Formation – Family of Origin – Members Content
This session is designed to help you see clearly the pictures in your brain of what you think is right and normal. That is, your unconscious expectations of the dynamic between husband and wife – what it means to be husband and father or wife and mother.
Even if your parents were extraordinarily happy in their marriage, what worked for them was unique to their relationship. It does not necessarily follow that their behaviour patterns will model the best way for you to love your spouse. You will have your own unique relationship with someone who is very special and very different from the person your mother or father married.
The purpose of this exercise is to begin to set you free to love your fiancé and future spouse the way they most need and want to be loved, rather than the way you instinctively think is best based on your upbringing.
Your Adopted Formation is the unconscious learnt behaviour you accepted without question or perhaps adopted without noticing, like an accent or gesture. Rejected Formation happens when we have a powerful negative reaction to our own formation experiences (“I’ll never be like that!”) but this causes us to instinctively react in the extreme opposite way. Neither Adopted or Rejected formation are freely chosen behaviours.
The ideal is to be free to choose to love the way the other wants to be loved.
This exercise is not an objective or analytical task. Just record your immediate reaction to each of the questions. Take your best guess at answering as many of the questions as possible. Answer them based on your perceptions of your parent or parent figures. What may have actually been going on between them is not relevant, but what you thought or subconsciously assumed was going on is relevant because you carry these perceptions into your marriage. It is your perception of what was happening that formed your attitudes and expectations, not the reality of what was actually happening.
If you come from an intact marriage, that is, your parents stayed together, answer the questions based on your perceptions of their relationship. If your parents were divorced or if you lost a parent early in life, answer the questions in terms of the general attitudes toward the opposite sex of the parent you lived with and his or her significant relationships with the other sex such as a father, brother, friend, or boyfriend.
It may be that you are marrying late in life or that this is a second marriage for one or both of you. In the case of a second marriage, it is important to examine how what you observed in your family of origin affected your behaviour in your first marriage. It can be enlightening and liberating to see what was really going on in the first marriage, what your reaction was to that dynamic, and its subsequent effect on your present relationship. It will be very helpful to work on forgiveness and closure where necessary in order to be free to love wholeheartedly and to fully trust again.
Even if you left home a very long time ago there is no doubt that you took ‘home’ with you.
Stories of the Heart
When I heard our six year old son exclaim that “Daddies don’t cry” I was taken aback. I do cry, and I have cried in the presence of the children before, but it seems that he had never experienced this part of me. ‘Daddies don’t cry’ wasn’t true of me, but it was true of his experience of me. I made a mental note to be sure that my son, at some stage, had the opportunity to see some of my weakness and softness as well as my strength and constancy.
