Many of my clients are misfits. Sometimes openly, sometimes secretly.
Hardly any of them really like it.
They are the first in the family to go to college. The first to have no children. The first who didn’t settle before her 30th, who broke off several relationships, decided not to get married, went to college, or not. Broke with the church, became a buddhist, or a reiki master, or an anarchist. Or she first did everything according to expectations, but then turned everything upside down after her 40th (divorce, giving up career, coming out – you name it)
I myself have a lot of those misfit check marks.
And where on the one hand you can sometimes feel like a real warrior, it is also damn lonely.
Your family doesn’t understand you. Or they judge you. Or they are afraid that things will never work out for you and constantly give you unsolicited advice.
For some, things have really turned sour, resulting in complete lack of contact, or at least connection.
It hurts. And you may wonder if it’s all worth it.
And at the same time: you feel you have no choice.
Because you are being true to yourself. Where you might not have been for years, at some point it started to dawn on you. Those radical decisions (I‘ve had my share!) sometimes feel like a leap off a cliff – with a very uncertain outcome. And yet you had to do it.
Because the outsider, the misfit, has a crowbar function. It stops with you. The codes passed down in the family for generations. The laws, the norms, the prohibitions.
That’s a super important task.
Often, we’re talking intergenerational trauma that you are halting – whether you are aware of it or not.
Well, that’s nice! you might say. Lucky me! I take one difficult decision after another, go to the absolute depths, and no one wil ever thank me for it!
No. Because for family members who have not yet reached that level of awareness you are a much too difficult mirror to look into.
So stop looking for confirmation.
What you can do:
1. Know that there are a lot of crowbar-women around, who feel and experience the same as you
2. Find them, find support from each other (are you in my Facebook group yet?)
3. Don’t make it unnecessarily difficult for yourself: seek help for yourself if your road becomes hard at times. Sometimes just one conversation can light your path.
