Vulgare proverbium est, quod nimia familiaritas parit contemptum.
(„It is a common proverb, that too much familiarity breeds contempt.“)
Guigo II, Scala Paradisi, approx.1150
Most formidable to perceive objectively — as strange or problematic — is that which is most familiar.
Friedrich Nietzsche
People have a deep-seated negative habit of preferring familiar suffering to the danger of the unknown.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Fear keeps us rooted in the past. Fear of the unknown, fear of abandonment, fear of rejection, fear of not having enough, fear of not being enough, fear of the future — all these fears and more — keep us trapped, repeating the same old patterns and making the same choices over and over again. Fear prevents us from moving outside the comfort — or even the familiar discomfort — of what we know. It’s nearly impossible to achieve our highest vision for our lives as long as we are being guided by our fears.
Debbie Ford
One sunny day, two young fish are happily swimming along in the ocean when they happen to meet an older fish coming the other way. On passing by, the older fish nods at them and says, „Morning, lads. How’s the water today?“
The two young fish swim on in silence for a bit. Eventually one of them looks over at the other and asks, „What the hell is water?“
This parable hits the nail on the head when it comes to blissful ignorance. It underscores how the absence of awareness deeply influences what we perceive as „normal“.
Some aspects of life are so „familiar“ that we remain ignorant of their existence. And because this is the case, we often perpetuate — through the interactions with our own children — the patterns which wounded us, ourselves, as children.
This explains the generational nature of family dysfunction which, like the water in the parable, is beyond the awareness of most families and their individual members.
In „The Myth of Normal“, renowned trauma and addiction specialist, Dr Gabor Maté, lists four prerequisites for the healthy development of children in the familial context. These fundamental building blocks are as follows:
1) An unconditional attachment relationship with at least one adult caregiver where they feel welcomed, safe, and valued simply for being alive — not because of their achievements, compliance, or good behaviour.
2) The children should not have to work to ensure the functioning of the relationship with their parents or adult caregivers. They must be protected from the burden of absorbing parental stress, managing a parent’s emotions, or acting as peacekeepers or caregivers. The onus on the cultivation and maintenance of the relationship lies with the adults.
3) Children need the space to feel and express the full range of human emotions — including joy, sadness, grief, fear, and anger — without suffering a rupture in their connection or sense of safety with their parents.
4) Finally, they depend on a mature adult brain to regulate their emotions. They thrive when, in the first four or five formative years, they remain oriented toward responsible adult caregivers.
Families characterised by frequent or on-going conflict, misbehaviour, neglect, or abuse do not fulfil these prerequisites. They are said to be dysfunctional. The children of such families emerge from their formative years feeling unsafe and insufficiently supported. Their further development towards fulfilling their full potential is often considerably stifled.
Poor communication practices, the inability to engage in constructive conflict or set healthy boundaries, role reversal (parentification), scapegoating, abuse — physical, emotional, spiritual, and sexual — or unresolved addiction and other mental health issues; these are some of the attributes of such families.
The generational aspect is easily explained. If the parents of today’s family themselves grew up in such circumstances, they are highly unlikely to be able to teach their children — by example —the basic elements of healthy family living. They are incapable of serving as role models. We cannot pass on what we haven’t got.
For the children of such dysfunctional families, our only chance is to learn these emotionally mature behaviors after we leave the nest, usually on the back of experiencing some form of existential crisis.
Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACA) is a Twelve Step programme dedicated to recovery from the effects of growing up in such dysfunctional circumstances. The basic text of this programme states that the goal of the programme is to halt the generational nature of family dysfunction for the greater good of the world. (ACA Big Red Book, pg. xiii)
The „familiar“ is a core attribute of the family. Both words come from the same root. It is in the intimacy of our family that we form our interpretation of what is normal and, by means of extrapolation, project these norms onto the world at large. The sanity of our world view, therefore, is directly dependent on the sanity — or otherwise — of our family of origin.
In the context of Carl Jung’s concept of shadow work, the story of the fish and the water serves as a powerful metaphor for unconscious living.
For the unawakened, the environment is invisible: Water is the very element in which the fish live, breathe, and move, yet they are completely oblivious to it because it has always been there. Jung argued that human beings are caught up in the same predicament with respect to their subconscious beliefs, family conditioning, and hidden shadow traits.
