"If you think you are enlightened, go spend a week with your family." - Ram Dass
A common occurrence when individuals engage in "the work," such as transformative projects within psychotherapeutic or meditative contexts, is that even after undergoing significant personal changes, they still get emotionally triggered when visiting their parents. When these triggering moments happen, an internal dialogue often emerges: "Shit, I've put in all this effort, and yet these people still trigger me."
Doing "parts work"1 or entering non-dual states of consciousness may provide greater peace in day-to-day living, but they are separate skills not transferable to getting along with one's parents. The source of the triggering is not "feeling seen." The need to feel seen is prevalent in those who do the work, especially if they do "we space" practices, heightening intersubjective experiences in groups of people where significant emotional vulnerability is displayed, understood, and accepted. Once one experiences such practices and gets a taste of how good being deeply met by a group feels, this way of relating becomes preferred.
Soon, those who become comfortable at being seen and good at seeing others ween superficial persona-heavy relationships from their lives. It becomes painfully salient how non-nurturing these social relationships are. The relationship with one's family is often resistant to such weening. Family gatherings, like Christmas dinner, can evoke great reluctance in those who've undergone the work. Not being seen by a co-worker or a stranger at a party differs from not being seen by one's parents. The latter carries a lot more importance that cannot be hand-waved away through emotional integration or expansion of consciousness.
Not feeling seen by one's mother or father carries a primal emotional pain. Our parents are the ones who brought us into the world; they are the ones who loved us first and perhaps the most we've ever experienced; they were once our Gods, our heroes, our best friends. Nobody can replace our parents. Our deep-seated need to receive their validation never fully goes away, regardless of how many hours one lays on the Freudian couch or has one's ass on the Buddhistic cushion.
Regarding the option space for this particular existential knot,2 I see four available ones. The common option is coping with feeling unseen. With this approach, one reluctantly adopts the family role they frequently get sucked into while passively withdrawing their social energies, doing the bare minimum to survive the evening. If fortunate, they might leave the gathering with few emotional triggers, but often, they depart with a sense of "meh" and emotional exhaustion.
The extreme option is DeFOOing. Before YouTuber Stefan Molyneux became an alt-right adjacent culture warrior, he was the main advocate for the "Disengage Family Of Origin" (DeFOO) movement. To DeFOO is to consciously and permanently cut off one's biological relationships. While the DeFOO option may be the right approach in extremely abusive family dynamics, it has received much criticism, with teenagers overextending the notion of abuse and cruelly cutting ties with their parents.3
A complimentary option to coping or DeFOOing is creating or discovering one's "family of choice." Also known as "chosen family," this refers to cultivating a non-biologically related group of individuals that provide ongoing social support. Families of choice are typical within the LGBT community and supportive communities dealing with addiction or childhood abuse. They serve as a support system fulfilling the family role, particularly for those who face rejection or ostracization from their biological families with traditionalist leanings upon coming out.
The most complex option, which can be quite intricate to execute, is what I'll refer to as "family intrapreneurship." While an entrepreneur takes the risk to create something new, an "intrapreneur"4 takes the risk to create something new within an existing organization. This concept can extend beyond business settings to encompass family systems. If one has done the work, and the previous three options are unattractive, this is the wisest option
Should someone genuinely advance towards greater wisdom and privately perceive themselves as less foolish than their family members, it becomes incumbent on them to assume a more significant role in guiding their family toward the path of goodness, truth, and beauty. I know of no discipline that reliably upskills someone in this. A basic understanding of family systems therapy5 might be needed, as well as hours doing Family Constellation6 work to process intergenerational trauma and knowing how to create authentic and fun social experiences through practices like Circling7 and improv8.
For aspiring family intrapreneurs, I’ll offer three pieces of advice:
Stop being attached to the “special-feeling” of feeling seen. A byproduct of feeling seen is the creeping “special-feeling”9 that emerges, which can be pretty addicting to the point where narcissistic personality structures form around it. What truly triggers a response in individuals who have undergone personal growth is not the absence of parental validation but rather the feeling of not being recognized in the self-centered manner they desire – in a way that allows them to indulge in a sense of specialness. If one can get into the right relationship with the special-feeling directly, they will be less dependent upon others to experience it.
