Heather Murphy | How to Be More Self-Aware Using Family History Research

Stories in Our Roots  00:03

Welcome to the Stories in Our Roots podcast. I'm your host Heather Murphy. In this podcast, we dive deep into how knowing the stories of our ancestors can make a difference in our lives today, discovering our family history is more than a hobby. It is a way to connected deeply with ourselves, those we love, and the world around us.

Heather Murphy  00:26

Hello, and welcome to Episode 33 of Stories in Our Roots. I am Heather Murphy. And I am excited to talk with you today about how you can become more self aware, using your family history research. Today we'll talk about what does self awareness even mean? What are the benefits, how you can become more self aware in general, and three ways that you can use family history to become more self aware.  So first of all, self awareness is the ability to understand your thoughts and emotions and the actions that result from those things. And then even more deeply to be able to understand perhaps why you have those thoughts, why you have those emotions, it's really being able to see yourself clearly to understand why you do the things you do why you think the things that you think. And the way to do this is often through reflection and introspection, thinking about yourself, and spending time with yourself. That self awareness is closely linked with self care. But if you are not aware of your needs, then you're not going to be able to give yourself the self care and the type of treatment that is really going to be more beneficial for you. So self aware is just being aware of your thoughts and feelings. It is so easy to not spend time with ourselves to be so busy with work and family and put ourselves in the mindset that we just have to keep doing. We just have to keep making the deadlines, keep the kids fed, keep doing our to do list, we feel these feelings of perhaps being overwhelmed or anxious or wondering how the future is going to work out. It was really beneficial if we take time to stop and think about how we are actually feeling.  The benefits of being aware of how we are feeling are really, really great. It enables you to be able to choose your actions rather than feeling controlled by them. Most of the time, our actions are not the first thing that come up for us. There is some sort of triggers something that happens. And then we have a thought and then we have a feeling and then we act. But what if we could understand for ourselves why we have that certain feeling when a certain thing happens. These things can be positive or negative. But when something happens, you think of a certain thought, and then you feel a certain way. Why is that? becoming self aware helps us to become really clear on what matters to us, not what matters to our spouse, or to our children or to our friends. But what really matters to us. When we know what matters to us, then we can choose how to spend our time and energy on those things that are most important to us. Being self aware allows us to have more control over our feelings. Now this isn't to mean that we can always feel great that we're not going to have feelings of sadness or disappointment. But we can lessen the amount that we have those feelings, when we realize that we do have some control over them. Being aware of these things can help us take care of ourselves. We can have understanding on what we need to do, to take care and improve ourselves. And as we are aware of those things that trigger us or aware of those things that make us happy, that give us good mood feelings, then that can have a cascade of other effects. We can be clearer in our thoughts, our moods will improve will improve our relationships. The rest of our life can improve in many ways. If we focus on being aware of ourselves, and sometimes that's hard to do. We get so busy like I was saying before Everyone else's needs. But if we take the time to really think about how we're doing, how we function was important to us, and gain that clarity that comes with that. And be aware of those things that we need to work on ourselves. Things that we may need to let go of, or things that we need to build up, then we can better show up in our relationships, we can be happier, we can work better, because our minds are clearer and improves how we function in our world.  So how do you become more self aware? It's simple in concept, it's just taking time to identify what you're feeling. And being curious about possible reasons why you feel that way. Sometimes it is so easy to just shove our feelings into the closet serve our mind, and try to not feel them. Because we feel like they're getting in the way of the work that we need to do or our responsibilities. And we choose not to deal with them. Sometimes this is because we just don't know how to deal with them. And it's easier to just try to ignore them or suffer through then to take the time to fix it. When we have these feelings, we need to think about what they mean. Sometimes we may misinterpret them on their surface. We may mistake for instance, anger, for fear. But if we take time to think about the way we're feeling, then we can start to become curious about the thoughts that lead to those feelings. And where those thoughts come from, why we have them and whether or not they're accurate or not. A lot of times some of our thoughts and beliefs aren't exactly clear, they're kind of warped and don't reflect true reality. And so by sitting with those thoughts and those feelings, we can perhaps identify what is going on, we can look at our lives and look for triggers both positive and negative, that come up, we can notice patterns in our life, when a certain type of certain circumstance happens that we automatically react in a certain way. This happens, especially when we are tired or maybe