Rewrite Your Script by Rewriting Your Family Story

We all have family stories. Some of us have heard rumors that we’re descended from royalty or at least Mayflower Pilgrims. Some of those stories might be true. Some might not be. More specifically, we might have heard stories about more recent ancestors—grandparents or great-grandparents—we have probably conceived notions about those people from the stories we have heard about them, or stories they told us about themselves, and ultimately, some of those stories may have helped us to define ourselves and to shape whom we have become.

Recently, one of my friends told me about a family discovery he made that changed how he viewed a lot of things. This friend grew up in a family that had a lot of sexual hang-ups. Premarital sex was frowned on. People needed to be morally responsible. His family, in a sense, sort of thought of itself as better than others because it was more moral. There was clearly a right and a wrong way to behave in relationships and especially in regards to sex.

Then one day, while doing some genealogy research, he happened to find out, not only that his great-grandparents had gotten married because his great-grandfather had gotten his great-grandmother pregnant, but that the man involved had not wanted to marry her and she had consequently had him arrested and a judge and sheriff coerced the man into marrying her—this was back in the late 1800s of course. The couple stayed married for the rest of their lives.

My friend had to laugh about the situation. His mother had always been very prudish, as a direct result of her mother being so over-protective. And his grandmother had equally been over-protected as a young girl, so much so that the night her future husband proposed to her, she had a friend with her because she was not allowed to go out on a date alone with a man.

And now it was revealed that that grandmother’s mother had gotten herself pregnant out of wedlock. Had the family always then been prudish, or had prudery developed from prudence? Doubtless, the great-grandmother had not wanted to see her daughter caught in the same situation she had been caught in. She may have been over-protective, but she been strict with her daughter out of love. Only, over-protectiveness resulted in what eventually became an unhealthy attitude about sex in the family.

That’s how many codependent and dysfunctional behaviors happen in our families. Someone tries to compensate for something that went wrong—he or she tries to protect or control out of fear based on personal experience, and ultimately, the result is that codependent behaviors get passed down in the family.

As for my friend, he is still laughing about what he learned regarding his great-grandparents. “They were human!” he told me. They are more real to him now than ever before considering they had both died long before he ever knew them. This little tidbit of information about an event that happened over a century ago has made him realize how much our family stories, or what we think are our family stories, shape our identities. It also shows that the family story we tell ourselves may not be completely accurate depending on what information our older family members tell us and what they leave out for their own reasons.

What family stories could you unearth that would help you to put you and your family into perspective? Sometimes, the smallest piece of information about a person can help us to see him or her in a totally different light, and by extension, we come better to understand our own relationships with family members.

Irene Watson, MA,  is author of The Sitting Swing: Finding Wisdom to Know the Difference, and co-editor of The Story that Must Be Told: True Tales of Transformation, and Authors Access: 30 Success Secrets for Authors and Publishers. She is a workshop leader, managing editor of Reader Views, and president of a non-profit Higher Power Foundation. Irene lives next to Barton Creek in Austin, TX, with her husband Robert.