SHAPING YOUR FAMILY’S FUTURE


4 • YOUR FAMILY, YOUR FUTURE


You may have thought you had your parents perfectly pegged. In your mind they were great or they were terrible; they were incompetent or they were perfect. When you become a parent, these labels may change. Consider yourself warned. For more about this, click the button.


4A•TALK IT OVER


reaching Back A huge challenge in this type of work is to keep from using the FST approach as an excuse to dump on your family. When you ask difficult questions of yourself and your family, you may be tempted to affix blame. The previous chapters attempted to help you see your family with new eyes. This exploration of the way you grew up will be just as helpful in your life as a parent. For an example of how the past can affect you as a parent, listen to the


story of Jared by clicking the button.


Small changes come as each adult in the family works to become his or her own person in the family of origin. Change also comes when new people marry into the family system. (Each person brings his or her own “dances.”) Sometimes this passing down is intentional. Parents teach their children how to behave around their elders or how to make Grandma’s chili, for example.


Still, few families pay much attention to the emotional reactions and behaviors they pass on to the next generation. Parenthood brings out our most noble intentions. We want to be heroes to our children. We want their respect, their admiration, and their love. We genuinely want to be better parents than the people who raised us—just think of the mental list of “I’ll never . . .” or “When I have kids . . .” promises you’ve made to yourself. As you have seen in the previous sessions, inherited messages can be hard to uncover. They can be even more difficult to undo. In fact, it’s hard to rid yourself completely of these family patterns. They will always serve as your default mode. But you can learn to sort through the messages you’ve


26


Listen to Jared’s story


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