approval

Hey there, it’s Graham from The Confident Man Project again and today I want to talk at you about your family. Family issues have been pretty huge for me so I know a little bit about this and I want to share with you what I have learned, particularly about stopping seeking validation from your family. What tends to happen when we’re young is that our parents experience us as an infant, as a baby, as a child, an adolescent and then by the time we become an adult our parents’ view of us is often so fixed by their earlier experiences of us that they have a lot of trouble accepting who we now are as an adult being different to who we were as a child.

And this is the reason why a lot of the time when we hang around our families we tend to regress back into a child-like state where we behave and relate to our parents and our siblings in much the same way that we did when we were a kid.

That’s not necessarily what you want to do if your childhood experience wasn’t one where you felt reinforced and validated and loved and just nurtured and you had a really fun time all the time. So if you want to break away from some of the family stuff, it’s really important that you stop seeking validation from your family.

(more…)