by Chris G Moon
By “genius” I am referring to your inherent giftedness experienced through your creative thoughts, words, or behaviour. When influenced by your genius, you will feel a deep sense of joy, serenity, and/or purpose that radiates out through your actions. Even if those actions are basically the same ones you have performed many times, your genius will inspire you to perform them in a uniquely creative way. When acting from Family Loyalties, you are following patterns, rules and beliefs that may have been necessary in the past, but now serve only to limit you. You pledged obedience to this code of thought and behaviour in order to ensure a place for yourself in the family. Stepping away from this code towards your essence can initially bring up intense feelings of betrayal that have reduced many people to tears.
In my work I have met people who are doctors, lawyers, bankers and politicians because they were loyal to what their family expected them to be. I have also met people in the same professions who are there because it is exactly where they want to be. There is a world of difference between the two kinds of professionals when it comes to inner peace and true success. But who loves their family more? The ones who freely chose their line of work typically seemed more at peace with—and often felt gratitude towards—their families. Those who chose their professions out of a sense of loyalty tended to be more ambiguous about their feelings towards their family.
Family Loyalties are as effective as dilemmas in keeping us stuck and unable to step forward in our lives. They differ only in the way they cause us to behave. Where a dilemma will have you bouncing back and forth between two options, Family Loyalties will have you behaving according to predetermined patterns.
If your choice of profession originated from the need to belong, and never came from your heart, your experience of work will probably be very mundane. Many people drink because their parent(s) drank, work blue-collar jobs because they came from a blue-collar family, or drive Ford because they were born into a “Ford Family.” Did these people choose their actions or professions consciously, or did it all come from an unquestioned sense of what they “should” do? The following examples of the impact Family Loyalties have on us come from participants of workshops I have facilitated in Asia and North America:
• A woman felt she had to choose a boyfriend that would meet with the approval of both her mother and father.
• A man complained that he had to take over the family business, even though he was very young and would have preferred to travel for a few years.
• A woman discovered that, because she took on the role of the “family slave”(taking care of household chores, raising the younger siblings, and going no further than grade school so both her parents could work and her brother could attend university), she tended to fall into a pattern of subservience in her important friendships and relationships. She never married, and was lost about what to do with her life.
• A man had a hard time breaking the habit of stopping off at the bar for a couple of martinis after work. He realized he was following a routine of his father and grandfather.
• A woman had the habit of speaking very quietly because, when she was growing up, she was discouraged from speaking too loudly or calling attention to herself in her family environment. She was also afraid to approach her boss for a raise because that would be asking for “special attention.”
My study of these Family Loyalties has led me to the awareness of the many ways I have imitated the “Moon behaviours” in my relationships—especially when I was unhappy. I could be angrily tight-lipped like my mother, and bitterly sarcastic like my father. Pretending not to care about a disappointment when it really hurt, avoiding social confrontations, worrying about money, being overly protective of the children, making a joke when feeling uncomfortable, silently pouting during the Power Struggles with my wife...I began to clearly see that the mannerisms and attitudes I employed closely resembled those that my mother, father, or siblings would use.
The problem with this is that I sink into these behaviours automatically, without even thinking about it. Instead of coming up with a creative, spontaneous, loving, and truthful response to a given situation, I slip into a pattern that I created from imitating other family members. How do you know when you are being governed by these false loyalties? A good rule of thumb is: if you are not expressing the giftedness of your true genius, if what you are doing is not creative or inspired, or if you are reacting to a situation without consciously choosing your response, you are most likely serving a Family Loyalty: doing whatever you’re doing in pretty much the same way it’s been done for generations (with a few personal variations of course).
There is an allusion to the unconscious origins of Family Loyalties in Judeo-Christian writings, concerning the sins of the father being visited upon the sons.71 It’s interesting to note that “sin” is a Greek archery term which means “missing the mark,” i.e. a mistake.72 Ergo if a parent makes a mistake, and does not correct it, the mistake gets passed on to the child, and the child’s child, etc., until someone finally hits the bullseye. It’s not unreasonable to conclude that we learned certain habits, purely because we imitated, rather than corrected, the misguided behaviours of our ancestors.
Even if you go through a phase of being “the problem kid” who is always rebelling against the status quo, asking inappropriate questions, and generally giving Mom and/or Dad trouble, your rejection of the “family way” can be just another way to be attached to it. Fighting against something strengthens it in your mind. I have talked to a number of clients who insisted that they were not bound by such false loyalties, and described behaviour in direct opposition to “the Family Way.” Upon a closer investigation into their family line, however, we always discovered an aunt, uncle or grandparent that rebelled in exactly the same way. The result was the same every time—they were still resisting their creative genius and relying on knee-jerk reactions to life situations in order to cope.