not feeling the best, you can totally see a lot more clearly, those things that will trigger you in a negative way. Things that will maybe set you off that if you were in a better state of mind and had more control over your thoughts that you might be able to cover up, be aware of those. And then it's a process you can't just like, make a huge list of all these things and all these feelings that you're having and thoughts that you're having, and try to fix them all at once. Because that will just be too overwhelming. And your brain just works better if you focus on one thing at a time. So how does family history work into all of this? Let's talk about some exercises that you can do using family history to help you become more self aware. To help you understand your thoughts and the resulting feelings, and how family history plays a role in that. The first idea I have for you is to create a timeline of your own life. And don't just clued in vet events include how you felt at those times. This can be a great eye opener as you work back in your life and you think of different events, whether they're small or large, and kind of put together your own story of different events that might play into why you feel what you feel now, what this exercise is important. And okay to take off your rose colored glasses. You don't necessarily have to share this exercise with your posterity. But write down all these events that had an effect on the way you see yourself and the way you see the world around you. It can be interactions with friends in middle school, families circumstances when you were preschool age, anything that you can think of that made an impact on you. And try to be honest with yourself. Sometimes it's easy to sway where we come from a situation whether everything was fine or where everything was really really bad. But we can also take those feelings and use those feelings. To help us understand how those events affected us, if you have an event, and you have a really, really negative feeling about it, even though in retrospect, in your adult mind, you don't see what the big deal was necessarily, it makes a difference. If it affected you at that age, what, whether or not it is a big deal to you now, so write all these things down. And something that I'd like to do to keep in mind is what do you know about your family life, when you were a child, say under the age of eight, a lot of the way that we see the world around us and learn how to interact and have our thought patterns is built when we are young children. And for many of us, we may not be able to remember a whole lot from our life, when we were that age, we might be able to remember events. And sometimes we can remember how we felt. But a lot of it, we're not going to be able to remember, if it's possible, I suggest that you talk with your parents or your older siblings. What was family life, like? When you were five, what was the family going through, when you were that age that you may not be able to exactly remember, but other family members will remember and will be able to fill in some of that information for you.  I have an example in my life of how this was helpful for me to understand myself. For some reason, I have had a fear of running out of food, not necessarily of being hungry. But the idea that I'm afraid of running out of food, and then I would be hungry. I wondered where this feeling was coming from exhibited in whenever we go on trips, I bring way too much food because I don't want to run out. When the end of the summer is over. I have great peace in my heart when I look at my pantry. And some years have canned hundreds of jars of fruit, like 400 pounds of fruit, and I have jams and dried items and everything on the shelf. And that just brings me so much peace. I remembered that for the most of my growing up years, my family received welfare from the government. I remember about the age of eight, our church giving us some food. And just this feeling of excitement of having fresh green grapes. That was something that we would never buy, but having grapes. That was just amazing. And then I remember my eight year old self going into the back room of our house, where we had all sorts of storage and we had the shelf with canned food on it. And after we had this delivery of food, just walking and looking at that shelf, and looking at all the food that was there. Things like canned peaches or raisins. That was such an amazing thing to have for me as an eight year old. Now, I remembered that, but I didn't remember necessary feeling like we were going to run out of food. It didn't quite explain for me why I had this feeling now as an adult.  I decided one day to ask my mom about it. And I told her I had this fear of running out of food. And I told her that I never remembered running out of food or having like electricity turned off or any of that. I didn't remember any of that. But I asked her about it. And she said that no, they never ran out of food. But when I was especially young, probably under the age of age, my dad never had consistent work. He worked at different laboring jobs. For several years when I was only between the ages of three and six. He would carpet church buildings. And so whenever he would get a job, he would go out and do that. And then he would get paid and then wait until the next job came around. But it was never dependable when that next job was going to come. What my parents would do whenever they would get paid is they would use significantly large amount of that paycheck to buy things like potatoes and rice, shelf stable food that was cheap, that would last as long as possible. Because they were afraid that the money would run out and they wouldn't have food to feed themselves on their five children. That's where my fear of running out of comes from. Because as a very young child, there was the idea in our family that we never knew when we were going to be able to buy more food. So we'd buy a bunch, and then hope not to run out of it before we could buy more. Now that I know where that story came from, where I know where those feelings came from, as a child, I can now as an adult, assure myself that I'm not going to run out of food, I'm not going to be hungry, things that my five year old self was very worried about. I can help to heal those feelings that came as a child, so that I don't have to carry that fear anymore with me.  