This Holiday Season - Hold Your Peace - Energy Healing Institute

I was the youngest of 4 in my family, and somehow also managed to be the rebellious child. I broke all the rules for everyone who had already left and moved out of the house! I know, kind of backwards. But hey – I was doing what I did for me, trying to find my way forward as a free spirit in a house of mega boundaries and white knuckle level control.

Flash forward to my 40’s, and a holiday dinner at my parent’s home in Connecticut. They’d retired, left behind the house we grew up in, and built the retirement home of their dreams in a beautiful little town in the Northwest Hills. As we sat around the dinner table, my youthful rebellious antics became the topic of conversation. I had a middle-school aged son, a husband who I adored, a home in Maine, a successful career. One would not have labelled me a ‘rebel’ at that point in my life.

However, as I sat at the table, feeling skewered by the stories and the references to who I once was (in their opinion, of course), I had a very powerful insight that forever changed how I experienced the difficulties of being with my family.

Want to know what I realized?

Singling me out as the difficult one made my family feel better about themselves, their choices, their lives.

If I chose not to react, not to engage, not to fight back, they were left with themselves.

I could hold my presence. I could hold my peace.

While some of their remarks stung…likely by design…I held my peace, literally. Held. My. Peace. I did not jump in and defend, I did not slide into an old role. I did not attack or tell stories about any of their antics. I held my peace. In my heart, in my mind, in my energy field.

Role-ing Home for the Holidays

There’s no place like ‘home’ to stir and serve up the behaviors, patterns, themes that were enacted in earlier days. Families are stockpots of stories and memories that can become firebombs in very short order.

I’ve listed a few fairly common family system roles below. Can you identify with any of them?

perpetual peacemaker
good son
constant caretaker
rowdy rebel
dutiful daughter
rule breaker
troublemaker/instigator
designated patient
troubled child
neglected child
performer/perfectionist
needy clinger

The family is the place where roles are created and reinforced through its own system of rules and code of conduct. Roles are not often swapped – the dutiful daughter is rarely going to emerge as the rowdy rebel. Yet, it’s possible to embody multiple roles, for example both the dutiful daughter and the peacemaker. Or both a designated patient and the good son.

At the table, with my parents and siblings, hearing the taunts and tales while holding my presence and my peace was a powerful moment. I was long emancipated, well-educated, successful, the parent of a fabulous young son, yet the system needed me to step back into my rebellious role to create safety and security in their own roles. If I remember correctly, no one abstained from sharing a story about me as a young person.

Have you been there? I’m betting you know exactly what I’m talking about!

Your Energy Knows its Place

In my practice, my clients share stories of holidays past, historical difficulties amongst siblings, the challenges of relating as adults to their parents — who may lack adulting skills of their own. They find themselves instantaneously taking up the mantle of a role they once carried, feeling salt rubbed in old, buried wounds. Holidays rarely resemble Hallmark commercials do they?

Here’s the thing:

Your energy field has well worn grooves that trigger your ‘role programming’, casting you nearly immediately into your old, familiar place, with all the old, familiar feelings, grudges and wounds.

As you prepare for this year’s holiday season, imagine doing things differently.

Imagine not playing your role.

Instead, Hold Your Peace.