“Families are like branches on a Tree: we grow in different directions, yet our roots remain as one”
Monica McGoldrick
Nowadays there is no actual parenting handbook, nor was there hundreds of years ago. Just as we are all different, children also come in different sizes and shapes. We can definitely read, research for information or see how others do it. Yet we cannot go into an internship with our own family and chose if we want to stay or not. Things are definite and it remains the most challenging job ever. Project management skills can be useful, but there is no actual KPI to measure the involvement, efficiency or the degree of fulfillment that such a role gives, as it is permanent one, 24 h/day and it’s what defines us as individuals.
Following my own motherhood, discovering on my own and ongoing, having hundreds of families share their divers and complex realities, I’ve come to the following belief: we are all incredibly interconnected and there is no such thing as accidental events. As a coach and advisor, I can analyze how people take decisions, how they act in the business environment and how their attitude and self-awareness changes into the spectrum of their family-life. The explanation of how we interact and get interconnected comes from our family genome, from the unbelievable connections and repetitions, even programming, between generations. There is a scientific explanation of how we end up undertaking certain attitudes, actions and decisions almost unconsciously, yet subconsciously following a predefined pattern. It is activated as we become parents, part of a family or as part of the family community.
Facts from our families’ past end up modelling our current behaviors, sometimes unconsciously. Even events that happened way before our birth and that we were never aware of, can influence us significantly in the most unsuspected ways. Also avoiding painful memories often distortions family relations and creates more problems that our regular behavior would.
There is a new way of self-knowledge, of understanding these profound connections, the generations’ patterns and how we choose our current families. It’s about me, you, us and those who came before us.
