Family of Origin Culture: What We Bring To Every Relationship

JJ: Welcome to the With Counseling podcast. I’m JJ Blanford, therapist and founder of with Counseling. In today’s episode, we are going to talk how our family of origins, family culture impacts our relationships.

Currey: Yeah. And I think for me, this starts with thinking about marriage, but it really does impact every relationship we have. I think marriage may be the easiest way to sort of see this kind of coalescing, but when you have two people that are sort of ready to get married, one of the things that they don’t think about is how much the culture that the family that they grew up in, the way that their family works, the ins and outs of their family, affects the way that they think about relationships and the way that they operate in relationships.

JJ: Absolutely. And so I think I have talked before about how much I enjoyed doing post marriage counseling. I think premarriage counseling is really helpful and kind of helps people walk through some of big issue topics. But I have had the opportunity to work with couples in their first year or two of marriage as some of the little idiosyncrasies have come to light. And it is work that I thoroughly enjoy because I think there is so much about family culture that informs who we are in such a fundamental way. We don’t think about it as family culture.

Currey: 100%. It’s the water we swim in, right?

JJ: Yes.

Currey: We have no idea that we are acting in any specific way until we butt up against somebody else who doesn’t operate in the same family culture. Right?

JJ: Yes. And so I think there are big things about are we going to have children?

What kind of careers do the careers we want to pursue align with how we envision family to be?

How do we celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas?

Currey: Birthdays?

JJ: Well, but I don’t think birthdays are a big thing that people talk about a lot. I think things like Easter.

Currey: Oh, I see what you’re saying. You’re saying the big stuff is maybe.

JJ: The things we think we talk about. We don’t necessarily think about birthdays. We don’t often think about things like 4 July or Easter or.

Oh, well, my family always went to the lake for Memorial Day, so I just assumed that’s what you did on Memorial Day. Or I always envisioned we would send our kids to such and such summer camp or there are so many places that our family of origin impacts how we operate in relationship. I mean, again, yes, in marriage and also friendships of like, well, the way that my parents hosted friends at our home looked like this. So this is how you host friends in your home. And I think a lot of times when people come to see me, it’s because they’re having challenges in a relationship somewhere in their life. And so much of this, people don’t always say it. Some people do say, I want to know which way is right, and it is helping. My role, I believe, is helping people kind of navigate with the people in their life. How do we decide what is right? It’s not that one family of origin or the other had a better idea. It’s how do two people, whether romantic or platonic, friendship, who are trying to be in relationship, how do they reconcile these different ways of being?

Currey: Yeah, I think that’s good. And I think it’s something we just don’t think about. We carry those things with us and we operate in the world in a certain way and don’t realize we’re doing that sort of thing.

I know celebrating things are, like, really easy examples, though. But what about less easy examples? I’m thinking of something like how we fight or argue or address conflict in general. Maybe the way that we repair relationships to go back to an earlier episode. I mean, what are some of those, I don’t know, more emotional dynamics that we don’t realize?

JJ: Well, I think sometimes it’s really simple things I have often shared. I don’t know that I’ve ever told you this, so why not on a podcast?

Currey: That sounds perfect.

JJ: It’s only been 20 years, but I have talked about how we loaded the dishwasher. When we finally got a dishwasher a couple of years into marriage, how we loaded the dishwasher was different and it was silverware in particular. Do you put the prongs of forks up or down?

Like, for us, we had a conversation. We figured out how in our family, we’re going to put forks in the dishwasher.

There are people who cannot let something that simple go because how it was ingrained in them. I will tell you, dishes, laundry, and household upkeep are, like three of the biggest things that I help people process.

Currey: For real?

JJ: For real.

Currey: I did not know that. That’s wild to me because it seems like, I guess for us, those things really easily went from, this is how my family did it to, like, this is how we do it, right. And I don’t remember battling over, well, laundry was a battle because it was like, who’s going to do this? Because neither one of us wants to. Right.

It so quickly became like us building sort of a culture together rather than leaning up.

How do you help people? Because that seems really simple. I would imagine if you can’t do that with things like that. Very simple things that it would be very complicated to do more emotionally fraught things. Is that true?

JJ: I mean, I think it’s all perspective, right? We were incredibly young when we got married, and so we were figuring out adulthood together. When you’re thinking about people who are more established in life, when they choose to partner, those things are more ingrained. I also think it doesn’t matter your age. It’s. A lot of those things come out as control. If we haven’t figured out, kind of our power dynamic feels archaic. But I don’t know what better.

Currey: I think that’s a good one. Not necessarily who has power, but, like.

JJ: How do we share power within this relationship? Those are the easiest places for these disagreements to come up. You do laundry wrong, I will be the queen of laundry, because, for real, the number of people that like laundry is a thing. And I’m like, oh, I don’t care if curry does the laundry, doesn’t even matter. It’s done. And I have worked with so many people that that’s not how they feel. Or it’s also figuring out, like, I care deeply about laundry. I don’t care about dishes. How do we kind of divvy up these things? And so I think there is so much household stuff that family of origin just comes up in. How do you communicate with your families? Are you a.

Well, I talk to my family three times a week. You talk to your family once a month. That’s always worked for one person each. However, they’ve chosen to communicate. When I bring my experience to a relationship and say the way that I’m doing things with my family, how we’re communicating, how we interact, how we are as a family is better, you should adhere to my way. This is where we see friction in relationship.

