Summary of The Origins of You by Vienna Pharaon: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

By Willie M. Joseph

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of The Origins of You by Vienna Pharaon: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

 

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Vienna Pharaon's The Origins of You is a guide to understanding and overcoming wounds from our Family of Origin, the foundation of how we relate to others, ourselves, and the world around us. It helps us understand our family and framework, examine what worked and didn't, and rewire our programming to improve our relationships and lives. It doesn't matter if you have loads of memories from childhood, or struggle to remember anything at all, what matters is your willingness to look inside yourself and your determination to find a new way forward.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Feb 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215977347

Willie M. Joseph

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MY FAMILY OF ORIGIN AND YOURS

I was five years old when a rupture in my family left me with a wound that would dictate the course of my relationships for years to come. It has taken me years of hard work to see the impact of what happened and to actively take control of who I want to be in relationships, valuable lessons I've learned that I will share with you in this book. My story begins with a beautiful sunny day in the summer of 1991, when I heard my father's raised voice from behind the closed bedroom door. He shouted at my mother to pack a bag and we were leaving. We picked up my maternal grandmother and went to the Jersey Shore, where I played in the waves, built castles in the sand, and probably convinced my mom to stop for ice cream on the way home.

When we got to my grandma's house, we settled in, unwinding after a day in the sun, when the phone started to ring. The most important details in this text are the events leading up to the call from the caller ID. The caller ID revealed who was on the other end of the line, and the family ran over to the neighbor's house. The neighbor opened the door to two angry men and a couple of police officers, who banged on the front door, circled the house, and tried to catch a glimpse of any movement inside. My mom and I hid in the closet with her, feeling terrified and unsafe.

Throughout the incident, we remained, my mom and me, stock-still, hand in hand, in the closet. My own safety wound was born and I had no idea how long I would remain trapped in that moment. My parents tried their best to protect me from their rage, but the system they called home was crashing and burning. I took on the role of peacekeeper in an attempt to put out the fire and keep the family functioning, but the long-term effects of taking on this inappropriate peacekeeper role and of mistakenly putting all my efforts into making everything okay would take years to unpack. I learned to shapeshift, shrink, minimize, maximize, and distort myself and my experiences all in the name of pleasing.

My safety wound remained unaddressed and, repeatedly reinjured, continued to unconsciously direct my life. My fear of being controlled, my people-pleasing and need to be worthy, and my cool-girl, on-top-of-everything persona made it impossible for me to reveal how I really felt or ask for any of my needs to be met. When I first started therapy, I was convinced that the issue I needed to work on was improving communication and conflict in my relationships. However, when I began to explore myself through the lens of my family of origin, I realized that my way of being and existing had had an enduring effect on me. My attempts to avoid pain and keep myself safe were having the exact opposite effect, as I was tamping down conflict only for it to reemerge in other places. The most important details in this text are that it doesn't have to be this way, and that our origin stories can be the road map to our healing.

The author shares their own stories and the stories of many others they've worked with, with the aim of helping them explore their own origin stories, naming their wounds, making the connection between those wounds and their unhealthy behaviors, and ultimately learning how to create and maintain healthy relationships in their life right now. This book will teach how to look beyond the presenting problem, the problem that you come to therapy to resolve, and explore and connect with the origins of your beliefs, behaviors, and patterns, and the way your family of origin contributed to them. Understanding your origin wound and the long-standing destructive patterns it leads to, will go a long way to addressing conflicts and behaviors that trouble you today. Origin healing work is an integration of family systems work and psychodynamic theory to help individuals and couples heal from past relationships. It is based on Integrative Systemic Therapy and looks for how our present-day behavior connects to the family systems in which we grew up.

It requires understanding and awareness of the origin wounds that have a tight grip on us, and naming them is the first step toward healing. In part 2, we will explore a specific wound's origins and the destructive ways you learned to cope with it, and then read some healing stories. The Origin Healing Practice is a four-step process that involves naming the wound, witnessing, grieving alongside of it, and pivoting to make long-lasting changes so that you don't keep repeating destructive patterns in your adult relationships. It is also about finding a path forward where you can live out what you know and reclaim what has been taken with compassion, understanding, and empathy for yourself and others. There will be prompts, exercises, and guided meditations to help you do the work as you go.

The most important details are that this work is not about throwing parents, caretakers, or any of the adults who served as parental figures under the bus, but rather to acknowledge and name our experiences without minimizing or invalidating them. It is important to remember that our caregivers, too,