| “I know exactly what nail to hit now – the exact “tic” has been named so it’s given me a lot to understand and piece together”. |
This is one of the best bits of feedback I’ve ever gotten on my work! It’s from one of the survey forms I got back after a week of doing Family Energetics readings for the 6 stepmoms who signed up for a free session. I loved doing these readings! It felt more like a week-long game of Whack-A-Mole than work – I just kept hitting the nail on the head over and over as they popped up, in this family and then in the next one. Beyond the fun of getting to drop my perceptions to clients new and old, I actually had what I’ll call a Meta-insight because it came from perceiving a common thread across the spectrum of families I looked at. My personal “aha” moment was this: In every family I looked at, I saw a distortion in how masculine and feminine energies are being managed. By both partners. I had never really thought about this before, but it all fell together for me and I wanted to share it with you as I make sense of it in real time. I actually have a feeling that distortion of masculine and feminine energy is not something limited to stepfamilies, but it doesn’t help that our “second-family” roles are so little understood and so unlike what we expect them to be. Here’s what I know: ☛ In the decades since women started juggling career and family, we’ve gotten more comfortable wielding masculine energy. ☛ And since men have started asking for and getting joint custody after a divorce, they’ve had to practice being both mom and dad in a way they might not have had to do before. ☛ As men and women, we all embody both masculine and feminine energies. This has nothing to do with what society says is “man’s work” or “woman’s work”. It’s about natural law (and, you know how I love natural law!), and how the human psyche is structured. This in turn affects how we tend to show up in relationship and in the larger family system. ☛ The element of “Leadership” in one’s personality is more fuelled by masculine energy. By contrast, the capacity for “Efficiency” actually draws on feminine energy. ☛ “Dreaming” (in the sense of intuiting a direction for yourself and deciding on it) is more of a feminine activity while “Providing” and “Delivering” on that dream lie in the masculine realm. Both men and women naturally take over any of those roles at any given time and yet there’s a delicate balance that goes out of whack when the partner who needs to be the leader in a family (by virtue of being the parent of one’s children) becomes intimidated by the efficiency of the other partner and abandons leadership. He stops feeling good about himself if he doesn’t see himself as the provider who delivers on his partner’s big dreams and desires. And if he doesn’t get confidence from his role as a spouse, he can’t fully trust in his innate ability to be the fountainhead of whatever his children require of him. He feels out of his depth and withdraws from the game. And because his partner loves him, she tries to make it all OK by filling in the blanks on her own. And the more she does that, the more he can’t take the required steps toward recovering his place. It all goes on under the radar. Nobody even notices what’s happening until the whole ship is listing badly and taking on water – and then they can’t understand what caused the problem in order to fix it. I’ll continue this with more about fixing it in Stepfamily Energetics Part Two. Meanwhile, if you missed out on requesting a reading and you’re just dying to know what I see going on in your family, hit reply and I’ll squeeze you in for a call. |
Essential Stepmom 