“Being related hardly insures relatability.” – Michael E. Angier

Are you happy with your family of origin? Can you emotionally connect with your family? If you can, you are fortunate indeed. Many people feel that if their family wasn’t their family, they wouldn’t spend time with them, because they feel no emotional connection with them.

Do you believe that you chose your family? I once had a powerful between-life hypnosis session where I remembered choosing my family. I was given a choice of a few different families to be born into, but I was strongly encouraged to choose the family I chose because of the soul challenges that this family offered.

As a child, I often wondered if I was adopted because I had so little emotional connection with my parents. Because I always felt like an alien in my family, I assumed that there was something wrong with me. After Spirit brought us Inner Bonding and I started to practice it, I was finally able to deeply know that there’s nothing wrong with me and that my parents were just not available for emotional connection.

So why did I choose that family? What were my soul challenges? There were many:

• Learning to claim, value and maintain my high sensitivity and compassion in a family that lacked sensitivity and compassion.
• Learning to be independent with an over-controlling, angry and critical mother.
• Learning to create abundance in a family that was poor throughout my childhood.
• Learning to shine with a mother who was threatened by my shining.
• Learning to move beyond care-taking and love myself with a family that demanded care-taking.
• Learning to connect with and trust my guidance in an atheist family.
• Learning that it’s okay to not feel emotionally connected with my family and to seek emotional connection with people who are open and loving.
• Learning to heal the wounds from my rejecting family that created my fear of rejection.
• Being motivated to help others who also come from difficult families.
• Being open to receiving the Inner Bonding process from Spirit to help myself and others find the emotional connection with ourselves, others and Spirit that we seek.

Looking back, I’m grateful that I chose my family. Had I been in an easy, accepting and loving family, I might never have been motivated to learn, grow and become the grateful and joyful person that I am now.

If you feel angry and blaming toward your parents, imagine what might happen if you decide to believe that you chose your parents for your soul’s journey of learning to evolve in love and learning, and to fully manifest your gifts? Anger and blame toward your family of origin are not only a waste of energy, they keep you stuck in being a victim rather taking responsibility for learning to love yourself.

Perhaps you don’t believe that our soul is immortal and that we keep coming back here until we learn our soul lessons. That’s okay. But if you can entertain the idea, even a little, that you chose your family of origin, you might be able to move out of being a victim and into taking personal responsibility for your feelings.

Even though I never could emotionally connect with my family of origin, I still loved them while they were alive, and I chose to spend time with them. I’m grateful to them for the many soul lessons I learned. I miss them. I pray for their souls and communicate with them in Spirit. I know they did the best they could.