Inna Shukshina

What is a family line anyway? It is of course our mother and father, our grandmothers and grandfathers, brothers and sisters, and also all the uncles, aunts, cousins and children — all our relatives. Our husband’s or wife’s family line also has an influence on us.

And the question arises — how do our family and our family values influence us and the way we live our life? Are we completely free of this influence, or does it determine almost everything in our personality, and how do we get rid of some negative influence our relatives have on us?

First of all it is important to study your family line — who belongs to it, what fates people had, what they did, what talents there were. Ask your parents or other relatives about this — by the way, it is an occasion for a very heartfelt conversation and for strengthening close relationships.

You can also include in your family line people who had a very great influence on your family, even though they were not blood relatives. A great many people influence how we look at life, how we perceive events in it, how we treat ourselves and other people.

Connection

It is important to maintain a connection with your relatives. Everyone, I think, has people in their family line whom we think of with great warmth, love and gratitude. It may be a kind, caring grandmother, or a grandfather who was a jack of all trades. These are the people with whom your connection is well established. But each of us also has people in the family line whom no one likes to talk about or remember, with whom something was not right, with whom relationships did not work out. Those who seem to have been crossed out of the family. But it is important to maintain a connection with them too. The better we are able to maintain harmonious connections within the family line, the more confident we feel in life, and the more we trust the world and people.

Perhaps you have seen close-knit families who gather several generations at once for big celebrations. It is also becoming popular now to  put together your family tree. The more relatives you keep in your memory and whose path you respect, the more stable you are in life.

Only by deciding to treat every person’s choice with respect, and every fate thanks to which you are alive, do we gain the freedom to live our own life, without living out the mistakes of our ancestors, without spending our life trying to change someone and to prove something to someone. If you do not know many of them and are not in touch, then such a connection can be created at least inside yourself. Imagine that your ancestors are a whole huge stadium full of people! They lived as best they could, loved as best they could, made mistakes as we do, but without them we would not exist either. It also happens that we repeat in some way the fate of someone in our family line (for example, there are families in which men do not stay — so a grandmother, a mother and a daughter live like that, and the daughter too is soon left alone — a family script of life without men), or a talent of one of your ancestors is passed on to you. For example, a grandmother had an excellent voice and her granddaughter also sings wonderfully, or many people in the family line have a talent for mathematics.

History

Our people went through many traumatic events in the 20th century. And what helped them survive then was passed on further to us as well. For example, it may be a fear of showing yourself. Or a fear of being rich and taking money for your services — and it turns out that your ancestors were dispossessed as kulaks, and those who survived learned that you must live quietly, not stick your head out, not live in prosperity — it is dangerous. Wars and repressions affected every family and passed on to their descendants a fear of loss, and pain. Many  lost their loved ones then, and the way we feel now in relationships — unprotected, abandoned, or respected and loved — may be a reflection of the feelings and experience our grandmothers and grandfathers went through. The influence of the family line is easy to explain from a logical point of view too: the way people talked to us, the way they acted in our childhood, every small detail was not accidental and carried within it the experience of previous generations. Look at how differently relationships are built in the families of different people.

Who especially needs to work on family-line scripts:

• if you put in a lot of effort to put a situation right, but it does not work
• if you cannot find your place in life
• if you cannot manage to build a relationship with someone
• if your hands drop and you do not know what to do next
• if you are going round in circles and cannot find an answer

This week and next only I am running a week of consultations on the theme of the family line. You can choose a simpler or an extended option.

1. Express consultation on family-line relationships. 

Duration 1.5 hours by Skype or phone. Price 8,000 5,000 roubles this week only. A short version of the programme “Family-line scripts”. You will also learn:

• Who the “Excluded” of the family line are
• The balance of “Taking” and “giving”
• How to neutralise negative family-line scripts
• The technique of gratitude to the family line

I will give you a simple preliminary assignment and a simple homework assignment after the consultation, so that you will receive feedback from me by email over 2–3 weeks and will be able to ask any additional questions.

2. The detailed programme “Family-line scripts”. 1. Connection. 2. Order. 3. Balance.

3 consultations by Skype (audio) or phone, 1–1.5 hours each. 21,000 15,000 roubles.

In this option I will be able to support you personally on this stretch of the path over the course of a month, and each theme will have its own consultation.

