process, first we must become aware of it. Noticing what is going on inside you is critical. Instead of saying “You’re making me angry”, say something like “I am noticing myself becoming angry”. It seems like a small difference, but it is a huge change. It takes the power back from the outside world and other people, and puts it straight back in your hands. It is the awareness that whatever is happening emotionally is happening inside you not out there. This gives you the possibility of doing something different.

Next, ask yourself, “How old do I feel right now?” – do you feel like the adult that you are, or have you been hijacked by a younger version of yourself, trying desperately to avoid some calamity from happening again? Try not to think too much about this, just allow space for a younger part to say “I’m here! Notice me!”

Finally, reassure your younger part. Remind it that whatever catastrophe it is trying to avoid has long since passed. Show the young version of you how old you are, and remind it that you escaped that situation – you survived it, and you’re now older, stronger, with more power and resources. Thank it for alerting you to a danger, and take a moment to engage your thinking part – perhaps there is a real danger here so give it some consideration, and show your young part that you are taking it seriously. But then reassure your young part that it is not responsible for navigating these adult situations. It will probably feel very relieved to hear that. It wants to know that there is an adult in the room – that’s you – who can navigate this situation far more effectively than it ever could in the past.

(If you don’t feel the presence of a younger part at all, then replace that with “emotional part” – it is only ever a part of you that is feeling anger, or fear, or anything else at all. So long as you engage your awareness of what is happening inside you then you have at least two parts – an emotional part feeling the emotion, and another part – an Observer – noticing what’s going on. You then have some choice over which part you engage with, or identify with. Allow the Observer part to reassure the emotional part, as above).

Recap

Our earliest experiences shape our expectations, and our family of origin gives us a role to play and a script to read from. Our first task as adults is to bring awareness to this process, how it started for us, and how it is still playing out today. We need to understand our roots and be aware of which ones keep us grounded in healthy soil, and which ones became twisted around hard, stony ground. Only with this awareness can we start to choose which roots to draw our nourishment from.

“What we receive from our parents is both a gift and a burden, and the task of life is to sort out what to keep and what to transform”

Carl Jung