Be senseful of the “archetype gap.” There is a phenomenon I’ll call the “archetype gap,” which is the gap between the archetype one adopts or the one that is projected upon them and who they really are. We all have the father and mother archetype floating in our collective unconscious and have enormous expectations toward these archetypes. These expectations are placed upon those we see who should fulfill these roles, and we incessantly judge them if they do not meet those expectations. Our parents will always disappoint us in this regard, just as their parents disappointed them. The art here is to recognize the gap and stop putting unfair expectations on your biological parents. After all, we are surely not meeting the archetype of an ideal son or daughter. After a certain age, it is best to detach the parental archetype from the actual parent and see them for who they really are, which gives us the chance to truly love them for who they are. One can always experience validation from the archetypal father or mother from their “second fathers” or “second mothers,” aka mentors, teachers, or life guides in the form of older coaches and therapists.
Take quiet ownership of the "family nexus." The philosopher and anti-psychiatrist R. D. Laing coined the term family nexus, referring to how a family "deploys itself in space and time."10 I understand the nexus as a family's social field11, which collectively upholds an unconscious worldview, often resulting in double binds, scapegoating, and feeling excluded. It can be understood as the myth the family operates on, influencing each member's "ontological security" - their feelings of safety in being in the world. Family nexuses can be more or less dysfunctional, with more dysfunction seeming prevalent these days. While no one owns the family nexus, one member is usually the source, influencing it the most. For family intrapreneurs, the wise move is to recognize the source and begin the agentic journey of either being a supportive sub-source or gently taking over the source role altogether. Some strategies to consider are organizing ad hoc family gatherings, inviting new family rituals, writing unexpected and thoughtful letters to family members, engaging in a video documentation project of one's family history, and finding ways to create memories that reinterpret the family's mythos.
To be a successful family intrapreneur, artfully weaving the above three suggestions into familial social fields, one has to know what their philosophy of family is. I see too many people giving up on their families of origin, secretly scapegoating their parents for all their shortcomings, failing to appreciate the life they were given as a gift, and spending time with friends who can “see them” but who are not committed to them when it truly matters.
Certainly, this imploration of intrapreneurship may not be suitable for everyone, especially in cases where parents have committed terrible sins against their children. However, many of us can exercise greater familial agency, extend forgiveness where necessary, and love our family as is, spiritually guiding them toward a greater sense of being whole.
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Emotionally integrating semi-independent “subpersonalities” or "parts" in conflict with each other.
“An existential knot is an issue that feels deeply personal, most saliently experienced in the felt-sense, accompanied by great difficulty in coherently describing what the issue is. The person’s mental models are extremely entangled, with thought loops that lead to difficult emotions. When trying to “solve” the issue they are met with disappointment and confusion. When trying to inquire into it on their own they are met with frustration and a sense of stuckness. The common reaction is to escape into some kind of cope. If the existential knot is left tied, an “existential crisis” awaits.” - “Untying Existential Knots,” Feb 22, 2022
See “You’ll Never See Me Again” (2008) from The Guardian.
“Intrapreneurship is the act of behaving like an entrepreneur while working within a large organization. Intrapreneurship is known as the practice of a corporate management style that integrates risk-taking and innovation approaches, as well as the reward and motivational techniques, that are more traditionally thought of as being the province of entrepreneurship.” - Wikipedia
“Family systems therapy draws on systems thinking in its view of the family as an emotional unit. When systems thinking—which evaluates the parts of a system in relation to the whole—is applied to families, it suggests behavior is both often informed by and inseparable from the functioning of one’s family of origin.” - GoodTherapy
“Family constellations is a therapeutic approach designed to help reveal the hidden dynamics in a family or relationship in order to address any stressors impacting these relationships and heal them.” - GoodTherapy. Also see The Stoa session on Family Constellations.
Circling is often defined as an “intersubjective meditative practice.” See The Stoa session on the history of Circling.
See The Stoa session with the father of improv, Keith Johnstone.
“What makes something special? Definitionally speaking, I like the first lexical definition I came across when searching: "different from what is usual." Felt-sensely speaking, the special-feeling has a warm sensation that makes me want to smile like a little boy with my parents adoring eyes on me after doing something in front of them for the first time.” - “Your Writing is Not Special: A Guide on How Not to Become a Narcissist,” Aug 15, 2023
“The way in which a family deploys itself in space and time, what space, what time, and what things are private or shared, and by whom - these and many other questions are best answered by seeing what sort of world the family has itself fleshed out for itself, both as a whole and differentially for each of its members.” - R.D. Laing, Sanity, Madness and the Family
“By social field I mean the structure of the relationship among individuals, groups, organizations and systems that gives rise to collective behaviors and outcomes.” - Otto Scharmer, “The Blind Spot: Uncovering the Grammar of the Social Field”