Episode 25: Find Your Family Way Part 1

Good morning everyone, and welcome to Sparkle School, where together, we access our innate, iNtuitive wisdom as unique and self-valuing women, and share who we are becoming in a safe, sensitive community.

Our main focus for the past six weeks, has been the metaphor of the Kaleidoscopic Mind, which gives us a way to mentally break our complex stress factors down into manageable parts. We’ve thought of our iNtuition, as the three, long, stable mirrors in the tube of the kaleidoscope. They pick up on everything that’s happening in there, just as our iNtuition constantly collects the diverse data points that bring meaning to our multidimensional minds. Our kaleidoscope metaphor frames our iNtuition as a trustworthy and dependable part of who we are.

At the far end of our kaleidoscope’s mirrored tube, in a circular chamber, are brightly colored pieces of glass that shift and change like our flow of emotions. This equates, metaphorically, to the Feeling preference in our personality types which are; INFJ, INFP, ENFJ and ENFP. Altogether, these four NF types comprise only about 8% of the general population. It is the combination of our iNtuitive and Feeling preferences, that make us the rare creatures we are. It is, also, the way those two preferences dance together within us, that gives us our most difficult challenges, and our most phenomenal potential.

Today, we begin a new exploration that will carry us into the coming weeks. As you know, in Sparkle School, we work with ten areas of life. They are personal growth, health-fitness, work, play, relationship/romance, spirituality, friends, family, money and living space. Of course, each of these areas of life impacts the other areas, every, single day that we’re alive, but, there is one area that impacts us from the very second of our birth. It shapes and colors who we are from the inside out, and that is the life area of family, and in particular, ‘family of origin’.

What do we mean by ‘family of origin?’ We mean the significant caretakers and siblings that we each grew up with, or the first group of people we belonged to, our biological or adoptive family. The early experiences we have in our family of origin greatly influence how we see ourselves and others, as we move through life. They impact how we cope and function in our daily lives. When we want to be in charge of ‘who we are becoming’ it is important to be aware of who we have ‘been’ in life. That means identifying how our family relationships and up-bringing have influenced us.

With that knowledge, we can be at choice about the parts of us we want to carry forward and build upon, as well as any parts we may want to leave lovingly behind.

As mature iNtuitive-Feeling (NF) type women, we all grew up in a world of profound change. Most of us were born before there was much awareness of personality type, or of the extreme challenges we would face as members of a very small and complex, but highly sensitive, minority of types. Over the coming weeks, we will explore how we might have been impacted, as NF type children growing up families that were, or are, greatly influenced by our pervasive, Sensing-majority culture. Let’s start now with our next journal prompts.