Creating Family Relationships That Work - IoPT
A Family Is A Natural System Meant To Thrive.
When We, as Parents, Heal Our Own Early Wounding
We Are Free To Create The Families That We Deeply Yearn For
And Give Our Children What They Need To Be Free And Whole.
Parents pass on many gifts to their children and also, unwittingly, the legacy of their wounds and those of their parents. We all do this because that is the way we’re wired. Our early life traumas interrupt and challenge our development and put in place our survival strategies that keep us safe. The problem is that these survival strategies shut down family systems and create invisible webs of past hurts that bind everyone to the knots of history; threads that cause family lock-downs, conflicting intentions and the resistance patterns that prevent life from opening and expanding.
Family struggles are really expressions of survival strategies in conflict with each other; unresolved needs and wounds never attended to. Children can’t make things better because they’re wired to hold their parent’s shadows. Only the parents can shift these dynamics and when they do, it’s a liberating and expansive experience that allows life to begin to feel coherent and full, instead of fractured and interrupted. It’s a new beginning for everyone when a parent begins to look at just one hidden or forgotten thread in the invisible web that binds us. Then, in that moment, that which has kept us trapped begins to set us free.