This explains our blind spots. We don’t see our own impairments, projections, or defence mechanisms because they form the literal „atmosphere“ of our daily lives. We take our worldview for granted rather than realizing we are looking at the world through the personal, limited, unique lens of our unexamined minds shaped by our formative experiences.
The solution to this perception disorder is what Jung called the „Awakening“. The purpose of shadow work is to become aware, like the fish that finally realizes what water is.
It forces us to step back and look at the invisible forces shaping our choices, behaviours, and reactions so that we can begin to choose to live consciously. By bringing presence to each moment, rather than running automatically on impulses, we can shift out of living on autopilot. The way Socrates put this was to point out that the unexamined life wasn’t worth living.
Let’s take an example from my own life. Eating meat, cheese, and other animal products was central to the nutritional tradition in my Irish family of origin, a practice which had been in place for countless generations.
At the same time, we had a succession of beloved family dogs as pets. The idea of slaughtering and eating those dogs would have been abhorrent. The contradiction of selective behaviours vis-a-vis different sentient creatures apparently went unnoticed.
Later in life, my awareness began to shift. This was a gradual process made up of different increments. I thought I loved animals yet found myself contributing to their imprisonment and even slaughter through my diet which included dairy butter and cheeses of all sorts. (I had given up eating meat, fish, and eggs long before reaching this final threshold).
One day, on a visit to a local cheesemaker, I pulled all my courage together to ask the farmer the question which had been on my mind for a long time. „Is it possible to run a cheese-making operation without killing animals?“, I asked gingerly.
The lady was refreshing in her frankness — even though the answer was not the one for which I had hoped. „Of course, not“, she replied, „the females need to be continuously pregnant, more or less, and there is no use for the male progeny. These are slaughtered shortly after birth and sold as meat.“
She shared more details about optimal animal life span and husbandry criteria, but I had already gotten the answer I needed. I thanked her for her honesty and told her that she had helped me greatly. From that day onward, I have gladly maintained a vegan diet.
While several siblings have also adopted an animal-free diet, other members of my family of origin couldn’t fathom such a decision. Indeed, there have been instances of ridicule and incredulity. None of this has ever been sufficient to dissuade me from my course of action.
When asked about my dietary preferences, I initially pointed to the pain caused to millions of animals around the world each day by consuming animal produce, in my view unnecessarily.
Today, however, the decisive point is the pain I experienced in the knowledge that eating animals and animal produce corrodes my own soul.
So many people in the world would rather stay in a situation that’s painful but familiar because they’re comfortable with it. Others have the strength or heart to realize when something’s not good for them and to turn around, even at the risk of finding themselves alone.
This gives the phrase „Familiarity breeds contempt“ a new twist. I now see it also in terms of self-contempt, which is a direct result of persisting in certain behaviours despite the remonstrances of our intuition.
How do we become aware of the water?
The original meaning of „repent“ — Greek verb metanoeῖn (metanoeo) — is „a mental and spiritual turning point.“
The first step, according to Jung, is to identify our projections. Here, we take a good look at the people who prompt the strongest negative emotional reactions in us. We write down the exact traits we dislike in them and examine if our reactions are new or, perhaps, familiar from earlier in life.
If the latter is the case, we can explore the earliest incidence of these reactions and how they manifest in our bodies. By these means, we can become somatically aware of our emotions.
The second step is to find similar behavioural patterns in ourselves. We do this by looking back through our history to find moments where we exhibited that trait, even if we did it only to ourselves (e.g. harsh judgement or self-criticism.).
We take ownership of these traits (Saboteurs) and bring compassion to the fact that they originally emerged out of some form of necessity — with the aim of protecting us under circumstances of adversity.
We can then ask ourselves how that specific trait served us in the past, and how it could be tweaked today so that it could be utilised constructively. This is the moment of discovery of our Sage powers. By such means, for example, judgement can be transformed into discernment.
Finally, by reclaiming the underlying capacities of the trait we can adopt the more aware, refined version – the Sage Power – as a part of our Mental Fitness upgrade. Once the old Saboteur is embraced and its life-affirming counterpart cultivated, it loses its destructive power to control us or sabotage our life.
With ongoing daily practice, we gradually emerge from the slumber of familiarity into the colourful, bright world of presence, exploration, and new behaviours.
By continuing to cultivate this vibrancy, we begin to realise that the work we are doing, we are doing for others — in ever-widening ripples — as much as ourselves.
