Family

Family is where your oldest patterns live, because it's where they were installed.

You can be a competent adult everywhere else and feel twelve years old within ten minutes of arriving home. That isn't weakness. It's programming.

Working with family means holding two truths: people did their best, and their best sometimes hurt you. Both can be fully true. You are allowed to love them and limit access; allowed to understand why it happened and still decide it stops with you.

Compassion with edges — love that doesn't require self-abandonment.

Waiting for an apology that may never come before allowing yourself to heal.

• Name one family pattern you repeat, and choose one interruption of it.

• Decide your limits before the visit, not during it.

• Give the grief of the family you didn't have somewhere to go — write it.

• What role was I assigned, and am I still playing it?

• What do I keep hoping will be different?

• What did I need that I can now give myself?

The Ancestral Connection and Inner Child subjects; Apache Tears and Rose Quartz; the Six of Cups.