The Dance of Connection

The cover of the book is white, so I apologize for it not showing up better. The book I'm reading now teaches you how to navigate your most important relationships. It is also about reinventing yourself. Dr. Lerner states that we don't discover who we are by sitting alone on a mountain top meditating, or by being introspective. The road to discovering or reinventing oneself is through our relationships with other people and the conversations we engage in. She starts with explaining the dynamics of her own family and then she talks about our first family and how we came to relate to the world the way we do.
Oh Boy! My first family, the one I was born into. My family was a quiet, shy bunch. In fact each one of my siblings has a shy child and if asked no one would have to much trouble picking them out. My father worked hard at his job and also at home. My mom was a stay at home mom and raised four children, kept house and did everything the old fashined way. By this I mean, hung clothes on the line & canned vegetables etc. Everything was made from scratch and it was meat, potatoes & gravy at almost every dinner meal. How did I learn to communicate from my family? Gee that is going to take some thought. I was pretty shy if not the shyest one in my family, the third child, following the only son. Our family didn't demonstrate love by kissing & hugging or by saying I love you ten times a day. I don't remember either taking place, it was just sort of assumed. Sex was never talked about or even the fact that I would become a women some day and this what you do to take care of yourself. I don't remember any conversations about important more adult issues at all.
Two lessons I do remember was, you don't talk when your father is watching the news; big mistake. And you don't sass your mother in front of your father at the dinner table. I remember my brother and father wrestling on the floor smaching some just picked baskets of strawberries, after this act of difiance was committed.
I guess the premise is if you learn where you came from you'll be able to figure out how to get where you want to go.
I hope to finish reading this book this weekend.