Leslie Nipps Counseling

Powerlessness. Choicelessness.

“Tom” came to me with a complaint that he just couldn’t find the energy to move forward in life. He was stuck in his work life, and everything was tinged by the suspicion that he just wasn’t good enough. As it turned out, Tom’s mother began life having inherited a disease as a result of his parents’ neglect. She almost died, and never really thrived. Tom, on the other hand, was completely healthy. So, why does it look like he has inherited his mother’s near-deathliness?

Powerlessness and choicelessness are the source of our inability to choose the experience of life we would like all of the time. If we had power, we could choose what we wanted easily, right? So, where is our power? Where is our capacity to choose whenever our soul and integrity seems to call that from us?

Many of us are “running on fumes.” We’ve cut ourselves off from the primary source of energy: our tribes. We inherit life from our ancestors; they are our source of power. When we are disconnected from them, or in some way our bonds with them are disturbed or improper, we are without the basic courage we need to live.

But as children, we can be faced with some challenging dilemmas:

• We can have parents who are suffering, or came from families of suffering, and as little children, sensing their pain, we unconsciously decided to try and help. From there, we begin to make a series of unconscious decisions for our lives that seek to find resources for our parents and other family members. We seek to be more powerful than our ancestors.
• Or, our parents were less-than-perfect parents. Maybe even dangerous parents. So we learned to separate ourselves from the danger, define ourselves as apart and different. We seek to be better than they could at taking care of ourselves.

Both approaches are beautifully human, and quite likely necessary to our survival as children. As adults, however, both approaches leave us stranded from our tribal energy, which we can only access through our parents. We literally have life because they gave us life. But in our attempt to be more successful or powerful than our parents, we attempt to reverse a flow that cannot be reversed. The energy is dammed and inaccessible.

We need this energy for our lives. To create, work, love and grow. Without it, we are profoundly disabled. Nonetheless, we are reluctant to receive the energy from our tribal sources because we unconsciously sense the old danger. It feels life threatening, so we continue on low resources as best we can and wonder why we can’t find a way to thrive the way we would like.

Full adult thriving requires us—at some point— to consent to the fact that our parents are our parents, and without them we would not have life. They are our ultimate source energy, despite their manifest limitations. When we can find a way to consent to the fact of all our ancestors—the saints and sinners, the crazy and the sane, the safe and dangerous—we can receive our birthright as we should. And life can flow again.

On August 22nd, at the workshop “The Surprising Source of Effortless Strength & Courage,” we will combine NLP & Family Constellations wisdom to recover our source of strength by re-solving distorted relationships to our families. For more information, go to Effortless Strength & Courage.

Spider Crab by Leslie Nipps