Existential Psychology

Family Values

By  | 

Imagine for a moment that you were accidentally switched at birth. A French couple had been living and working in the United States for a while and were now waiting for their baby to be born before moving back to Paris. You were taken across the Atlantic and raised in France. Think about some of the ways you would be different from how you are now.

It’s quite jarring to consider how much of your personhood is dependent on variables completely outside of your control. You were thrown into this world without your knowledge or consent at a historical moment and in a geographical location and these factors have exerted a profound effect on your development.

I think one of the most important results of consciously realizing how your culture and your upbringing have influenced your prescribed ways of thinking and feeling is that you more readily accept values and ways of being that are different from your own. Many people say things like “I was raised to believe so and so,” stating it with pride and the conviction that their way is the only way, but this is an illusion and proof of an unexamined life.

One of the rather nefarious reasons that parents work so hard to instill values in their children is that they are unconsciously working on an immortality project. If their offspring thinks, feels, and relates in the same way that they do, then in a way they get to live on.

This is why blind acceptance of your values and how you were raised can be a major detriment to your own happiness. Imagine a pizza menu with all kinds of different pies to choose from. They are all equally good in their own unique ways. Yet you decide, without ever having tried anything else, that the Hawaiian is the only one for you. You order it every single time and obstinately believe all the other pizzas are inferior, although in practice you know nothing about them. People would think you were crazy yet blind adherence to cultural and family values is the exact same thing.

From an existential point of view differentiation is one of the most important life tasks. This means growing away from what you have been taught and towards who you really are. It doesn’t mean completely discarding the values that are important to you or the  lessons that your parents and your culture have taught you, but it does mean viewing them more objectively and deciding whether they truly fit. Differentiation is anxiety provoking because it entails uncertainty. But it means that you get to decide upon a set of values that let you become who you really are.

Related posts:

  1. Overly Emotional If you have ever been called overly emotional you’d do well to think long and hard about the comparative psychology of the person who leveled this accusation against you. Because it’s quite possible that your emotional apparatus is working just fine while it’s this other person whose emotional apparatus is malfunctioning. While those who keep […]...
  2. Autobots And Decepticons Talking about the Transformers movies with kids and adolescents is an excellent way to set a positive trajectory for counseling right from the beginning. Most children have seen the movies and they can relate in an archetypal way to some of the existential themes and to traits of the main characters. The trick is to […]...
  3. Depression And The Competitive Attitude Separating normal from abnormal is, for most people, a question of which norms and values their particular cultural group embraces and which norms and values their particular cultural group disavows. They take it as a given that one dominant set of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors derived from the norms and […]...
  4. The Devil And Temptation Let’s take it as a given in this article that the main characters in myths and religious stories are personifications of human struggles, they expose underlying truths of human existence in a way that can be more easily understood by the people. So for example when you hear the remark ‘He’s the devil personified’ it’s […]...
  5. Patience And Complacency Complacency is the evil twin of patience. The belief that you’re just being patient is the perfect rationalization for the complacent attitude, letting you off the hook from the intellectual, emotional, and physical strain of kicking it into high gear. You can tell yourself you’re working hard enough and that things will eventually come together. […]...
  6. Authenticity And Values Life problems are rationalized on various plausible grounds in order to escape conscious awareness of the painful truth behind what’s actually causing them, which can simply be boiled down to living a life that feels inauthentic. We would define authenticity as having the courage to isolate and unfold one’s unique potentialities and using the values […]...
  7. Is Guilt Productive? Defining Conscience Conscience and guilt are inextricably linked. When we act in ways that go against our conscience the adaptive outcome is guilt. The first complicating factor is to decide if by ‘conscience’ we mean unthinking obedience to cultural norms and values or a nuanced personal ethical system developed through years of thought, self-reflection, and […]...
  8. Positive Side Of Obsession The word obsession has mostly negative connotations. We picture a crazy stalker, a workaholic, ritualistic hand washing, or a barrage of unwanted thoughts that won’t go away. But there’s a positive side of obsession too. Dedicating all your attention and energy to a discipline is the only way to achieve mastery over it, and this […]...
  9. Parenting And Control A powerful psychological motivation to produce and raise offspring, even though it’s not always consciously recognized, is the immortality project. Childrearing provides the unique opportunity not only to insure the continued survival of one’s own DNA but also to implant certain norms, values, and taboos for living, to pass on certain ways of being. It […]...
  10. Existential Isolation You started your life physically connected to another organism. While you lived in the womb for around nine months you knew nothing of loss, sorrow, or loneliness. Your biological state of being made you feel connected because you were connected. Even for the first two years of life you did not have to worry much […]...
  11. What To Do When Encountering Resistance To Your Growth If you’re in the process of growth you’ll surely encounter resistance from the people around you, even friends and family members who purport to really care about you. This is because growth implies change and a change to any part of the interconnected social system ends up impacting the whole system. In other words your […]...
  12. Existential Isolation And Human Connection In existential circles it’s often said that no two people have ever sat in the same room. This is because our own unique life histories and genetic makeups color the way we perceive the world around us so that the same objective data point is interpreted differently by me than it is by you. This […]...
  13. Parenting and Power The feeling of power can be intoxicating. Everyone has heard the expression ‘Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely’. The relationship between parent and child automatically creates a complicated power situation since your children cannot and should not be in charge. Many parents wonder how to deal with this intrinsic power in a psychologically healthy way. […]...
  14. Make Your Learning Experience Playful When it feels like labor we’re filled with dread during the lead up and we hate the actual experience as our psychic and physical energy quickly seeps out of us before leaving us unhappily exhausted. If we can find a way to avoid a similar experience in the future we will. When it feels like […]...
  15. Abuse And ‘Us Against The World’ A common predicament victims in abusive relationships face is increasing isolation from friends and family members. Abusers find it easier to accomplish their agendas when their victims’ trusted confidants are nowhere to be found and therefore unable to suggest alternate narratives that could cast doubt upon the manipulative narrative gaining traction, a manipulative narrative where […]...
  16. Attitudinal Values On an episode of Futurama, Bender the robot is acquitted of various crimes because his lawyer is able to successfully argue that he is only following his programming so he cannot be responsible for his actions. If he has no free will how can he be held accountable for what he does? His friends expect […]...
  17. Ambivalence Around Cultural Norms And Values Ambivalence occurs any time we hold simultaneous, contradictory thoughts or feelings about the same thing. The result is painful psychic conflict, a sort of confused hostility and resentment that most of us end up directing towards some external entity when in actuality it’s our own problem to sort out. That psychic pain will never go […]...
  18. Family Constellation While in the process of improving your life you are probably going to experience push back from the people around you. Ironically it is those closest to you, particularly family members, who are most likely to stand in the way of your growth. They don’t have it out for you, and if asked they would […]...
  19. Unhealthy Family Systems In unhealthy family systems we usually find one member of that family identified as ‘sick’. This is the person who has the problem, the person who is bringing the rest of the family down, the person who needs to get help. And this person usually is constantly getting into trouble of one sort or another. […]...
  20. Working Through Family Estrangement To Stay or to Go Some highly destructive, abusive situations call for the complete rupture of the relationship, and in these cases having the courage to cut off should be celebrated. Because the paradox is that while in relatively healthy relationships it’s easier to move on than to dig in and work things out, in unhealthy […]...
Related Items