family systems

Large family having Christmas dinner

Christmas Day With My Parents, And Other Life-Threatening Challenges

Christmas day this year was rather challenging, principally because my dad is dying. He’s 87 and got cancer 3 years ago. The 18 months of radiotherapy and chemotherapy probably saved his life, but now his bone marrow is fucked and he can’t make his own red blood cells, so he’s going to die. He knows it, I know it, everyone in the family knows it. We just don’t know when. I feel absolutely devastated.

Watching his steady decline is all the more painful because it brings up all the unmet needs I still have in my relationship with him, like security and significance, that I now know for sure he will never fulfil for me. I’ve realised this intellectually for a long time but seeing him slowly die real nails it home. My relationship with my dad has always lacked emotional intimacy despite my best efforts to connect with him over the years. He just didn’t have it in him. At the same time, he’s the one person I feel most confident in saying who genuinely loves me… and now he’s going to die. Fortunately, he’s not in any great pain as far as I can see… he just gets tired a lot.

(more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Heal Intergenerational Unworthiness Trauma

Intergenerational Unworthiness Trauma is a term I coined this morning to describe feelings of unworthiness and insecurity that are passed from parents to their children down successive generations.

Parents who feel fundamentally unworthy create a lack of secure attachment with their infants, leading to children with insecure, avoidant or disorganized attachment styles. When these children grow into adults, they pass the trauma on to their own children through their inability to bond emotionally with them. Everyone in the family ends up with emotional abandonment trauma manifesting as core feelings of unworthiness.

In other words, parents who feel fundamentally unworthy, insecure or broken are unable to raise children with deep feelings of worthiness themselves.

The cycle repeats down the generations until someone recognises and breaks it by doing the emotional healing work to deal with their own traumatic attachment wound, so they can create a secure attachment to the children in the next generation.

I have experienced this personally, and believe it is the underlying issue that undermined my own self-confidence for so long, ultimately leading me to create this website. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

10 Signs Your Family Is Crazy-Making

A few years ago when I did The Hoffman Process, one of the facilitators described [intlink id=”480″ type=”post”]my mother’s behaviour[/intlink] as “crazy-making”.

I thought, “Wow, that’s a fantastic description.”

And it wasn’t just my mother; it was the whole family dynamic that she and my passive father helped establish. Take a perfectly normal infant child, bring them up in a crazy-making emotionally disconnected family and you’ve pretty much got a recipe for insanity.

But how do you know if you’re living in a crazy-making family? Well, I’m glad you asked.

So here’s the top 10 signs that your family is crazy-making:

(more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago