The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love - Hardcover

Pharaon, Vienna

 
9780593539910: The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593539915 ISBN 13: 9780593539910
Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

From licensed therapist and popular Instagram relationship expert Vienna Pharaon (@mindfulmft, +683K followers) comes a profound guide to understanding and overcoming wounds from your Family of Origin—the foundation of how we relate to others, ourselves, and the world around us.

None of us had a perfect childhood; we are all carrying around behaviors that don’t serve us—and may in fact be hurting us. But it doesn’t have to be that way, says licensed marriage and family therapist Vienna Pharaon. Our past might create our patterns, but we can change those patterns for the better...with the right tools.

In The Origins of You, Pharaon has unlocked a healing process to help us understand our Family of Origin—the family and framework we grew up within—and examine what worked (and didn’t) in that system. Unhealed pain (or “wounds”) in that Family of Origin will manifest in our adult behaviors in surprising ways, from work challenges to interpersonal struggles. But the good news: armed with the knowledge about our past, we can actually rewire our programming to meaningfully improve our relationships and our lives, right now and in the future.

It doesn’t matter whether you’ve been in therapy for decades, or whether therapy isn’t for you. It doesn’t matter if you had a great childhood, or a terrible one. You can create change and resolve things from the past that need your attention. Complete with guided introspection, personal experiences, client stories, frameworks for having difficult conversations, and worksheets to complement each chapter, The Origins of You will teach you how to break family patterns and help you liberate the way you live and love.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Vienna Pharaon is a licensed marriage and family therapist and one of New York City’s most sought after relationship therapists. She has practiced therapy for over fifteen years and is the founder and owner of the group practice, Mindful Marriage and Family Therapy. She received her Master of Science in Marriage & Family Therapy from Northwestern University, and trained extensively at The Family Institute, Bette D. Harris Center. Pharaon has been featured in The Economist, Netflix, Vice, and Motherly, and has led workshops for Peloton and Netflix, amongst others. She currently lives in Upstate, New York with her husband and son. The Origins of You is her first book.

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Introduction
 
I was just five years old when a rupture in my family left me with a wound which would dictate the course of my relationships for years to come.

For a long time I refused to acknowledge the effect my past had on, well, everything else in my life. In fact, I might never have fully understood the importance of these early events without an education in psychology, a working knowledge of the lingering effects of trauma, and a deep curiosity around relationships. It has taken years of hard work to see the impact of what happened long ago and to actively take control of who I want to be in relationships, valuable lessons I’ve learned that I will share with you in this book. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning.

Let’s start with my origins.

It was a beautiful, sunny day in the summer of 1991. I was trying to make a flimsy gold bangle into a trendy hoop earring—five going on fifteen, as they say—when I heard my father’s raised voice from behind the closed bedroom door. My father’s anger was always scary to me. He was the kind of man who liked to dominate every situation he was in, and the power and control he exuded felt threatening and manipulative. My joy in my cool jewelry project immediately vanished.

“If you leave, don’t come back,” he shouted at my mother.

As a five-year-old, the words pierced me. I’d never heard such rage targeted at someone I loved, at someone he was supposed to love: If you leave, don’t come back.

Within minutes my mom was barreling upstairs, urging me to pack a bag. There wasn’t much time for my system to process what was happening. All I knew was that we were leaving.

We picked up my maternal grandmother and went to the Jersey shore, where I am sure I played in the waves, built castles in the sand, and probably convinced my mom to stop for ice cream on the way home. It hadn’t yet struck me that “home” this time might mean somewhere else. Dropping off my grandmother wouldn’t be just another stop. It was the destination.

When we got to my grandma’s house, we settled in, unwinding after a day in the sun. It wasn’t long before the phone started to ring. Although there was no caller ID at the time, it was obvious who was on the other line. My father immediately demanded to speak to my mom, but my grandma knew better than to pass the phone. Within minutes, we were all running over to the neighbor’s house. No time to process. Just time to run.

About ten minutes later my father and his brother, my uncle, pulled into my grandma’s driveway. We watched from afar as they banged on the front door, circled the house, and tried to catch a glimpse of any movement inside. My mom’s parked car was a clear giveaway that we couldn’t be far. I remember ever-so-carefully peeking my head above the window sill to see what was going on just a house away. My dad and uncle were just small figurines in the distance, but I could still see their rage.

I wanted to call out to my dad, but I was also frightened. I was hiding with my mom, feeling terrified and unsafe, while simultaneously thinking to myself, I’m right here, Dad.

Minutes later, the police pulled into my grandmother's driveway. I could hear the fear in my mom’s voice as she demanded I hide in the closet with her. This is really happening. I was instructed to not make a peep. Then came the knock, which pierced in a familiar way. The neighbor opened the door to two angry men and a couple of police officers. The questions came from the officers while accusations came from my father and uncle. They knew we were inside, but there was no invitation to enter.

I could hear the rage escalating. There must be something I can do to fix this, I prayed. How do I make this stop? I just want them both to be okay.

Yet there was no way to make both of my parents happy. There was no way to choose them both. There was no way to honor one without hurting or disappointing the other, or so I believed. There was no way to stop the fight.

Throughout the incident, we remained, my mom and me, stock still, hand in hand, in the closet.
And though I didn’t then have the language to describe it, it was then – at that moment – my own safety wound was born. I had no idea, at the time, just how long I would be trapped in that moment.
 
*  *  *

Even though my parents tried their best, they couldn’t protect me or shield me from their rage. My physical safety was never threatened, but the system I called my family was crashing and burning. The chaos became the status quo. I saw two adults come face to face with threats, manipulation, paranoia, emotional flooding, abuse, control, and fear. As much as they tried to hide it from me, I saw it, I felt it, and I experienced it alongside them. My world had suddenly, dramatically, become unsafe. The two people who I’d trusted to be my protectors were so busy fighting each other they, for a time, lost sight of me.

I realized I had to create my own safety.

I took on the role of peacekeeper in an attempt to put out the fire and to keep the family functioning. It was quite the role for a five-year-old. Unaware that it wasn’t my responsibility, I gave it everything I had. I became a phenomenal actress. I had determined that my not being OK at all times was too much for my parents to face, so I’d say, “I’m fine,” with the sole intention of not adding to their burden. And, in an effort to always please them and tell them what I believed they needed to hear, I never shared my preferences, only validated theirs. I became a child with no needs of her own, exceptional at anything I put my mind to, always helping to lessen the burden or distract them from what was happening.

My safety wound – more about this in the pages that follow -- remained unaddressed and, repeatedly reinjured, continued to unconsciously direct my life. I was always on the alert, always ready to put out the next potential fire, whether the kindling and match came from my parents, my friends, or eventually my own partners. But the long-term effects of taking on this inappropriate peacekeeper role and of mistakenly putting all my efforts into making everything okay would take years to unpack. I learned to shapeshift, shrink, minimize, maximize, and distort myself and my experiences all in the name of pleasing—a habit I would later need to work tirelessly at overthrowing if I wanted to have authentic relationships.

And I became so skilled at making sure that what happened to my parents didn’t happen to me that I wound up recreating everything I was fearful of. My fear of being controlled, as my father had controlled my mother, made me controlling myself. My people-pleasing and need to be worthy made me invulnerable and inauthentic, blocking genuine connections. And my cool-girl, on-top-of-everything persona made it impossible to reveal how I really felt or ask for any needs to be met. I was stuck in my personal and professional relationships, recreating the very patterns I’d sworn to never repeat.

When I first started therapy, I didn’t see any of this. I was convinced that the issue I needed to work on (my “presenting problem”) was “improving communication and conflict in my relationships.” I found myself inexplicably at odds with people in all aspects of my life – friendships, colleagues, and especially people I dated--but somehow, I never traced these different frustrations and struggles back to this inciting incident in my childhood. I’d survived that, I...

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Verlag
G.P. Putnam's Sons
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593539915
ISBN 13 
9780593539910
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
G.P. Putnam's Sons
https://www.penguin.com/putnam/

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