1. Connection. In the first one we will look at your connections within the family line — with whom the connection needs to be weakened or broken, and with whom strengthened, so that it is most harmonious in your life.

2. Order. In the second we will look at order — what the roles of parents are in relation to adult children, what to do if your parents or your husband’s/wife’s parents violate your personal boundaries, behave strangely, and you cannot  understand and forgive them. What if your brother or sister makes too much use of your help. If you have been like a parent to your brother or sister all your life and are already tired of that role. If your children do not want to grow up.

3. Balance. At the third meeting we will work on balance in the family system. What if you give too much and receive little in return, if you have resentments that someone did not give you what you feel belongs to you. How to learn both to give with joy and to receive, and to do it in a balanced way.

You will also do exercises with feedback from me, and we will move towards the result that matters specifically to you — finding your calling, improving relationships in the family, understanding yourself better, making sense of a problem or letting go of negativity.

You will get:

• A solution to a problem that has tormented you for a long time
• You will become more energetic, more confident, more at peace
• You will clarify a situation that was unclear to you
• You will begin to understand yourself and your feelings better
• You will improve relationships with those close to you and probably restore a relationship with someone

You will learn

• How the laws and order in our family system influence us
• We will do the visualisation “House of the soul”
• How to neutralise the influence of relatives’ unhappy fates on you
• How to get support from your family line for your undertakings
• How to take your own place in the family system
• How to stop being a parent to your own parents, or to move from the role of child into the role of adult
• How to settle conflicts in the family

Write to me at inly@list.ru, describe the situation you would like to clarify for yourself and what question is troubling you, and I will write back to say whether I can take you on for a consultation and whether it will help you resolve your question.

And here is why this subject is extraordinarily important. One of my coaching clients was at first sceptical about this theme — it does indeed look somewhat strange and unfamiliar. But here are her results:

“One of the most unexpected experiences during the coaching for me turned out to be establishing a connection with my family line.  I could never have thought that improving relationships with relatives could give an enormous surge of energy and positivity. I had a feeling as if some wound had healed inside me. And the other side felt something similar. For me this resource turned out to be very powerful. “

She took the plunge and called an uncle she had not spoken to since childhood; he was very touched. And also, a miracle happened — her sister, with whom the relationship had been lost, called her herself, and this time the conversation went completely differently — sincerely and warmly.

And another client, after working through her relationship with her family line, discovered her calling:

“Inna, it is such a discovery for me that in my striving for creativity, for beauty, I am in fact carrying deep family values. There are very many creative people in my family line. The roots go deep, deep down on both my father’s and my mother’s side. They sewed beautifully, so that people were glad to come to them, they sang, they played musical instruments at celebrations. Later, on my mother’s side, creativity moved to the level of a hobby. My grandmother, working three shifts as a crane operator, built tanks, and at home she embroidered flowers all her life! My grandfather — a carver, a machine setter at a factory — at home picked up the accordion, and his soul sang! My mother, working as an engineer, at home would take up ballet positions and open up in dance, and could quickly sketch a portrait of a family member in pencil. And those hours bring my mother happiness).

It would probably even be a kind of betrayal of my family line to forcibly  extinguish this little flame of creativity in myself because other wonderful people lived  (or  live) differently. I am a bearer of the values of many generations, I am the continuation of my unique family line — one that strives for celebration, for joy, for happiness, that is able not only to earn money and work routinely but also to bring its talents to life. And I am keeping my little flame of creativity, let it burn, it keeps me warm.  And if the mother of a family is warm inside, then peace in the  home blossoms…”

And it really is astonishing — when relationships are restored with those from whom the connection had long been broken and it had quietly troubled you somewhere deep down, and when people hold evenings of remembrance for those who are no longer here, when a daughter calls the mother she has not spoken to for six months, and when resentments nursed for years are forgiven.

 Write to me at inly@list.ru if relationships in your family have been troubling you for a long time, if you cannot resolve the questions that torment you, and we will arrange a time for a consultation. Just imagine what a treasure it is — a close-knit family, peace and quiet in your home — and all of this is absolutely real. When you are alone, you feel superfluous and of no use to anyone in this world. How wonderful it is when you learn to receive support from people, when you feel a surge of strength, inspiration and gratitude to people and to the world!