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You may feel like an outsider in your family, but maybe you’re actually a lineage healer, and that means that you’re taking a stand for healing the pain. You’re taking a stand for supporting the children in the family to grow up healthy and whole. You are taking a stand for them not having to give up parts of themselves to be acceptable and welcome. You are taking a stand for the welcome and belonging of the child that still lives in you. You may feel like an outsider in your family, but that just reflects your certainty about how you feel. You know what you don’t want. You can see it happening. You don't want to go along with how things are. You’re sure of this. Even if you’re not sure what it looks like to do it differently. You may feel like an outsider in your family, but you wonder what else is possible. You wonder what freedom from pain would make room for in your life. You sense that there is more connection, more care, more freedom, and more belonging available. You wonder what life could be like without the repetition of the painful behaviors, avoidance of responsibility, and poor coping mechanisms that are the root of the shared family pain. You may feel like an outsider in your family, but you feel tenderly toward your child self that understood the world to be harsh, uncaring, and critical. You don’t want to push her away anymore. You are sensing her need for comfort, acceptance, and care. You really want to show up for that, to mother her now, in ways she wasn’t before. You suspect there is much to be gained by seeing her in a new light. You may feel like an outsider in your family, but you find that you keep repeating the same sorts of relationship dynamics with other people. You’re figuring out that the early relationship training that happens in families runs deep, and that you need some new skills in order to have the kinds of relationships that you want. This is powerful. You are claiming that you want something other than what you were trained to have. You are getting in touch with your agency. You may feel like an outsider in your family, but you have begun to recognize and believe in your own value. You are starting to think that some of the things you grew up believing aren’t really true, aren’t really about you, aren’t yours to carry. You are finding that there is more room than you thought for you to figure out who you really are, and that maybe those who told you who you were early on weren’t correct. You may feel like an outsider in your family, and you may wish they would see what you see. But they might not want to. That only makes you feel like more of an outsider, and it brings up the grief. They can’t see what you see. They see the world differently.  It means that a unique part of you is alive and well inside of the training you’ve had. While your family of origin tried to make you into someone else, you know that they’re wrong in some way, even if you can’t articulate it. You are a lineage healer. And it can also feel really hard to acknowledge this. It is the grief of being unseen for who you really are. It is the heartbreak of not being connected, of not belonging. All humans need connection, and not receiving it from the family you were born into is distressing.
Your grief is actually your compass. The grief points to the parts of relationships that are missing, the ways of being together that aren’t practiced, the family dynamics that feel upside-down and backwards. While it shows you clearly what is painful, hurtful, and where the loss is, it also shows you what is important to you. We do not grieve the things we do not care about. We do not grieve for what is unimportant to us. Grief shows us where we have longing, for something more, for being more. You may feel like an outsider in your family, but you are resisting being who they want in favor of being who you are. You are noticing what is important to you, what you do not want to live without. You are noticing the lack of attunement, where kindness is absent, how little compassion is held. And these are things you want in your life, things you’re willing to cultivate. That’s powerful. It’s befriending your agency. It’s claiming your birthright to be yourself. It’s claiming your position as a lineage healer, the one who will not repeat the harms of the past. And your grief is your compass. Let it show you what you care about, what is important to you — get clear on what you’re moving toward. What are your strongest values? What is important to you in relationships? What does your grief tell you about what you care most about?
