Q. How can family-of-origin work help me and my relationships?

A. Your question reminds me of a cartoon I show in some of my brain-function seminars. It pictures a car stopped in front of a giant road map. There is a large dot on the map, beside which are written the words, "you are here." The driver’s face shows stunned disbelief. We chuckle even as we sigh. Not very helpful to a traveler, is it?

In a similar way, it is difficult to develop a map for the rest of your life if you don’t know where you’ve been. Without that knowledge, many individuals spend their lives metaphorically driving around in circles. As Winston Churchill said, the further backward you look, the further forward you can see. This does not suggest that we are to live in the past any more than we are to live in the future. We need to know where we’ve come from, identify where we are going, and live in the present.