I know. Right??

 

 

This week let’s talk about family—next time, we’ll unpack how using Everyday Communication Sorcery will help you to choose your feelings about everything that happens in your family interactions, especially with the ones who make you the most…well…NUTS. (That’s what changes everything.)

 

Ready? Here we go….

 

 

As much as I am committed to the family I have created in the world, being a part of the family I was born into has always been more challenging than nourishing for me. (AND HEY!! These are AMAZING people!! All of them have created phenomenal works in the world—in a variety of arenas—over many  generations!)

 

For years I believed that all the problems I had to be me.

 

And yeah, I have to admit that I’ve always been (as my beloved late father-in-law described me) “a little different.” These days there are letters that describe those differences—ADHD, HSP, OCD—and understanding them has helped me claim the magic of my fully “neurodivergent” self.

 

There’s no way to know if this understanding might have helped my 20th century family cope with my firstborn self. When I ran away from home as a 17-year-old (with the clothes on my back and $30 in my pocket) I fully believed that we would all be better off if we never saw each other again. (Now I know that nothing could be further from the truth…)

 

You may be the one in your family who’s felt like that. (I promise you I’m not a special case!)  If you are, you may have had the same questions about “WTF???” as I have. Whether it’s true for you or someone in your family who you love, I’m so delighted that you’re reading this post.

 

Trust me, we can only scratch the surface here, so I hope you won’t mind if I get a little more personal. I only know what I’m about to share with you by walking through the proverbial fire myself—and OMG. Finding my way through my own family situation has lit a fire in me to share this with everyone on the planet who’s looking for way to do it themselves.

 

 

Over the past 6 years, two of my four sisters and I have been working on a project we have come to call Family Reinvention. We call it that because, as I learned from my teacher, Dr. Nadya Zhexembayeva, the purpose of any reinvention is to “bring more life to any situation.” I wanted to bring more life to a family system that was killing me—as well as bringing unintentional pain to my siblings in our interactions. All three of us wanted to be able to choose our feelings in any moment and in every conversation with each other. Our work together is at the very heart of everything I have created with Everyday Communication Sorcery.

 

After a shaky and uncomfortable start, we’ve each gotten skillful at exploring the question of: “What is it about our conversations with family members that makes us totally NUTS—and HOW does that happen?”

 

When we started this journey together 6 years ago, there were three “out-of-our-family-box “behaviors that we committed to—these help us stay in the conversation when we want to run screaming from the room. Our quest was to unpack our family drama (our parents are now gone). Our mission was to bring more life to ourselves and our sibling/offspring relationships. That’s why we agreed to:

These behaviors were totally foreign to us as children. It took us being “middle-aged” to try them on. (I know. Better late than never.)

 

For much of my first three decades on the planet, unpacking the questions of “what went wrong?” in my family and “what’s wrong with me?” was a burning quest of mine. Turning 30 set me on a path for the work I do—and all of it has transformed me as a person. How I felt as a 17-year-old couldn’t be further from the truth—and my clients over the past 4 decades have taught me that I’m not a special case. So many of us—including my own siblings—feel exactly as I did.

 

Everyday Communication Sorcery was born out of my deep desire for—and consistently honed skill at—working through the challenges we all face as family members.

 

 

Now I know that humans are built for “family,” so we feel better—and we thrive—when we have a nourishing one. Some of us are born into—or adopted into—them; some of us marry into them. And some of us create them in the world with kindred spirits who SEE us in ways our other family cannot.

 

Because the need for “family” seems to be wired into our DNA, over the years many of my clients, friends, and family members have admitted that we keep going back into the “nuttiness” because there is something there that we want with all of our hearts: that visceral connection to “our people.”

 

We want it so deeply that we keep on trying to create it, with our own blood kin or, if that fails, with those we claim as family. 

 

Since we’ve never been taught to do this, we find ourselves blindly feeling our way through the process of trying to create that connection we crave.  And OH YEAH—it can get completely NUTTY when what want so deeply seems to elude us no matter how hard we try—which is typically WHY these people drive us…well, you know… NUTS. 

 

Here’s Why It Truly Gets NUTTY…

Doing a lot of research into Family Systems helped my sisters and me to uncover some surprising things that are true about people born into the same family (it’s worth mentioning here that although much of this is also true for those who are adopted into a family, there are other factors at play connected to their “relinquishment trauma” that are beyond the scope of my posts. One of my sisters is a huge resource in this area—if she can support you, I’m happy to connect you with her privately.)  

 

It turns out that there are two things that are invisible to all of us, that are the root causes of our family “nuttiness.” The moment you unpack them, everything looks different. This understanding is the first step in being able to choose your feelings and harness the power of everyday Communication Sorcery.

What do you think? As you’re reading this, are you visualizing how this stuff is true in your own family? (Me, too… No matter how many times I see it or share it, I still get the visuals.)

 

So let’s stop here…If we were in a room together, I’d be asking you how you’re doing right now.

 

If you’ve never seen any of this stuff before, it’s entirely possible that your head may be spinning. That’s totally normal! Even though this stuff is the water I swim in after all these years, I still remember how I felt when I first discovered it. It was a LOT.

 

Congratulations on reading through to the end of this post! Next week we’ll unpack some juicy Family Communication Sorcery.

 

Play of the week: Over the next week, I invite you to simply sit with this new information. No steps—the only actions to take are the ones that support this practice. It’s different for everyone. However you do it will be perfect for you—including tabling it for another time. I hope you will give yourself full permission to:

Try this out and see what happens. As always, the Big Win here is to consider the possibility that this practice will benefit you—something you can only prove one way or the other by trying it out.

 

 

If you liked what you read this week and you want to take a deeper dive into how understanding your Family System can work for you—for FREE—head on over to www.maiabeatty.com and schedule your 30-minute Discovery Session with me. We will NOT be talking about coaching; I am currently not accepting any new clients. So if you want to unpack anything in this week’s Playbook in real time, there’s a spot for you in the next 7 days.