Family Ties That Bind: A self-help guide to change through Family of Origin therapy. - Softcover

Ronald W. Richardson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1551802384 ISBN 13: 9781551802381

Publisher: UNKNO, 2009

Synopsis

Most people?s lives are complicated by family relationships. Birth order, our parents? relationship, and the ?rules? we were brought up with can affect our self-esteem and relationships with spouses, children, and other family members. Family of Origin therapy and techniques can help you create better relationships. This easy-to-read, practical book explains how families function and what you can do to change the way you act in your family and with other people. Exercises show how to apply the principles to your own situation and develop a more positive approach to all aspects of your life. Step-by-step exercises show how to make contact with ?lost? family members, how to interview relatives to develop a clearer picture of how each member fits into the family tree, and how to find different and better ways of dealing with family relationships. Professionals will also find this book a useful companion to their therapy sessions with clients.

About this title

About the Author

Dr. Ronald W. Richardson, BA, MDiv, DMin, has been a marriage counselor and family therapist since 1976. He retired in 1996. He was formerly the Executive Director and Director of Training at the North Shore Counselling Centre in British Columbia. He was also on the faculty of the Pacific Coast Family Therapy Training Association. He is active as a Clinical Member and Approved Supervisor of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy and is a Diplomate of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors.

From the Back Cover

Most people s lives are complicated by family relationships. Birth order, our parents relationship, and the "rules" we were brought up with can affect our self-esteem and relationships with spouses, children, and other family members. Family of Origin therapy and techniques can help you create better family relationships.

This easy-to-read, practical book explains how families function and what you can do to change the way you act in your family and with other people. Exercises show how to apply the principles to your own situation and develop a more positive approach to all aspects of your life.

Topics covered include:

- What makes it so difficult to be myself with my family? - How is my relationship with my spouse affected by how my family acted when I was a child? - Will my parents still love me if I let them know my real feelings? - How has my birth order and gender affected my personality? - What birth order in a spouse is the best match for me? - Why do I always feel rejected when my spouse disagrees with me? - How can I change the way I react? - What role does my family history play in my life? - How can I improve my communication skills?

Professionals will also find this book a useful companion to their therapy sessions with clients.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1 INTRODUCTION

"The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more [the child] will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life." -- Carl Gustav Jung

Life in the family of origin (the family a person is born and raised in) is a tremendously powerful experience for everyone. And the impact of that experience is not restricted to childhood. The way we see ourselves, others, and the world is shaped in the setting of our family of origin. The views we develop there stay with us throughout life.

At some point, most of us leave our families of origin physically, but we rarely leave them emotionally. Even if you put an ocean between you and your family of origin, or never return home again, you will continue to re-enact the dynamics of your original family in any new family you establish. The specific content may well be different, of course.

For example, you may do many of the very things your parents did, even though you always swore you wouldn't. No doubt your parents swore the same thing about their parents, who swore the same thing about their parents, back to the first cave man and woman who swore they'd never be the apes their parents were. At times, this decision to be different can take interesting turns.

Example Annette, a divorced parent with children aged 14, 12, and 9, complained that her parents never liked or approved of what she did. She made a rule for herself as a parent to always praise her children and let them know how much she liked them. To her surprise, her oldest child told her one day, "Mom, the problem with you is you're always telling us how good we are and we can't believe you because we never hear the other side!"

One of the most difficult things in life is to gain emotional separateness from that powerful early family environment and not continually repeat it or react against it.

The purpose of this book is to help you find new ways to deal with that family environment to have a better life here and now by learning a different way of dealing with your "leftovers" from there and then. If you can look at the unfinished business of your past in an appropriate context the environment of your family of origin your present and future experiences in life can be more positive. You can be more in charge of your own life, less defeated by undesirable events, and better able to create for yourself the kind of life you want.

Think about how you feel when you visit or phone your parents. Do you feel or act similarly to the way you did when you were living at home? How long can you last before the old feelings start? Five minutes? An hour? Two days? What happens to you when things start getting tense? If you can last more than three days before acting or feeling like a 13-year-old again, you probably don't need this book. Most adults, however, tend to act in ways they wish were different. Some attempt to fit in as peacefully as possible. They deny their own feelings, do what their parents want, and don't rock the boat.

Others make a point of being the opposite of what their parents want and expect. They are perpetual rebels.

Some try to show their parents how they failed as parents and work on improving them. Many just have as little to do with family as possible. They are emotionally distant and rarely visit or communicate with their families.

All of these ways of relating bear testimony to the power of our families in our lives. Most of us have not learned how to be close to these significant people while continuing to feel like our own persons. We find ourselves reacting to them, rather than doing what would make sense to us in our most objective moments. Yet, until you can be an independent adult with your family, it is unlikely you can be this way with anyone else in an intimate relationship.

The same issues end up getting dumped into new intimate relationships: marriage (legal or common-law, same-sex or opposite-sex), children, work, friendships. The extent to which a satisfying adult life can be established is dependent upon how well you learn to deal with these forces in your family of origin. One way to do this is through family of origin work. The goal of this work is to change your experience of yourself in your family of origin and, by extension, in your present relationships.

None of us really has a choice about whether to deal with our families or not. Even choosing not to deal with them is a way of dealing with them. You can't be free of your early experiences by denying their significance or ignoring them. Your early experiences are bound to repeat in your present life with different characters and in different contexts.

Doing family of origin work is one way to begin changing this self-defeating pattern. Some people do this work with a counsellor, or a family therapist, but you can also do it on your own. In fact, people were using this approach long before family therapists started taking credit for it. A natural part of becoming a mature adult is to reassess the earlier relationships with family and make adjustments in them....

Edition details

• Publisher: UNKNO
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1551802384
• ISBN 13: 9781551802381
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 136