Removing the Parental Legacy

Our families bequeath to us many different things: heirlooms, family stories, medical histories, genetics, behaviors, personality traits, property, money, and a role in our family of origin to name a few. Our parents, for ill or for good or sometimes both in any given moment, are not only our caregivers, but the gods who form and control our childhood world. They are the symbols of what it is to be male, to be female, and become our primary relationship model for how we will interact with these types of beings. They help us define ourselves through relating both with the parent who is “like me” and the one who is not. They represent for us how the sexes interact with each other, how they interact with the outside world, and they teach us who we are and how we should react and interact within our family and all its dynamics. There is very little about our lives which parents don’t dictate or control, all evidence to the contrary when dealing with a two year old or a teenager.

Through our teens and our twenties we work on individuation and go through the startling process of realizing our parents are neither gods nor particularly powerful like they seemed in our childhood. They shrink in size from Titans to humans and we see all their foibles and personality quirks, their unique choices and how those choices are not necessarily something we will continue in our adult life. We create our own life…