Expanding our horizons: leaving home to come home

In December I attended a therapeutic retreat: the ‘Family of Origin Intensive’. Hosted at the beautiful The Falcon At Castle Ashby, from the initial circle of trust and safety on the first morning through the 5-day arc to the heartwarming closure, I felt held throughout by the superb practitioners and there was never a moment when I felt unsafe. This enabled me to take the leap into the deep healing work I needed to do. 

Our ‘Family of Origin’ is the first family we are born into… or adopt…as babies. We can then have many subsequent, including non-blood, families but the significance of our Family of Origin is that this is where our first emotional bonds were formed, it’s how we learned to relate to others and how to express…or swallow…our feelings. It is also where we acquire our emotional and psychological blueprint for our self-concept, imbibing, often unhealthy and unconscious. messages that shape our beliefs, behaviours, and emotional responses in our present world.

The retreat came at the most auspicious time. A couple of years before, I would have declined the invitation: I have had many years of therapy and core to deep therapeutic healing is processing the legacies and experiences arising from our family of origin. I had reached a place where I thought I had done enough diving into my childhood and my family of origin … been there, done that!...and was now focussed on my life in the present.

But the last 18 months had been an unexpected immersion back into my family of origin through the illness of my father, dealing with dynamics I thought I’d left behind long ago. And, of course, our psychological inner work is never done. It is a lifelong journey and the ever-unfolding events in our present are the catalyst for further rabbit-hole-diving into our psyche. So, when the invitation came to attend the retreat, the timing was perfect…and I thankfully took the leap.

Why is it so important to do the inner work on our family of origin? Beyond understanding ourselves more, it’s because if we don’t examine it objectively, we will either idolise or demonise it, caught in its power, emotionally and psychologically stuck in child-like, arrested development, and with no real understanding of its ancestral legacies, the life-enhancing and healthy ones but also the harmful ones.

And if we choose to have children, this inner work becomes even more urgent. When my son was born, I had just trained as a counselling psychotherapist and the new mother in me was horrified by all the harm I could unconsciously do: all those ancestral wounds I would automatically pass on unless I consciously turned the ship around. ‘Physician heal thyself’ is core to psychotherapeutic practice and I had already been in therapy for a few years, but now it was for real. I knew the more I healed and changed, the greater chance I would give my son to grow into the person he was born to be, i.e. his ‘Authentic Self’.

I recently celebrated, with close friends over in London from New York, the 250^th Anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence. My American friends are always puzzled that a Brit, particularly an English woman, would celebrate Independence Day. I tell them it’s the same as assuming that all US Americans, whatever their political beliefs, endorse the conduct of the current leadership of their country and they instantly get it and nod vigorously in agreement. It was shame of their political leader that made my New Yorker friends initially reluctant to celebrate such a momentous anniversary in their country’s history.

I’ve been thinking about this. I live in Britain and, although I consider myself a European, given my French ancestry, and have lived in 5 countries and worked in many more, Britian is still my homeland. Throughout my life, I have lived the paradox of being simultaneously proud and also ashamed of my country: both of its present and also its history and legacies. It’s very normal for me to live with this paradox and I see this as very healthy. It allows me to see my own country through a clearer lens, its strengths as well as its flaws, and also to see other countries and people more objectively. And ultimately it keeps me focussed on the big picture. That this small island, the UK, is just that: a very small island in a very big, beautiful and complex planet, which is turn is a tiny dot in the vast magnificence of the Universe. Everything is relative and it’s all about perspective. There was a moment early in my travels when I realised that the unquestioning belief that ‘my country/province/team/family is the best’ was global and either everyone was right…or no-one was.

So, although I feel sad that so many US Americans are feeling great shame for their country, I also see this as a healthy and necessary maturation process. Unquestioned allegiance to one’s homeland is synonymous to an unexamined and unfiltered attachment to our Family of Origin. We grow up swallowing beliefs and allegiances to a political party, religion, sports team etc purely because that’s what our parents…and their parents etc…did. And to question that ideology becomes a taboo.