So make this timeline of your life, talk to other family members, especially about stories when you are young, you might kind of hit the highlights. But what was it really like for your family? When you were young? What did your parents worry about when you were under the age of eight? What were their worries and concerns that you might have picked up on but you just don't remember?  Alright, number two, is to sit down and make a list of various family beliefs or patterns that you have noticed. And this might be an ongoing project, it might be something that you have a note on your phone, or you keep a notepad on your dresser, when these things come to mind when you're able to think about them and realize them, that you write them down. There'll be positive stories, and there'll be negative stories. Or in other words, another way to look at that is there will be beliefs and patterns that may be helpful to you, or that are not helpful to you. Sometimes you'll be able to trace back these beliefs and patterns to when they originated, and be able to see how maybe it was very helpful to have that mindset for, say, your great grandfather. But in your life, maybe that isn't needful anymore. By looking in the stories of your ancestors, you can see how these beliefs and patterns evolved over generations became stronger or weaker. Or maybe they snowballed. Maybe there was an original event with your great grandfather. And then something happened with your grandfather that reinforce that. And as generations go along, different events play into that same pattern or belief. By identifying these, then you can choose which ones you want and which ones you don't want. Like I said, we're not necessarily going to label them good or bad. Certainly there are situations that are good or bad. But part of the problem with labeling them as good or bad is that we often associate that good or bad label that we attribute to a pattern or a belief to the person as well. And life is so complicated, especially if you plan this out and and see all these different patterns and beliefs. Oftentimes, it's not just because one person decided that that's the way they wanted to live. That's the way they wanted to believe they're shaped by events by other family members. And it's just best not to label things good or bad, except in those certain instances where something is bad. But be really careful not to attach that too closely to the individual and keep it to the belief or the action.  About a year ago, I talked about this one on the podcast before, I was able to understand my belief that women only work outside the home if tragedy strikes because that was a pattern that had happened on my maternal line. By identifying that and seeing that then I could address it and be able to move past it. And sometimes our family beliefs may just be the way that we interpret our family's past. For instance, there is one woman in my family tree going back to my great grandparents that did work outside the home. Her husband had gone to World War One and so she taught school and when she came back, she decided to keep working in the small town even though her husband needed to go to the city to find work with the new skills he had developed in the military. My interpretation as I look at that is that her working outside the home was detrimental to her marriage. But that is a judgment that I am making. It is not a truth. I do not know exactly what their relationship was like. Before he went to war, what it was like afterward. So in this list that you're making, some of these things will be actual patterns that have been passed down. And some will be your interpretation of them. Sometimes we don't see things as clearly as they actually are, we're putting our spin on it. And those are important to include as well.  One example of a way that these family beliefs and patterns have popped up just within the last week in my life happened when my dad called me, and he asked what I was doing. And I told him that I was working on remodeling my son's room, we had gotten all the paint done, and we were putting on the trim. And I was working on filling in those little holes. And he made a comment that he was so proud of his daughters for doing projects like that, and that has sons hire someone else. Because I was in the mindset of looking for family beliefs that don't serve me or that maybe they do, but being able to identify and recognize when somebody says something in my family, is that true? Or is that their interpretation of it. And that's what I was able to do in this instance. And this is actually something that I had worked on previously. because growing up, this was the same thing. Working hard is a admirable trait. And if you don't work hard physically, then that lacks the evidence of this good character trait. And so I needed to work through and acknowledge to myself that hiring people to do jobs on your home or your yard or for your business is okay. You don't have to do it all yourself can still be a good person. And it doesn't mean that you are being lazy or not applying yourself by getting somebody else to do some work. Instead of just dismissing my father's approach. I thought about the family history behind that mentality. He lived his life where his value was largely dependent on his ability