The Role of the Family Harmonizer and Recognizing Its Unconscious Imperatives

Jun 3

If you took on the role of family harmonizer growing up, you might still find yourself trying to make everything okay for the people around you at the expense of your authenticity and autonomy. You notice little moments of going along with something you don’t like. You see yourself making the extra effort to make someone comfortable and notice they don’t do the same for you. You rearrange your day to help someone when they need it and they don’t say thank you or acknowledge your effort. And when something isn’t okay with you, you remain silent more often than you would like.

You want freedom from this old pattern. You want to live with courage and authenticity and trust yourself to navigate conflicts. There are many ways to find freedom from patterns like these. Often what drives a repetitive reactive pattern or family role is a set of unconscious imperatives from which you are still operating. Shining a light on these can help.

Unconscious imperatives about how to be or behave are habits that were adaptive at one time, but no longer serve their original purpose. If you took on the role of family harmonizer you may operate from unconscious imperatives like:

If there is a challenge to your needs, give up what you need to keep the peace.
Identify the person with the most power and find what pleases them.
Change stories of what you or someone else did to match the expectations of the person with the most power.
Accommodate and go along with what’s happening.
Ignore tension and try to keep things light.
Stay quiet when you think or want something different than the group.

Your family of origin is one of the richest sources you have for getting to know yourself. When you spend time with your family you see what patterns you have resolved and where you still get caught. Take the time to reflect on both the celebrations and mournings using the self-empathy process. Choose two or three interactions or decision points to focus on. Look for challenging moments when you stayed connected to your authenticity and your values regarding how you want to show up. Also, choose a time when your reaction was all too familiar, like pressing play on an old recording.

With this practice you might feel grief as you become aware of moments when you abandoned yourself and also relief as you notice the times you stayed grounded in the face of old triggers. Going through these moments one by one with compassion will strengthen your awareness and help you live from authenticity.

As a last step, identify the needs that the unconscious imperatives are meant to serve and then with gentleness and compassion notice how and when that need is met in your life beyond your family. If these same needs continue to go unmet in your family system, take time to discern if and how you would like to attend to those needs now in your family.

For example, if long ago you took on the role of the family harmonizer, you might see that this strategy was meant to meet needs for safety, harmony, belonging, stability, and connection. Regardless of how your family has evolved, you likely have many of these needs met consistently in your life now. Grounding yourself in this truth over and over again will help release you from this old role with your family.