Transcript of the Video

I’m Angela and this video is part of the Healthy Relationship series. And it’s called “Celebrating What your Parents gave You”  – not just what your mama gave you, but what your parents gave you – or didn’t!

So there is an obvious emphasis in the month of November for the USA and Northern Hemisphere the holiday of Thanksgiving and it’s when families come together. And often when families come together it’s a time to celebrate, but a lot of sadness can come because people may not have family or when you get together with family things come up that you’re not happy about and it can be unconscious.

What people don’t realize with families is that often the things that happen in the family from very early on in life can be very much programmed in a level that’s not consciously remembered but what some psychologists call implicit memory. That’s the very prenatal experiences or from 0 to 3. And after 3 years old there’s also a lot of more conscious memories, but you’re not really going to remember them because you’re still in the childhood state.

So our families can trigger really a lot of feeling states when we come together with them. And moving into the holiday period you can also feel a lot of stuff either when you’re with your family or when you’re away from them because you’re not feeling like hanging out with them or you don’t have that ability to or you haven’t even been invited to hang out with them.

So when we talk about celebrating what your parents gave you or didn’t, it’s about looking at the relationship from a different point of view.  We’re not going back to the childhood perception of the relationship.

We’re going to what I call a “soul perception” of the purpose of the relationship. And any family relationship is usually a soul choice. It’s a relationship where you wanted to see “what are those things that I need to resolve in this life” that are especially around “loving myself”, knowing your value and moving forward with what you really want to do, rather than holding that back and living a smaller or a lesser life.

So our family relationships because they do trigger our emotions so much really are really big relationships to move us forward in life, even when they’re frustrating and sometimes especially when they’re frustrating.

So one of the strategies in terms of celebrating what your parents gave you or didn’t is to make a list of “what did your parents give you”. And so for some people this can be challenging because they might have a negative perception of their parents. So then I start with the other column which is “what didn’t your parents give you” and then we work backwards.

If you’re very easily able to see what your parents gave you then these are things to celebrate because you were basically given these tools and strategies or strengths as part of your upbringing.

If you’re looking at the other column where it’s “what they didn’t give you you”, you were also given tools and strengths and opportunities or challenges to learn about: what they didn’t give you, what they left open as a space of emptiness almost, because they didn’t provide it for you, for you to discover and explore that space. And for some people that can trigger a lot of stuff because you think:

“Oh! my parents didn’t do this for me, they didn’t do that for me”, so there may be a resentment.

And that will keep you in the emotional body, it’ll keep you in the emotions, it’ll keep you thinking “I was a victim” or didn’t get well-parented or provided for.

And that is where this time when we’re looking at family relationships and moving forward for Transformed Relationships the course that I work, with how do we change the way that we create love in the world.

We don’t have to go around forgiving everybody if you’ve been hurt by them but if we look at the emotions that keep us in resentment and they won’t let us move forward, we can actually change that perception of the emotion.

It’s not about getting rid of the feeling, the feeling perhaps will still be there, but the perception can shift because you can start to look at what your parents didn’t give you as an opportunity to overcome a challenge that was pretty tough in some cases. Or in other cases was an opportunity to discover more about yourself.

So let’s look at in terms of building healthy relationships the gifts that your parents gave you. One of the reasons I find this is a very important way to transform relationships is that we don’t really honour the parent relationship in modern culture very well.

Our ancestors would often do remembrance of their parents living, dead and their ancestors, which are the parents of their parents right, seven generations back. So we find that in lots of different cultures around the world seven generations back, is an honoring of what parents gave to parents. And at the very basic level, they handed down the DNA. So celebrating the gifts is a very important way to start just honoring at very basic levels what are those characteristics that you have inherited and remembering that your parents and their parents crafted those characteristics not just through the DNA, but through their nurturance and their family creation and their celebrations and their rituals.

So focus on that in the holiday period about the gifts, even those things like cooking are wonderful gifts because it’s when communities come together and create and celebrate and also honor the resources of their world to provide for them as well.

And for those of you preparing for the family, I wish you a wonderful holiday time and a time to honor those moments where you are also creating the next generation’s future memories.