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aybe you've started to see it. The way things were in your family that weren't quite right. The criticism that came disguised as love. The needs that went unmet so consistently you stopped knowing you had them. The ways you learned to make yourself smaller, quieter, less — just to keep the peace or earn a moment of warmth. Naming it is a big deal. It takes courage to look at what happened and call it what it was. To de-normalize the poor behavior, the lack of attunement, the criticism, or the violence that adults brought to our childhood. And, even more, to realize that other people relate to each other differently. To know that what pained you didn't happen to everyone. But then something unexpected happens. You name it — but nothing changes. The wound is still there. The patterns are still showing up in your relationships. The beliefs you thought you'd dismantled are still running in the background. And a voice somewhere inside starts to whisper: Maybe I'm too broken. Maybe this works for other people but not for me. Maybe I've wanted too much for too long and there's nothing left to want. I want to speak directly to that voice. Because it's lying to you. And I know it feels true — but that is just habitual thinking masquerading as your inner voice. Feeling true and being true are not the same thing. Naming the wound doesn't tame it. It was never supposed to.  Naming is the threshold. It's the doorway that lets you in — to a world of your own creation, a life built on your own terms. But walking through a doorway doesn't mean you've arrived. It means you've left the familiar behind and stepped into somewhere new.
And somewhere new is disorienting. That's not a sign that something is wrong. That's exactly what new feels like. I don't love the word "healing" because it implies the wound disappears. I don't think it does. What I think happens instead is that we grow into something else around it — something of our own design, made out of our own love. Something so much bigger and more beautiful than the wound that even if the scar remains, it no longer defines the landscape. You are not broken and unfixable. You are disoriented. And disorientation is navigable. What do we do when we find ourselves somewhere unfamiliar? We orient. We find landmarks. We get a map. Not the kind of map that tells you exactly where to go — that map doesn't exist yet, and that's okay. The old kind of map. The kind that shows you the lay of the land and gives you enough information to take a first step. In your inner world, orienting looks like this. You start by finding your “YOU ARE HERE” sticker. You ask yourself: What am I sure of about myself? What do I know matters to me? What am I absolutely certain I do not want? These questions aren't small. For someone who has spent years doubting their own perceptions, being asked what they know to be true is an act of reclamation. Let yourself answer slowly. Even one thing is enough to begin. From there you can start to move. Not toward a fully formed destination — you don't need that yet. Just toward something that feels more true than what you're leaving behind. What is drawing you? What was wanted or needed that was never fulfilled? What direction feels more like yourself? There are a couple of things worth knowing as you begin to move. The first is that without some awareness of what we're actually looking for, we tend to reach for a different version of the familiar. When I was a teenager I felt unseen, unloved, like no one cared about me. I moved from searching for this from my parents — to no avail — to looking for boys to love me. Without any understanding of what caring love actually looked like, I predictably fell into the hands of people who didn't make me feel cared for either. I wasn't going toward something new. I was just trying to solve the old problem with new people. This is why the orienting process matters. Not so you have all the answers, but so you have some sense that you’re moving toward what you want, rather than just away from what you don’t want. Often, our wounding impacts our ability to trust ourselves. This is an important reclamation that happens over and over along the way. This work in our inner world is mostly not linear. It’s in our best interest not to expect that it will be. Because when we’re navigating the world differently, and it feels new and unfamiliar, it’s easy to think we’re lost or going the wrong way. Others (who benefitted from our lack of trust in ourselves) will definitely try to tell us this. And, at the same time, it’s also true that people who love us may have more information in these realms than we do, and they can help guide us. It’s important to discern the difference between these two kinds of people in our lives. Listen to those who want for you what you want for you. But you still don’t have to follow their advice. And then we start moving. We make changes. We try things out, and because we started the journey in the realm of the unknown, we learn as we go. We start out in a direction and unexpected things happen. Sometimes we course correct, sometimes we keep feeling our way through, sometimes we grab a hand of a friend who’s traveling with us for now. Over time we build our resilience to the trial-and-error process of becoming. This is reclamation. This is becoming who you couldn’t be when you were small. It’s a wholeness that couldn’t have existed before this moment because it’s built from everything you’ve lived through. But it’s here now. You are not the exception to this. You are not too broken, too damaged, too far gone, or too much. You are someone who didn't get what they needed, who named that truth, and who is now standing at the threshold of something different. You are allowed to want more. The wanting is not the problem. The wanting is the beginning. Don’t forget to embrace it. Even if it isn’t done. Celebrate anyway. Enjoy anyway. Maybe that’s what feels like healing. Last fall I visited my extended family in Oklahoma. These folks were very different from my immediate relatives — looser, warmer in some ways, more sprawling. I liked the feeling of wider connection, the sense of what family could mean when it moves beyond the tight nuclear unit I grew up in. Since my mom died three years ago I've spent a lot of time thinking about family, obligations, connections, and belonging. What we owe each other. What we long for. What so many of us never quite received. This is pretty classic Forest Mother territory — so I guess it's no surprise that in the seasonal wheel of Landscape of Mothers, early fall is Forest Mother time. This time around I've been sitting with what family actually means to me, and who is available to create the kind of family I want. Not the family I was born into, but the one I'm still, at this point in my life, trying to build  One of my friends told me recently that "family" is a tough word for her. She fears being treated like family — it's not a good thing in her experience. I have real sympathy for that. I've had a hard road with family too. But I think something is coalescing for me around care and kindness and togetherness — a growing sense that family is less about blood and more about how we show up for each other.
