Discovering Your Family System

Stepping back into place often creates a sense of lightness, freedom, and possibility. If so, you were giving to those from whom you should receive, and that puts you out of place and order. This may lead you to always be the one taking care of things and, in a sense, having to be too big all the time. This can, in turn, result in feeling like you never receive what you need. When you can learn to take your place and acknowledge but not take on everyone else’s stuff, order is restored. Conversely, if you gave up your position to another sibling or family member who needed more, perhaps you are now too small and often feel invisible, unable to receive your full measure of life, flow, love, success. You see this sometimes in leaders who insist on being invisible. They promote others, which is great, but do not take their own place. Back to the example of Lucia. Those who came first carry more life weight simply because life came to them first. Ranking doesn’t make you or anyone else better or worse. We each have our place in a system, and only our place.

Goodbye To Innocence

When we know and stand in our own place, we receive what we need and can pass on what we should. Life, love, and success can flow. When we are out of place, we feel it in the ways we don’t belong, and life doesn’t flow as it should. We can feel limited, burdened, or cheated. In organizations, there are many different ways to rank. It can be by skill set, by age, by tenure, by flow, by customer weight, or by salary, for example. Balance of give and receive. This dynamic kills many a relationship in any system. The flip side of this principle is taking too much. Systems and people thrive where there is balance and falter when it is absent. In one organization I worked with, everybody was working well together until the boss took away vacation days. Almost immediately, everybody started indiscriminately taking sick days.

Putting It Together

What were the members of the system saying? The balance of give and receive in the system is not okay. It’s asking too much of us without giving enough in return. So, now we’re going to take sick days. Many times people who haven’t been connected to their families of origin are stunned by the parallels in their lives when they do finally connect. At one of my events, Lisa stood up and proclaimed that this wasn’t for her. She was adopted and had no connection to her family of origin, and the tears in her eyes showed how painful this was for her. I invited her to work with me. To one side of the room was a mirror, and I asked her to take a look and tell me how she was different physically from her adoptive family. Then I asked how her personality was different from her adoptive family’s and what her frustrations and deep desires were, and bit by bit Lisa realized that she had all that she needed, including a stronger connection to her biological parents than she had thought possible. With one new thought and feeling, she began connecting in different ways. I suggested that she write down all her frustrations, heart’s desires, and significant events in her life and look for the patterns that kept her stuck. Through her own frustrations, dreams, and desires, Lisa could feel a connection and a sense of destiny.

Living In The Material World

Systemic work and constellations doesn’t preclude those who are adopted, orphaned, estranged, or who don’t know much about their family of origin. You don’t need a family tree hanging on the wall to tell you who you are. Your patterns of thought, feelings, actions, and inactions are the clues that provide insights into your heritage. Strong points of view, inexplicable dogmatism, phobias, and innate emotional habits are clues to what lives in your system and where those traits may have originated. In systems, it’s not just multiple generations that give us clues. Our own words, feelings, and mindsets and the meanings we have made of events in our own lives give us a clear idea of where and how we are stuck and where we are driven or pulled to go. What situations repeat for you? Have you consistently gotten stuck? What stories do you tell yourself about your abilities and potential? Outmoded patterns that no longer work for you and the new patterns that want to surface are there, even though you have no clear family history. You may never find the ancestor who first sparked the patterns of fear and doubt or determination and integrity, but you will find ways to acknowledge the patterns and then embrace what does work while laying down the old patterns that do not serve, turning them into places of wisdom. There is the seed of greatness in you, and as you sow it and begin to change, not only do you rise and transform, but you lay the path for those who come after you while connecting to the invisible ones who came before. You don’t have less, you have more. You know the gifts your adoptive parents gave you. What are the gifts your biological parents passed on? Did it take courage to have you and give you up? What other gifts did they pass on that you have not considered? Systemic patterns pass on to you whether you are conscious of them or not. You have only to watch shows like Long Lost Family to see how patterns repeat. Even when we don’t know our family of origin growing up, it’s surprising to find how much of their history we have repeated without even knowing them. Discovering your family system is like exploring a treasure map. All the clues to the places you are stuck and the destiny that’s trying to emerge through you are contained in the clues within your family system.