Community as Instrument of Personal Transformation
Editor’s Note: Sven wrote this article amid the Holiday Season when so many long for connection and community, and so many suffer the pain of disconnection, sadness, family pain, and more. In it, Sven discusses his rock-solid belief that creating what he calls the ‘Chosen Family’ can be massively transformative, often even more so, than family-of-origin. In his bold, cut-to-the-chase style, he provides hope for all struggling with aloneness and the desire to live more authentically. To that end, six months ago, Badass Counseling launched the free ‘Badass Counseling Group’ on Facebook that now bursts with 39,000 members. Seeking a more intimate experience, more resources, and more opportunities for deeper connection, people in the group and online kept asking Sven for something more. So, just recently, after months of work by his team, Sven launched the limited-enrollment, subscription-based CMTY-PLUS! on BadassCounseling.com. It’s an absolute game-changer! If you or someone you know is seeking greater soul community and others to share the soul journey with, please join these groups now.
Your Chosen Family: Community as Instrument of Personal Transformation
Ever had someone in your family that you wish weren’t?
I mean your family of origin and then the folks that come with that. It starts with parents and siblings, and maybe stepparents/step-sibs, then expands to cousins/aunts/uncles and grandparents, and eventually children, in-laws, nieces and nephews, new in-laws after a divorce, step-kids, and on and on.
In all of that pile of family, have you ever had even just one person that you really wish weren’t there, weren’t a part of the family, weren’t in your life? Well, it would be hard to find a person who doesn’t have at least one person they sometimes wish weren’t in their family. It’s a pretty common phenomenon. Heck, I’m quite certain I’ve been that person, over the years, that someone or another wish weren’t in their family, extended family, or stepfamily. It’s sort of an inevitability that the larger any family gets and the more it changes and people age and grow, the greater the likelihood of there being people whom you don’t like.
The part that really sucks about a situation like this is that you’re stuck with the person, whether you like it or not. On the one hand, you didn’t choooose this person, but now you’re stuck with this person in your life. And, of course, it’s far worse the closer the person is. A disagreeable uncle you only see at Thanksgiving is nowhere near as painful as a stepsibling you have to live with every day or a parent who continues to take advantage of you at 44, just as they did when you were 14.
That’s where it starts. It starts with one person. Sometimes, for some people in some families, maybe there is only one person they cannot abide. But, if that equation replicates, it can reach a point where you are in a family of multiple people you don’t want to be around, or multiple people who don’t want to be around you or treat you poorly.
Whatever the situation, perhaps you begin to distance yourself from the family. Maybe it starts with one holiday you decide to skip, calling in fake-sick, or gee-I’m-slammed-and-can’t-make-the-wedding. Recognizing that feels kinda good, that separation, perhaps your distancing or checking out grows a bit more and a bit more. Perhaps your family of origin decreases. Maybe you check out entirely; maybe you don’t. Maybe you maintain a half-relationship with your family or a cordial relationship, or maybe you’re just done completely.
... In with the new (the Chosen Family)
The crazy part about this distancing from family is that our natural inclination is to think that this is something that might happen in a person’s 20s or 30s, say. Still, it can happen in some families in the teen years, tragically. This un-choosing of family, to whatever degree it happens and at whatever age it happens, is both painful and difficult. But, it can be so necessary.
As a result, a void is created where family, or at least certain people, used to be. And, since nature (and the human soul) abhors a vacuum, we seek to fill the place that the unchosen used to fill. Enter friendships and relationships.
We start to create and build relationships that can support us, or at least we try to. As we age, we get a little better at it and a little better still. We begin to develop our own community, our own sort of ‘chosen family’ – those people whose values and treatment more closely resemble what we ourselves strive to bring to the world. Maybe it is friendships, particularly adult friendships, that bring this. Maybe it is the new family you marry into that gives you the love and support you so desperately wanted, or still want, from your own family. Maybe it’s those connections you experience for the first time when you found your new family at college. Or maybe your workmates become your chosen family.
I can recall moving across the country, from Minnesota to Los Angeles, to be with a woman. As I lived there, a few years, and simply could not afford to go home to be with family in the far north, our neighbors and workmates became very important in our lives, in ways friends had never been so before for me. There was an intimacy in our little, 6-unit apartment building, as we had each come from somewhere else and sorta needed each other, needed those connections. We had our own happy, small community that meant so much to each of us. Thanksgiving and Christmastime were especially warm in ways those holidays had not been for me, in years.