Currey: So how do you move somebody? Or first of all, how does one kind of step back and look at maybe things that might be a part of family culture that they sort of didn’t realize?

JJ: Honestly, having a therapist who is unbiased and can look at what you’re presenting to say, I’ve. I’ve worked with so many people that, like, once we’ve built rapport, that I can say, like, curry, help me understand from my perspective, I’m seeing it like this. Have you ever thought about it in this way?

And the number of people that I can literally watch the light bulb flip on and they’re like, no, I’ve never thought about it that way. Because they have their way. There’s a partner or a friend who sees the world in a different way. And sometimes I think instead of having curiosity, we just dig in.

One way is right, one way is wrong. I think it’s a beautiful thing of therapy, is you’re just bringing in another person who can say, maybe they’re both wrong. Maybe parts of both of them are right. This is just what I’m observing as you are telling me a story. And so it’s a great opportunity to just have someone kind of outside of that space or conflict or power struggle just have a different perspective.

That also doesn’t mean that every person who presents me with some sort of scenario and I give insight is like, oh, my gosh, JJ, thank you so much. That was really helpful.

And that’s know, then we can process that. Why is it so hard for you to let go of this part of your cuLture, family culture, and then kind of dig into that?

That can bring up a lot of things for a lot of people. I feel like I have lost a lot of my family to become a part of this relationship. Having to make this sacrifice, whatever that is, feels like just too much. Or there is so much to dig into in just thinking about what family culture is.

Currey: Well, because each relationship, in and of itself, and I’m just kind of talking out loud, like thinking out loud here, but each relationship, at some point, has its own culture.

Every relationship has its own culture. The way we interact, the way we do things, the things that we’ve done, the shared past, all of that stuff. And so sort of like, should we think of it as sort of like crafting a new culture in any relationship that we have, where two people sort of come to bring the respective ways of doing things together and sort of become one sort of deal? Is that a good way to think about it?

JJ: I think it is hard to think about maybe a friendship and, like, we’re both bringing our family of origin cultures together and shared experience and all of that. But I do think as we grow in relationship, more of those pieces are coming forward, kind of who we are, how we’re operating in friendship. And I also think it kind of helps us decide how we move forward or not in relationship. Right. Especially in friendships. I’m thinking more than, like, a marriage relationship, of as you kind of build a friendship with someone and you get to the point they’re kind of talking about their family, what that was like, as they’re sharing stories of their childhood versus how you see them interact with people now you may build a culture that you’re both comfortable moving forward in like, as friends. This is how we operate. I think you also have to think about all the places that this just happens, that you have to figure it out like your kid’s on a sports team. You have to decide, are we committing to the culture that exists in this place or it doesn’t work for us?

Currey: Sure.

JJ: And so I think we’re all kind of, like, in our most important relationships.

That family of origin culture is kind of driving how that relationship moves forward. And just as we operate as people in the world, we’re seeing how our family culture shows up in all of our relationships. It’s how we show up to volunteer at our kids school, it’s how we host people at our home.

And a lot of this, you’re never going to sit with a friend and be like, well, in my family of origin, we hosted people, but I think you kind of start to feel like how people are now, what they’ve maybe, I think as adults, what they’re bringing with them from their family of origin and what they’re building for themselves moving forward. And the beauty is we get to take as much or as little from our family of origin that works for us and bring that forward. And the places where we feel there’s a lack, we get to create something new. And so I think just because you have family of origin stuff you’re bringing to a relationship doesn’t mean that those things are concrete. There’s always the opportunity to change and grow and develop a new culture in whatever relationship you’re in.

Currey: Yeah, it’s a fascinating way, I think, to think about how we have relationships.

You’ve mentioned it a couple of times, but one of the easiest places to see this come into play is in parenting. Right? Like, my parents parented a certain way. Your parents parented whoever it is. And so these two parenting cultures are sort of colliding in a relationship as well, a marriage relationship. And we’ve spent a lot of time sort of talking to other parents about how to sort of navigate some of that stuff. I assume this probably will need to be another episode here down the road. But how does family of origin culture play into parenting?

JJ: I think it is a really challenging part of relationship because you’re not really parenting per se early on in your parenting journey, very few people have vastly different views on sleep training or what type of bottle to use. But as your child grows and their personality becomes more evident, there is so much to unpack on how you choose to parent. And I think that’s an ongoing conversation that how you parent in toddlerhood is different than early elementary is different than late elementary, middle school, high school, and so adult. Yes. That you are always kind of reevaluating family of origin on your parenting journey.

Currey: Yeah, I’d never thought about that. I mean, you’re a solid, like year, year, year and a half in before you have to make some real big decisions about discipline or that sort of thing. It can come up a little bit earlier, but generally it’s not like a big deal. You’re still a little bit in survival mode, honestly, in those years, so I had never thought about that. That becomes more prevalent once you’ve already been doing this thing for a while and those things then pop up. Oh, didn’t know we needed to talk about that aspect of parenting or expectations about who does what with the child and that sort of thing. Yeah, that’s really interesting. I think we really could spin that off into spend a few episodes kind of unpacking a little bit more of that at some point.

JJ: I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. I would love to answer any follow up questions you had. You can follow me on Instagram and Facebook at counselingwith or shoot me an email on my website, counselingwith.com. I hope today gives you a little insight and makes you wonder what from your family of origin are you bringing forward into your current relationships?