In light of the recent holidays and getting together with family members, Sherry and Rob talk about family systems and hierarchy. They give some strategies to help deal with any emotional angst of re-entering your family of origin.

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Episode Transcript

Rob Walling:

Went home to California for the holidays. Minneapolis is a bit cold right now. In fact I think with windchill it was -26 today and so for the past, what nine or ten days we were staying in Santa Cruz and then in East Bay and we saw a bunch of old friends and a bunch of old family.

Sherry Walling:

Old family? I’m sure your mother is offended that you said that.

Rob Walling:

I was just saying that as a joke.

Sherry Walling:

Yaka, yaka. Yeah, so like 65 degrees when you’re a Californian is like, cold to be at the beach but when you’ve been in Minnesota for a while that’s a totally fine temperature to be at the beach.

Rob Walling:

Well you and our youngest were in wetsuits ’cause we packed our wetsuits. So we never check bags right, that’s our thing. We have small bags, we carry ’em on, but we had four wetsuits that we wanted to bring, and we checked the bag for that and you and our youngest were in the water, in Santa Cruz, in essentially end of December and the water was cold. But you boogie boarded for extended periods of time.

Sherry Walling:

It wasn’t that cold once you got moving. And it’s just so fun, and it’s this … it’s something that he and I love to do together, so I think a good wetsuit is a very good investment if you like to play in the water, in the Pacific.

Rob Walling:

Yeah, so that was fun. It was fun to get back to California for a bit and see family and that’s what this episode is about. It’s about post holiday recovery, but more than that it’s about family systems, and it’s about how to think about as you get older, you know, when you revisit and see family members or you know, our brothers, sisters, your parents. When you see them it’s pretty often that you revert back to kind of being a kid. And that’s what we’re gonna talk about today, because it’s easy to fall into kind of the traps or the tropes of where you were when you were 15. And there’re plusses and minuses to that, and so we have a syn theoretical band, that’s the cool part of today, is like you’ve put together an outline as a trained clinical psychologist, who has studied this and who has experience in learning about family systems and the research on it.

 

And then we also have some very specific coping skills that you and I have developed to kind of get out of the house and have some alone time, especially if you’re an introvert, to be able to feel fulfilled. Because when there’s a lot of people around it’s often easy to get overwhelmed and to not give yourself time and space to basically debrief and mellow out and then come back more energized.

Sherry Walling:

Yeah, we probably should have recorded this episode before the holidays, that would have been more helpful to people, but I guess one of the values of this conversation is to normalize if you feel a little bit like your world has been rocked after spending time with family over the holidays. Even if you have the best family, that you just love and you get along with really well, it can be pretty tricky to re-engage with your family for a long period of time, a