There is a rich lode of stories that you can tap into quickly both for their historical content and for what they tell you about how members of your family wanted their young to be. These are “family stories.”

There is a rich lode of stories that you can tap into quickly both for their historical content and for what they tell you about how members of your family wanted their young to be. These are “family stories.”

Mine Your Family Stories for Insights to Your Relationships

Family stories come down to us in many forms. Sometimes they are full-blown stories with a beginning, a middle and an ending. They carry with them a clear sense of what they are about. That is, they have a moral which it is easy now for you to understand how your family members were imparting this lesson. Other times, however, family stories prove to be as simple as “My father once met a man who had a thumb and five fingers on one hand, and he played the recorder well.” It’s hard to grasp right off what the moral of the story could be. The point I am making, however, is that family stories can be as short as one sentence.

Family stories are almost always about being taught how to live in our families and how our families believe it is appropriate to behave in the larger society. These are stories that were intended to shape us and give us the values of the speaker. They are part of a whole lot of tools parents make use of (consciously and / or unconsciously) to acculturate their young into the family culture and into the culture of the larger society. These stories have imparted some values that you will appreciate all your life and will express gratitude for. Not all values, of course, are good. There are values that you may spend the rest of your life working to get rid of.

Let’s look at stories that are told about and around the circumstances of your birth. You may have heard comments like:

• “Oh, there was a big snowstorm that night!
• “I just spat her out.”
• “He just wouldn’t come.”

These stories have shaped you in some way: they are perhaps revealing of that person’s relationship to you and perhaps of your family’s relationship, too. Boys may more often be told about how hard and painful their births were while girls are reminded about how sweet they were. If you pay attention to how you feel when you hear or remember these stories, you may have an insight about your relationship to your family and your family’s relationship to you.

These stories are also about the person who was telling the story. (Why have they chosen to remember these particular details among all the details that could be remembered?)

Family stories go two ways. You yourself tell stories about your parents and grandparents in order to understand them – or, at least, to place them within an order of things that you can understand without being overly challenged. For instance, it is easier to accept Uncle Jim as an eccentric than it is to realize that his different values may, in fact, be healthier than those of society at large and therefore call you to make changes you don’t want to make.

Action steps

1. Look at your memory list and recall one family story for each of 10 items. You may be surprised to discover that some of what you have already written was actually a family story rather than your own remembered experience. Make notes of each of these stories so that you can write them down later.
2. Write a story you tell about your parents. Be aware of your point of view and of your interpretation make a list of what the story tells about you and another of what it tells about your parents. Which list is longer? What in your story says overtly that your parents were and what says it?
3. How are the stories about your mother different from those about your father?
4. Whenever you write, pay attention to how writing and remembering your stories makes you feel.