Megan's Story
Megan married Dean at 19 and thought their relationship would last forever. Then one day when Megan was 25, she looked at him across the kitchen table and felt herself go numb. Her feelings for Dean were gone. Within weeks Megan filed for divorce. Realising that her suddenly vanishing love for Dean seemed aberrant, she sought help.
I suspected that a family story lay out of reach for her and began to probe. It was fortuitous that we did. The link Megan hadn't made was easy to see. Megan's grandmother was only 25 years old when her husband, the love of her life, drowned while fishing at sea. She raised Megan's mother on her own and never remarried. Her husband's sudden death was the great tragedy in their family.
The story was so familiar that Megan hadn't even considered its effects on her. Once Megan realised that she was reliving her grandmother’s story, the sudden aloneness the deep loss and numbness, Megan began to blink and scrunched her face. I gave her all the time she needed to let the insight sink in. After many seconds came a series of quick breaths. A few minutes later her breath began to lengthen. She was putting the pieces together. “I feel strangely hopeful”, she said. “I need to tell Dean”.
Days later she called and reported that something was changing inside her: her feelings for Dean were returning.
It's important to restate: not all behaviours expressed by us actually originate from us. They can easily belong to family members who came before us. We can merely be carrying the feelings for them or sharing them. We call these “identification feelings”.
Are you identified with a member of your family system?
Could you be feeling like, behaving like, suffering like, atoning for, or carrying the grief for someone who came before you?
Do you have symptoms, feelings, or behaviours that are difficult to explain in the context of your life experience?
Did guilt or pain prevent a family member from loving someone or grieving his or her loss?
Did someone do something that caused his or her rejection in the family?
Was there a trauma in the family (an early death of a parent, child, sibling, or an abandonment, murder, crime, or suicide etc) an event that was too terrible, painful, or shameful to talk about?
Could you be connected with that event, living a life similar to the person no one talks about?
Could you be reliving this family members trauma as though it were your own?
Reference page 78-79 ‘It Didn’t Start With You’ by Mark Wolynn