Understanding Prescribed Roles In Family of Origin via Jungian Individuation

Who are you in the context of your family of origin? ... Were you the golden child? The black sheep? The child carer? The conflict-avoidant middle child?

💡Carl Jung brought to light the idea of “Individuation;” the process of stepping into an adult role and the invocation of identity outside the boundaries and limitations of your prescribed family role.

Individuation involves the integration or coming together of all the internalised archetypes of your identity. Making friends with your inner enemies in a sense.

All the roles that have been projected upon you by others in your developing years require a level of understanding, analysis and acceptance.

At the very same time and perhaps more importantly, the polite rejection of what others deemed your conclusive role in life is mandatory.

Family psychology is complex.

We would all like to think we are above or beyond our infant years. That archetypes don’t apply to us. That they’re far too simple or cliched to explain us.

Truth is, for better or worse, we are not.

We have all spent many many years as members of families, institutions and social circles, playing hard-wired roles that were lazily dished out to us by those too busy or uninformed to think about them as consequential.

Old habits die hard.

Educational institutions are an interesting foundation. If at school for instance, you were ascribed a role of the class clown, the high achiever, the sporting hero or back row trouble maker, chances are you’re struggling in adulthood to rewrite that narrative to suit who you’ve become.

Within the family, eldest child, middle, youngest or only child roles are deeply embedded in our subconscious story. As are step child and adopted child roles.

Years of repetition and the circuits built to keep those familial machinations in motion are hard to break.

There is a primitive comfort in the familiar.

It’s frightening to imagine how “circuit breaking” may effect the smooth flow of the ritualised and established family system.

Reluctance to mess with the hornet’s nest is common. Which is why therapists exist. To minimise damage and to help manage the paradox of needing to be part of and attached to something (family/community) that you also need to disengage from in pursuit of a satisfied life (individualism / identity). It’s tricky stuff.

With some committed work and guidance from a trained professional, we can disentangle ourselves from the unconscious biases formed within and engage in a contract of self formation.

We can, in other words, become ourselves.

Jung often represented the self as a circle or mandala. A full circle.

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Bringing the conflict between unconcious role-playing and conscious decision making into awareness and accommodating them with eyes wide open is an aspirational achievement of the self actualised.

Jungian philosophy works hand in hand with the therapeutic IFS model I work with (namely, Internal Family Systems).

To gain insight into and even befriend our often internalised or dysmorphic parts and our role in the family of origin is a critical part of Individuation and self-finding. And after the difficult years in our 20s and 30s in which we grapple to break away from our family in order to break down those expectations, most people find that - like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz - the path of Individuation invariably leads right back home, where you can reintroduce yourself to your family of origin as...yourself. Your actual self. You doing you.

There are many reasons why this may not be as easy as it sounds.

But there are far more reasons why it is the only emotionally feasible way forward.

- Paul Medew
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