And yet. Some part of my mind will probably always wonder if I belong with the people I'm with. I think that's what happens when you grow up as an outsider in your own family. The questioning becomes a kind of constant background hum. I sometimes feel envious of people who always felt that someone had their back, who had an uncomplicated sense of belonging to the people they were born to. That kind of grounding — being welcomed into a community as a baby, with many people wanting to see you grow and flourish — is something so many of us never had. We grew up under-mothered, even if we had parents who loved us. One or two people, no matter how devoted, can’t do what a whole village was meant to provide. I used to think the lack of belonging I felt said something about me. That I was somehow adrift, not right, needing to work harder at being the right kind of person. But all the trying I did failed to make me feel like I belonged. It just wore me out and made me wonder if I belonged anywhere at all. What I understand now is that the longing I felt — and still feel sometimes — isn't a personal failing. It's a signal. It's pointing toward something real that has been lost, not just in my family but in the broader culture. We have become more and more siloed. We live in smaller and smaller units, we are more socially isolated, and then wonder why we feel so untethered. The longing for belonging isn't weakness. It's the echo of what we were always meant to have. My daughter recently sent me a podcast about trees and how they share information. She had to listen to it for one of her college classes and she knew I'd like it. It's a Radiolab episode called Tree to Shining Tree, and it made me want to go sit in the forest and feel into the network that is a living forest. It's more than individuals, more than even families — it's the knowledge that connection itself is what makes community. Trees in a forest aren't just individuals standing together. They are deeply interconnected, sharing resources and information through vast root and mycelial networks. They warn each other of threats. They share nourishment across distances we can barely imagine. If you are a sensitive person you can go sit in the forest and almost feel it — the humming of movement underground, the sharing and communicating happening beneath your feet. The trees will notice you while you're there. They feel you. I think one of the quietly healing things about sitting in a forest is that you can feel seen, but in a way that carries no expectation or obligation to perform. You just get to be there. Received as you are. I heard somewhere that elephants look at humans as little fragile baby-like creatures. I don't know if it's true, but I love it. And I get the feeling trees do something similar — that they look down and say sweet things like "oh, she looks so tired, let's let her rest here" or "oh, what a darling little thing." That's what I imagine, anyway. And it makes me feel a little softer toward myself. A little more compassionate. For a moment, I feel gentle with myself in a way that's often hard to come by. Maybe that's what intact community was always meant to do. Not to fix us or require us to perform our worthiness, but to receive us as we are, and in that receiving, remind us that we belong. The forest does it effortlessly. And I’m so grateful to lay at her feet. |
Author: Jill CliftonHi, I'm Jill, creator of Landscape of Mothers. I'm here to talk about breaking family patterns of harm so that we can parent our children in ways that support them becoming fully themselves. I'm happy to have you here! Archives
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