I would like to point out that, in researching the family influence, I have found in most cases—but not all—there were more helpful influences from the family than harmful ones, and the harmful ones did not have a permanent negative effect. Once you become aware that a self-harming action is actually a misguided behaviour you adopted from a family member, you can make a choice that is self-empowering and erases what might have been earlier perceived as a habit that you thought was an unchangeable part of you.
The meaning of the previous sentence becomes clear when your relationship is up against the wall, and the only thing that will carry you through is an unprecedentedly creative, intuitive response. Family Loyalties are essential to reinforcing the stagnation that you find at the Introspection stage, and it is the mediocrity that Family Loyalties encourage that can block you from seeing more creative possibilities for resurrecting a dead relationship. You may be able to see what is keeping you stuck, but will react to that stuckness only with familiar coping mechanisms.
Choosing the Truth can release you from this trap, creating a passage through the block to freedom; not only for yourself, but for your whole family as well. If one person can transcend a family pattern, it provides a path to freedom for all the others who are stuck in those same patterns.
When it comes to this process, I found encouragement to move out of the deadness of the “same old same old” by recognizing that I was not doing this only for myself. I realized that if I did not break the hold of my Family Loyalties, I would pass them on to my children. I began to suspect that this process ran much deeper than I could initially see. What if so-called “hereditary disease” was another aspect? What if these loyalties attracted specific problems that were characteristic of my family line? Did my D.N.A. determine certain mental, physical, and emotional predispositions, or did my Family Loyalties influence my D.N.A.? Did I want my children to take on such burdens if there was a way I could prevent them?
Besides my own kids, there were many other people stuck in simil
ar loyalties who would benefit if they could see a better way. The first time I applied this understanding was at a point in my marriage where I was seized by a sense of supreme discouragement about myself as a worthy husband and father. A problem occurred between my wife and I that would not go away, but instead grew so large that it pushed us into distant corners. I soon found my face pushed up against the wall of my Victim Prison, and I reacted by coping with it the way I had taught myself to cope when I was a child. Petulantly withdrawing from Su Mei, I shut myself into the bedroom.
Laying on my bed, considering the advantages of divorce, I began thinking about how much easier death seemed than living. I was suddenly struck by an image of myself in a room with no doors or windows. A large group of people followed me around as I kept feeling the walls, hopelessly looking for a way out. Closest to me were my children Harmon and Tara, watching me and imitating my every action as if to say “Dad will show us how to get out of here—he knows everything.” I looked around at the other people and realized that I was not alone in my despair, but that there were many of us with similar problems. We were all looking for a way out, struggling with the temptation to simply give up on ourselves—to give up on life. One day my own children would face problems so overwhelming that they would be tempted to give up too. But what if I could show them that you never have to give up on life?
I pulled myself off the bed, stood, and faced my pain of hopelessness and failure. Holding my children in my heart and thinking of the other people I had seen in my mind, I chose life. I refused to believe that this prison was real—my ultimate destiny—and I cried from my heart for the Truth.
A loving feeling came into my pain, and with it came an inspired idea to reach out to my wife through my hurt. I left my room, approached Su Mei, and apologized, telling her how important she was to me. While I was talking to her, I was letting go of any desired results. I simply said what my heart directed me to say, and then went to the kitchen to make dinner. By the next day the problem had cleared itself up—as problems often do when you just leave them alone—and my marriage was full of life and passion again.
I have spent a lot of time up against the wall. My blind attachment to Family Loyalties caused me to react to my problems according to familiar patterns that kept me going nowhere. Sometimes I quickly remembered to choose the Truth, while at other times I delayed for weeks before coming to the inevitable conclusion that only a creative, inspired response would release me from my situation. I am sure there will be many more opportunities to examine where my commitment lies, but of this I am also certain: Family Loyalties are not the Truth. They do not inspire a loving experience and therefore they are not true. I can free myself of them by asking for a creative response to my situation that only my soul can provide, because my soul is not chained to any false allegiances. I can confront the most important (often the most painful) feeling with all my heart, recognize that pain is not the Truth, and desire the Truth more than the suffering. I can remember the people at the wall with me, looking for an example of hope in this world, and I can choose for them.
Lastly, I can choose to value my partner more than any false loyalties, and take a step towards her in my heart. This possibility is often overlooked in relationships because the deadness that can often exist between the partners at the stage of Introspection, but for me it is the most immediate and effective response to the stagnation that Family Loyalties reinforce.
The stagnating deadness discourages loving feelings, and often leads one or both partners to believe that the love is gone and will never come back. All that is left to do is either leave, or cope with the deadness the way we learned to in our childhood. It is certainly true that the sentiment and need which we mistook for love has died; but real love cannot die, or else it would not be real love. If we prefer the sentiment and romance, as well as the other aspects of Glamourous love, we can always consider leaving the romantic graveyard of the Victim Prison and begin our search again for our “perfect mate.” But if we would prefer an experience of the love that comes from the soul, valuing our partner more than the deadness gives us that opportunity. How do you value him or her when things seem so hopelessly stuck? Want to. Want to more than anything else. Result equals intention.
