PART II * Chapter 7: The family ocean

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Being born is like being kidnapped.

And then sold into slavery.

 ~ Andy Warhol

An old proverb tells us that fish will be the last creatures to discover water.

Makes sense, right? 

Water is the only environment fish know.  So, to fish, water is simply a given, something to be taken for granted and ignored.

Human beings are like that.

Except the water we take for granted is family.

By family I don’t mean just the group of people around us when we’re born and raised.

I mean an emotional environment, and a particular way of perceiving, thinking, feeling and acting. 

We depend on family, not just for physical survival and emotional feeding, but for our sense of what the world is and how we’re supposed to function in it.

Family is the psychological sea in which we swim, the only reality kids know.

So kids have no choice but to adapt to it and absorb it, to carry it inside themselves wherever they go.

And even when what we absorbed causes problems – makes us unhappy or sick, for example – we usually don’t think to step back to question it.

Since it’s impossible for a child — and, sadly, most adults — to see family objectively.