Family religion or what we need to leave behind

Welcome to this Special Edition of on unfamiliar ground. To live a life of integrity we need to leave our family culture behind and become rooted in our true selves.

A friend of mine parted ways with her husband a few years ago and entered a new relationship. It was a painful process, but the greatest source of difficulty was one that seemed unimportant and irrelevant: the occupation of her new boyfriend. Her family kept a long tradition of being teachers and civil servants, and she was a kindergarten manager. Her new boyfriend was a businessman who owned a small, flourishing opticians.

Roger Kegan coined the term 'family religion' not as a reference to the spiritual tradition a family chooses to follow,