(Originally appeared in Sense and Psychotherapy, Winter 2000)

One Saturday many years ago, home from college for the weekend, I was down in the basement doing laundry when one of my brothers came in and asked me what I was doing. “You don’t belong here anymore” he said, with a bite that only another family member can put in such words. Actually though, he was right. At the time, I felt as though my family and I didn’t even know each other, and it wasn’t long before I moved not just out of state, but to the other side of the country.

Looking back now across 20 years and 3000 miles, though I once again feel a strong connection with my family, I occasionally still wonder where, and how, I belong. As we all are, I’m deeply influenced by my experiences within my family, and again like most of us, I’m still not exactly sure how, or how deeply. Every morning I make my bed and have my son make his, in some part because as a kid my mother would strip the sheets if I didn’t make mine, but I wonder… in what more subtle ways am I raising my son as my parents raised me?

I’m fortunate that my family experience holds much more good than bad. I’m a happy, proud member of my clan and I look forward to the all too few opportunities to return for visits. Yet there’s a value in the physical and emotional distance I finally achieved. I feel now as though I can stand back and look at my family in a way that I couldn’t when I was immersed in it. There have been times, as a result of that distance, when I’ve made a conscious choice to shed psychic baggage that once weighed me down. We cannot change the past, nor entirely erase any negative effects, but we can learn from it and thus give ourselves the gift of our own present and future.

I know plenty of people, both friends and clients, who haven’t been as fortunate as I in the families they were dealt. I often wonder, as a therapist, what I can bring to the families I work with when the positive feeling I get from my family is sometimes as strong as the negative feeling many people get from theirs. Still, when I stop and recall how long it’s taken me to get to this point, I realize that what all of us can bring to our family experience is the strength and courage to step back and look at it, examining both the good and the bad, consciously choosing what to keep and what to discard.

I have come to realize that I can never truly “go back”, and this brings a certain sadness. Yet, it also frees me to explore new ways of going forward, discovering who I am and forging even deeper relationships with my parents and siblings. I have spent a long time doing my mental laundry and it’s still not spotless. I doubt I’ll ever remove all the stains, but that’s OK. My oldest clothes still tend to be the most comfortable anyhow and, wherever I am, I feel now that I belong in them.