FACET Topics: Family of Origin
Knowing about one’s family of origin is a vital part of knowing oneself. Knowing about your partner’s family is a significant piece of knowing your partner. Both are helpful when you are entering into the committed lifelong relationship called marriage.
Family of origin is the family into which one is born. Sometimes a person does not live in this family or lives in an adoptive family. Nevertheless, we inherit many things from our family of origin, besides the obvious ones such as racial, cultural, and even physical similarities and possibly propensities toward certain illness, etc. We now know that we "inherit" a multi-generational, emotional family process, such as whether we are very anxious, or how we handle stress.
We are each shaped, in many ways, by the family we got to grow up in. So if that was not your biological family you have two strands of “origin.” You will have learned patterns from the family that raised you, and have assumptions about family life based on that history.
No one gets perfect parents.From our family we may have received either too much or too little regarding limits, supports, stories, protection and nurturance. The resulting combination of what we did or did not receive in these areas play out in our unique development. The family of origin section of FACET is intended to address the various differences within each person's background.
It is important for both parties to go into marriage with an understanding of their own family background, as well as insight regarding their perspective marriage partner's family of origin. It will be a lifelong exploration that will continue to enrich your understanding of one another.
Additional Questions to assist the conversation:
How does my family feel about you? How does your family feel about me? How do our families feel about the marriage?
Where are the areas within my family of origin or yours that we must address?
How will we handle family gatherings and family holidays, such as Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter?
How will we handle tensions that come up in each of our families?
What have we tried that worked? Didn’t work?
How can we possibly be pro-active regarding identified family of origin hot spots?
Do we have a strategy for dealing with interference from family around our child rearing?