Episode 26: Consider Your First Family

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.

I imagine that every woman, regardless of her age, ethnicity, social status, spiritual orientation, or family history, has, somewhere within her, a desire to be seen and heard in her life, and in her world. Indeed, many women wonder how we humans have gotten so far away from the simple truths of life that women instinctively know to be essential, when we want to feel truly safe, and more fulfilled. We see evidence of this as women are stepping forward, one by one, like never before, to tell their hard truths, even under the threat of dire consequences, such as losing a job, stressing a marriage, or forfeiting a place in some cherished social setting.

In Sparkle School, we are learning to value our own voices by enhancing our powers of self-reflection, building trust in ourselves, and opening to more and more authentic expression of who we are. Simply put, our exercises, tools, and community calls, help us develop our emotional intelligence ... the Feeling part of our rare iNtuitive-Feeling personality type. By increasing our ability to recognize and own our emotions, we can separate them from the emotions of the people and events around us, even those seeded in our past. This allows us to be much more in charge of our words and actions, and greatly reduces the level of drama we experience in life.

Last week, we began an exploration of the impact our family of origin has had upon our emotional intelligence. By ‘family of origin’, we mean the significant caretakers and siblings that we each grew up with, whether or not we share the same DNA.

One way or another, every woman has learned in her first family, to keep some of her thoughts to herself, and this is especially true for NF women, because we knew on some level that our unusual thoughts and feelings would not be abundantly received by those around us. So, when we want to be heard enough to exert our influence on the world around us, it is essential that we separate who we are, in our deepest heart of hearts, from the person we learned to be, in order to fit, safely, in our families, growing up ... which were inevitably highly influenced by our shared, Sensing-majority culture.

Even the happiest of families has its drama and emotional confusion, and these things are likely to go unseen, until we poke around to find them. So, let’s stay alert for signs of hidden awareness, and at the same time, let’s remember that owning the impact our family has had upon our emotional well-being does not have to mean judging or rejecting actual family members. We may feel anger at someone, or grief over lost possibilities, but in the end, gaining more emotional clarity allows us to enter a place of compassion and forgiveness. And of course, sometimes it also means retreating to a distance that is safe for us.

Over the next weeks, we will use the life area of ‘family’, and in particular, ‘family of origin’ as a lens through which to explore the other nine areas of life that we work with in Sparkle School. This week, we focus our family lens on the life area of ‘personal growth’. Whether we like it or not, the family environment we grew up in has had a huge influence on how we have grown, so far in life. Understanding that influence, adds, hugely, to our emotional intelligence, and helps us to grow more powerfully, into who we are becoming.