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SACRIFICE
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“For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice.”
—Hosea 6:6
You can tell when you are in a state of sacrifice simply by exploring your feelings around two words: yes and no. If you are asked to do something and you feel too guilty to say no, or you are joyless when saying yes, you are probably being led into sacrifice by your guilt. In our childhood we took on a great number of sacrificial roles in an attempt to feel like a good person, thus nullifying the guilt that kept threatening to attack us. I’m sure I am not the only kid who assumed guilt for upsetting Mom or Dad. Many people felt that they were troublemakers, burdens, or destroyers of the family.
But where did I get the idea that my family was unhappy, and why was it my job to cheer them up? The answer to both questions is “guilt.” It doesn’t matter that the answer makes no real sense. I believed that my family’s unhappiness was my fault, and I also believed that I had to make up for causing their unhappiness (maybe this idea does not make sense to you, so let me give you an example: Have you ever been in a room or office where something was lost or stolen, and the way some people looked at you made you feel like you had to prove your innocence—even though you didn’t do it? Your defensiveness is irrational, but the guilt that causes the defensiveness is really there. Guilt doesn’t have to make sense for it to be effective). But the guilt debt never gets paid off. Most people live out their lives trying to heal their guilt through making sacrifices.73
When you reach the Introspection stage of relationships, you begin to question how much of your “giving” in the relationship comes from heartfelt desire, and how much comes purely from a sense of obligation. You feel the exhaustion of your sacrificial behaviour, and are confronted with the question of whether you have really been yourself throughout the time you’ve shared with your partner. If you do not want to be responsible for your actions, you will blame your partner for forcing you into that position; but if you are honest with yourself, you can see that your behaviour is only an adult version of your childhood sacrifices.
If you were the “hero” as a child who got the best grades, kept the house spotless, did all the cooking, or was a star on the track and field team, you’ll probably be the adult hero who gives the family all the best while doing the job of three people at work, never getting sick or run-down. Oh, and you’ll likely be the head of the P.T.A. and the Girl Guides or Boy Scouts too (maybe I’m exaggerating, but you get the idea).
If you were the “invisible child” who tiptoed around the house, never spoke too loud, and never caused a disturbance, you might in your adult life be inclined to avoid confrontations with your partner and make yourself unavailable at such times—reasoning, as you did when you were young, that your presence was the cause of the unhappiness and so disappearing would make everyone’s life easier.
If you were the sweet, adorable, charismatic, “charmer,” you might feel the obligation to always be sweet and cheerful when your partner is feeling down. It always worked on Mom or Dad!
If you were the “scapegoat” or “problem child,” you’ll act in a way that invites attack from your partner, allowing him/her to relieve frustrations by blaming you for his/ her misery. In the experience of righteousness your partner could feel better, and you could pay off your debt for being the cause of your partner’s—and family’s—misery.
Finally, if you were the “martyr,” you might sacrifice your physical, emotional or mental wellbeing, taking the problem into you and dying for it (if necessary). That way your loved one can forget his/her unhappiness while standing over your sickbed, or grave, and you can finally b
e together again—just like you tried to do with your family.
From the descriptions above you may catch a glimpse of yourself in one or more of the five major sacrificial roles outlined by Dr. Spezzano that most people choose as they grow up. People caught in other sacrificial patterns—such as “the nice guy,” “helper,” “silent sufferer,” “super achiever,” “Good Time Charley,” “entertainer,” “clown,” “chronically ill,” “misfit,” “strong, silent type,” “rogue,” “peacekeeper,” “pleaser,” “rebel without a pause,” to name a few—when acting out one of these sacrifices for their partners find that there is no true joy, fun, or peacefulness in the way they are giving.
Introspection allows you to realize that the sacrifices you make in your life are actually compensations for the “bad guy” that lurks underneath. To understand this better, I envision a model like this:
SACRIFICER
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TORMENTOR
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“BAD GUY”
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EMOTIONS
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FEELINGS (EMPTINESS)
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ESSENCE (SOUL)
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The tormentor is the part of your mind that keeps you in sacrifice, even when you are fed up with it, or burned out by the lack of fulfillment in your actions. This form of the Persecutor is a strong disciplinarian, using shame or threats of punishment and exclusion to keep you focused on the debt that you must pay before you can be forgiven. Just look at what happens when a sacrificer tries to change:
A friend of mine told me once of his attempts to climb out of his “quiet guy” tendencies. He would always allow his wife to dominate the conversation, even if he was not interested in what she was saying and wanted to change the subject. Whenever he attempted to step out of his role he felt frustrated, because he really didn’t know what he wanted to say. Eventually he decided that he could not win. If he kept quiet he felt used by his wife, who did not care what he had to say, but if he tried to speak out he found himself at a loss for words and felt foolish and inadequate.