for physical work, he worked at his dad's plumbing business when he was in high school. And after high school, he worked laying carpet, he did all these jobs that were manually based, he gained great self worth from his ability to work physically, to be able to know how to wire the electricity in your house, or how to replace the water pump in your car that brought him feelings of worth. And so as he looks at other people, that is what he sees measures worth is the ability to do those things. I can look back on the generations and see a pattern of physical work and understand more the pattern that has been passed down, and especially just with my father and understand that I don't have to keep that I can change the way I feel about hiring out versus doing it myself. And it's okay, I don't need to feel bad about carrying on a tradition or a thought pattern. That isn't necessarily wrong, but it isn't what's going to serve me in living my life the way that is best for me.  All right. The third idea for for using family history to help you become more self aware is to readjust the way you approach your research time as you research your family history. Sometimes it is easy to use family history as a time to become disconnected with yourself to just get lost in the research to make all these connections and links and get lost in the stories and putting everything together and kind of living someone else's life sometimes that can be helpful in its own way to become distracted from the things that weigh you down in life. But it doesn't help you to become more self aware. One of the biggest things about becoming more self aware is slowing down and allowing yourself to think your thoughts and feel your feelings and having the time to spend time with yourself. I know that's kind of a an odd concept and it kind of pulls into self care but it's not just about doing things that might feel good as far as self care goes. You have to be aware of your feelings in order to be able to To treat yourself the way that's going to be the most helpful. So when you sit down to do your research, a different way to approach it would be to think about how you're doing as you sit down and think about how would your time be most beneficial to you. For instance, if you sit down to research, and you just really need to feel productive, like you are accomplishing something, because that's something that you're struggling with, then choose to work on maybe an easier family line or a collateral line, where you're going to be able to put together a family and have some success to address that need to feel productive. If you're feeling really good, your mind's really clear, maybe working on a difficult project and your family history is going to be a better use of your time because you have that clarity to be able to work on that. And you can understand that it will be hard. But if you can make a little breakthrough, or get one little piece of information that that will still make you feel good, as opposed to a day and when you need it to feel productive if you sit down to work on a really hard line. And you only get that one piece of new information that won't give you what you need to help improve your thoughts and feelings at the time. Another example is if you're feeling lonely, maybe instead of working by yourself, clicking on links and staring at a computer screen, maybe it would be more beneficial for you to call a parent or a grandparent and aunt or uncle and ask them about their life or ask about a certain event and your family or a certain family member. They don't provide an excuse for you to make a connection with someone else. And then also a connection with that person that you're learning about if you're learning about a different family member. Another idea is when you are overwhelmed, and have you sit down and you're overwhelmed, and you work on a difficult project, that's probably not the best idea, it's not going to serve you as well. Maybe when you're overwhelmed, it would be better for you to index and think about the people that you were helping by indexing those records. Or maybe you can look through photos and biographies that you've already put together or maybe on family search or ancestry, somebody else's tree. And just remember the stories and read the experiences and feel that sense of connection and just your mind slowing down as you don't have to work harder, but you're helping to give yourself those good feelings that you have from connecting with your family history.  So the three family history exercises that you can use to help you become more self aware is to create a detailed timeline of your own life not only events, but also of your feelings. Number two, make a list of family beliefs or patterns that you have noticed with ancestors or within yourself. And three, change the way you approach your research to be introspective about how you're feeling at the time, instead of just sitting down and doing the first thing that comes to mind, take a little time to think about what would be the best way to serve your needs. At that time. I'd love to hear from you about how family history has helped you become more self aware to help you to understand yourself better. A lot of times in family history, we think it's about learning other people's stories. But a lot of the time, it's about learning about ourselves becoming more self aware so that we can identify those thoughts that we have that aren't serving us. We can clear those out and build on the stories and heritage that we really want to continue and to build up and amplify for future generations. Thanks so much for listening, and I look forward to hearing from you about your experiences with family history research and becoming more self aware. Thank you.

Stories in Our Roots  29:10

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