There are many people who have great difficulties in carrying out an adequate process of adult autonomy and establishing subsequent mature and healthy relationships.
How does one differentiate themselves from their family system? There we have created ourselves as beings with a unique personality and the roots have grown that will give us psychic support for the rest of our lives. And even more pertinent would be to ask ourselves, does anyone manage to differentiate themselves completely? It is not easy to answer this, but it is there are levels of differentiation that make us more or less capable of detaching ourselves and becoming “relatively autonomous” beings, along with others that extend to other generations and do not even end in one life. So some will have it sucked, while others will have to penetrate the world of madness to try it, and between them, there is the majority of human beings, “neurotiquillos” who fight every day with their demons. internal and try to discover who they want to be in life.
Why should we differentiate ourselves from our family?
Differentiating is a great effort of acceptance, of forgiveness, of de-idealization of parents, of working with anger. But if one thing is clear, according to Canevaro, it is that freedom is not given by the most affectionate parents in the world! The empty nest (the moment when children leave home to embark on their own path) is one of the most traumatic moments in the life cycle. Today’s society makes very visible everything that parents do to support their children, however, it does not prescribe what children invest of themselves in supporting their parents, therefore ceasing to invest in their own lives. Children exercise a silent support function, which makes their subsequent differentiation difficult.
Alfredo Canevaro, a great family therapist, whom I had the opportunity to see, talked about how he helps people in their individuation processes through their families of origin. For him, it is necessary to return to the family of origin to leave better. A healthy separation It is only achieved if there has been a union before.
To explain it, he compares this human process with the flight of cormorants, sea birds that, before embarking on their final flight, regress to previous phases of their development. In their evolution as independent beings they go through five leaps or stages, in which at the beginning of each leap, they regress to more childish ways of acting, and then progress and take the last leap towards their autonomous life
Likewise, another great similarity of this psychic process with the plastic capacity of the organism to react to the disease, making the tissues regress to less differentiated phases of development, which enable their regenerative capacity. And this “recreating again what has been destroyed” can also be applied to the psychic sphere, so that the personality of the individual can be remade.
The return to the family of origin is symbolized with the metaphor of the backpack. As a parent, what three things would you leave your child to take with them in their backpack to take your own path, three things that you are proud of and that you want them to keep about you and that can be useful to them. And as a child, what three things about yourself would you leave to each of your parents so that they can help them when you leave?
As a daughter I would leave a very valuable message to parents:
A child is a pure unpredictability. One does not know what he will become, what he will bring back, and precisely for that reason, one must accept it. Otherwise one would live only half, one would live like someone who does not know how to swim and splashes along the shore, even though the true sea is where there is depth.
