This is part one of a three-part series on self-differentiation and family gatherings.
Family gatherings - whether for the holidays, a birthday, a graduation, a birth, or a death - bring together multiple generations of a family system. They also often happen around big life transitions, which is a time of change and therefore heightened anxiety in the family system.
This is partly why family gatherings can feel so dreadful for those of us who come from family systems with complex enmeshment dynamics and low levels of self-differentiation. We end up getting caught up in the tension, getting emotionally triggered, resorting to old family roles and reactive patterns, and soaking up the anxiety of the family system. We leave feeling emotionally and psychologically drained and wondering if we’ve regressed after all the self-differentiation progress we had made.
This is a common experience among my clients and my students, and it certainly has been the case in my journey as well as my partner’s. Our old self - the one we cultivated in our family of origin and learned to use to survive within that context - doesn’t ever really die. Our solid self - the more mature part of us - just becomes bigger and stronger through self-differentiation work, and has more power to counteract the old patterns.
But it still takes intention and effort to do so in this old family context. Being back in the family environment will test how far we’ve come in our self-differentiation work and will force us to put everything we’ve learned about ourselves into practice. Our family system’s old patterns are likely still in place because they’re probably not doing self-differentiation work, so their old ways will trigger our old emotional sensitivities and elicit the patterns we used back then to cope and survive.
Spiritual Teacher Ram Dass once quoted, “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.”
Although I believe he was being humorous, there’s a deep truth in that statement. Our families will always test how far we’ve truly come in our developmental journeys.
Our family system is the primordial bond. Our deepest emotional attachments. Our nervous system develops within our mother’s body, and then continues to develop within our family system during the most susceptible and impressionable years of our lives. We are quite literally emotionally wired to our family members. And the much of the emotional sensistivies we carry in daily life were created in the context of our family system during childhood and adolescence. It’s no wonder they can get under our skin so easily.
But here’s the thing, because of this, the best place to practice our self-differentiation skills with our family of origin. Go to the source, do the work there, and it will almost organically carry over into every other context - marriage, parenting, work, leadership, society.
At family gatherings, because they commonly bring together multiple generations, and normally happens during times of heightened family system anxiety, is when the family patterns really come to life. So, it’s a great time to get a deeper understanding of your family’s functioning. You can then self-reflect and see how the same dynamics you observed are still alive in you today. You can then use the information you gather to understand what areas of yourself you want to most work on.
One of the best way to do this is by becoming a participant-observer at gatherings. This means you balance being an active participant of the gathering, while stepping back from time-to-time to observe the larger process. In these moments, just as an anthropologist observes groups with detached curiosity, you observe the dynamics of your family system and your role within it.