One of my greatest fears is jingoism: a belligerent and blind adherence to the rightness or virtue of one's own nation, society, team, group or family. It causes immensurable harm. There is a huge difference between healthy love and an aggressive, fixed mindset that ‘My/our way is not only the best but the only way.’ This is the ‘Tribal Mindset’, rooted in an over-inflated ego, and one that responds emotively…usually aggressively… to any questioning. The response: ‘How dare you?!’ is a strong indicator a taboo has been triggered! The obvious example is what’s happening now with the Football World Cup. The research on the psychology of sports fandom is fascinating and illustrates the difference between a healthy and joyful connection and an unhealthy, over-identification with a team/family/homeland.

And this is the odd thing about being stuck in a tribe. When we are in it, we feel great confidence, surrounded by our ‘family’, cocconed in all that is familiar and known. But it is an elusive confidence and one that is ultimately corrosive, rendering us infantile, stuck in arrested development, huddled in ever- narrowing horizons with an increasing fear and suspicion of what is different and what…or who… we cannot control. This is the shocking cost of the Tribal Mindset: ‘Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness’, (Alejandro Jodorowsky.)

As a species we are programmed to fly the nest: Nature is very canny in shifting the adoring parent/child relationship into the bewildering years of adolescence when our delightful, biddable child morphs into a sneering uncooperative teenager and our perfect parent transforms into a bigoted ogre. Nature is pushing us out of the nest and, as parents, telling us the nest is ready to be flown!

We can only gain an enlightened helicopter vision perspective if we develop the ‘Global Mindset’, the opposite of the Tribal Mindset. A Global Mindset is not about globalisation and creating a homogenised culture where everyone thinks alike. A Global Mindset deeply honours, respects and celebrates diverse values, customs and rituals but it ultimately retains the best of these and courageously lets go of what no longer serves, i.e. what is not healthy for growth.

A key part of my ‘Storytelling in Leadership’ workshop is Joseph Campbell’s ‘The Hero’s Journey’, see diagram below. In his ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’, Campbell researched a thousand myths from tribes all over the world and from all ages, including the Greek myth of Odysseus. He identified a core, universal thread, a monomyth, which he created into a mythological structure: the psychological journey of the archetypal hero, The Hero’s Journey.

In his introduction, Campbell defines this monomyth: ‘A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered, and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.’

Since its publication, Joseph Campbell's Hero’s Journey archetype has been consciously applied by a wide variety of modern writers and artists. It was a major influence on George Lucas and his first Star Wars trilogy, Joseph Campbell subsequently becoming Lucas’s mentor and living on his Skywalker ranch. One of my clients looked at me soon after we began our coaching relationship four years ago and said: “What you’re really doing is training us to be Jedi Knights.” How right and intuitive he was!

Another popular hero is Neo in The Matrix. A very unwilling hero to begin with, common to most heroes at this initial stage. We hear the call to adventure, but we fight it. It’s either too scary, too inconvenient and/or it will upset others. So, like Neo, we mind our own business and keep our heads down and get on with our lives. But, like Neo, the call gets louder, and more things happen to disrupt our lives and push us on our journey. The more we resist the worse it gets, until finally, battle weary and ego battered, we surrender and unconsciously accept the call as the only way forwards.

And that’s the point: to grow into psychologically healthy adults, to widen our horizons, our minds and our hearts, we have to embark on that journey and become the hero of our own life…yes, I hear the wince!...but who else will champion us if we don’t? And this is not about becoming a highchair tyrant with a fragile, narcissistic ego, taking up all the oxygen and elbowing everyone out of the way. A true hero has deep humility, respect, courage and a genuine openness to learn from and with others: helping to create a world-wide web of heroes!

So, what do I mean by the sub-title ‘leaving home to come home’? The poignant truth is we can never really return home. We might physically go back to our original home, but, if we have been genuinely open to embracing the new land/s and people, we are not the same person who left. Like Odysseus, our many adventures will have radically changed us. We have gone through many abyss and revelatory experiences, and seen too much, both in the new land and also from a distant and different perspective of our homeland. We can never unsee:

‘We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods…’

The Return of the Magi: T.S Eliot

We are all searching for home, that safe harbour, but our true home is not simply a physical place: it is an ever-unfolding emotional, spiritual and psychological voyage, a beautiful ebb and flow of tranquil, loving harbours and breathtaking oceanic adventures, a life-long quest to return home to who we are truly meant to be.

Hannah Elizabeth Greenwood