Let’s imagine that the family is a house with a front door, rooms, stairs, a roof… What part of this house will you be? A powerful supporting wall or a light garden gazebo? How do your family members perceive you? It is important to understand what place you unconsciously occupy in the family structure, so that you can change it if you wish.
All families are individual, and each has its own value system, its own rituals and traditions, but the role that we play in our own family is not accidental. Thanks to the discoveries of psychoanalysis, family psychology and psychogenealogy, today we know that the family in which we were born and of which we remain a lifetime can unconsciously impose a certain pattern of behavior on us. We can find ourselves in the role of an older brother who has to lead by example, or a younger sister who has to be on the sidelines. In the role of a mother, who must follow everything and keep up with everything, or a father, invested with authority. These attitudes are passed down from generation to generation and form family stereotypes. From birth, we hear phrases, sometimes completely innocent, that can influence our entire subsequent life. Grandmother, bending over the crib, exclaims: “What a restless one, you are still tormented with him!” or: “Well, dear, now lonely old age does not threaten you!” This is how the very first labels arise – “restless” or “support in old age”, with which the child will have to live.
Change role
A label stuck to a child during childhood can affect their personality and thus their future. Statements like “You do everything in defiance” or “You only think about yourself”, which we hardly pay attention to, turn out to be written in the book of our destiny.
Sometimes a label does not interfere with us, or at least helps our personality to form. But what if one day we want to abandon the role we have been playing since childhood? Then the balance in the family is disturbed, and our relatives, each in their own way, unconsciously try to return everything to normal … It is not easy to break out of the captivity of long-established rules, but there is nothing impossible in this.
Most often, the desire to break free from the label and play by your own rules arises in adolescence. Such a healthy desire for independence can shake the family boat, but getting rid of the label in adulthood is even more difficult, and even then self-improvement becomes an urgent need.
If you want to understand what rules your family lives by and what role is assigned to you in it, if you do not want to subordinate your life to family schemes (sometimes not at all comfortable) or want to change your family “role”, answer the questions of our test – and you will take the first conscious step in the right direction.