We Raised Ourselves Right, Too
Found this old one the other day, maybe someone needs to hear it.
A friend made a tremendous point to me the other day. I’m not going to get it exactly right but close enough.
We talk about how someone “raised us right”, when talking about where our values, morals, behavior stemmed from. Or even talking about the skills or talents we have acquired through the years.
Now this is most likely true, of course. But there’s a little bit more to this. An extra layer to this that we seem to note in other situations but often can’t see here. Everything we’ve picked up and learned along the way? It’s always been a conscious choice whether to retain it as part of our own experience. And at all times we have the choice to either keep or release any of it.
Now, the instinct is to say “woah dude, this is programming, this was all out of our control”. Often it felt like it as kids, I get that. We had to follow house rules, do as we’re told, and all that jazz. Me too, I get it. Often we have to do as we need to get along. But hear me out though. How many times as kids did we go and do something that was clearly was NOT a thing our parents would approve of? We willingly made those choices of course. Often we learned the hard way how stupid these choices were, but we made them on our own, freely. Even if we play the peer pressure card, we ultimately had the ability to choose to succumb to that.
We’re so often told, especially as we’re doing work to get past our traumas and achieve inner growth in our own ways, that we can - with a lot of deep work - break free from the “not so good” hard-wiring that we grew up with. The shit that leads us to addictions or other self-defeating behaviors. We learn that it’s a choice to relearn new, self-affirming behaviors and we learn to consciously change our thoughts and actions to attach to newly assimilated beliefs.
Of course it can go the other way too, but again, this road always starts from a conscious, personal choice.
Even if it feels like autopilot, it’s only because we’ve accepted that program for whatever reason felt right at the time. However we got there always is the result of a choice we made.
So if we can see that for all of this other stuff, why is it so hard to see it with the “raised right” question?
How many people, and we all know some, who were raised by good people the best they knew how, but ended up in a life where they always found trouble? Obviously they, at some point, made a choice not to accept the values they were raised with.
If it works one way, it has to work in others. The pattern is still the same. There is always a choice available to accept or reject anything we were ever raised with. Always.
Whatever values, be they religious or political, to what traditions are kept or abandoned, right down to how an apple pie is properly baked (side note: topped with brown sugar is always the right answer, my mom proved it!) ultimately become our choice to take as our own to pass on, or to reject for something that feels closer to our own truth. Often, we keep a lot of what we inherited, for better and for worse.
So when people credit those who raised you for “doing it right”, let me offer you the opportunity to also give yourself just as much credit for making great choices along the way.