Chosen family, I soon discovered, has the power to create in you the very thing that was never possible in your old configuration of family. Real growth, real support, and real love blossom. And, it’s a glorious thing.
“I’ve found my people”
“It’s like I’ve finally come home”
“These people are my family”
These are all common expressions when someone has found, or created, their chosen family, their community. You’ve found your people.
Chosen Family Journaling Questions
Have you ever had the experience of ‘coming home’ when it wasn’t your family of origin?
What does ‘coming home’ mean to you?
Who is your chosen family?
Why them?
What specifically do they bring to your life?
What specifically is missing from your family of origin that your soul so needs?
For some who may be experiencing that support and love for the first time in their lives, it cracks open a whole new belief system, one based on the wild new notion, “Hey wait, maybe I am lovable.” To be appreciated, respected, and supported by people who have zero obligation to do either can be a powerfully transformative experience, from old into new. For, it conveys worth and can facilitate the revealing and expansion of self. Why now? Because here, now, among these people, it’s finally safe… safe to become.
I can recall during my years of seminary and after, when I paid my bills by tending bar, that my goal was never just to get people at my bar to open up and start talking to me. The real goal was to get people talking to each other, facilitating that in whatever ways I could. Because, then it’s about the place, not me. The place itself, as driven by these connections with each other, would take on its own warmth and charm. I was basically creating my own little congregation of folks who just wanted to connect, and my job was to make it safe. While they may not have all been lonely, I never was far from that old Billy Joel line,
They’re sharing a drink they call loneliness.
But it’s better than drinking alone.
The Individual Soul Journey Together
I really believe in this notion of sharing the individual soul journey together. I think we lost something, as a culture, when religion began to wane in importance in the lives of so many people. I wrote about this 30 years ago in my first book, Spiritual but not Religious.
While there is nothing inherently wrong with individual or collective movement away from religion (and even as a former pastor, I’ve largely stepped away from religion, myself), one thing was definitely lost that has not been replaced fully. We lost that sense of spiritual connection, not to a god but to each other. You can have a relationship with a god in the privacy of your own room. But you can’t have a relationship with another, you cannot have a sense of community alone. And, I happen to believe very, very strongly that we all desire not just connection but soul connection. I think we all long to have deep conversations, and the safety to open up, even if only occasionally. I truly and absolutely believe that there is a palpable longing in our society and our individual lives to have real connections at the soul level, and not just with a lover/partner.
There is nothing in the world wrong with checking out and not wanting to connect with others. Nothing at all. And, sometimes, for some folks, perhaps the pain of life just got so bad that is the only option that brings peace. While I lament the pain this person has gone through, I simultaneously respect their need to protect themself.
However, that doesn’t negate the longing. And I believe that longing for connection, even for the person who gives up on ever having it, is part and parcel of the human experience, particularly at the soul level.
For, we are each on our own soul’s journey, whether we’re aware of it or not. Whether we call it that or not, we’re each seeking the connection to self and the peace, happiness, power, and fulfillment that comes with that.
A huge part of that is the desire to connect with others to sorta share the individual journey together. That sense of soul community can bring comfort on the journey, like Frodo’s Sam, Harry Potter’s Sam, and, well, everybody’s Sam at Cheers, even while each of the Sams is on his or her own soul’s journey. It is to share the journey, even if only for this period of time. Soul community – this chosen family – is a powerful thing in supporting the transformation from what-was to what-will-be.
At its least, this sharing of the journey diminishes the loneliness of going one’s own way. But even that is no small thing. To know we are not alone is a beautiful thing when having the courage to be alone on a path that doesn’t exist, but we are creating for ourselves. Even though the Sams in our lives are not on my path, they understand what it is to be alone on one’s own path. So, that sense of shared experience is warming and comforting. The loneliness inside quiets down or can even completely go away.
At its most, the sharing of the soul journey, even while each path is unique to each person, changes the myth we believe about ourselves, from unlovable to lovable, from not mattering to mattering. The mere presence of the community, itself, and the support it offers conveys to you the importance of you, the mattering. And there is no truth more revolutionary, more able to crush the rocks oppressing the soul than the revelation, “I actually matter! The real me, not just the me that does stuff for others. The real me matters! Damn!” This is because when one has been conditioned to believe precisely the opposite, over the course of decades, something like mattering is all but unfathomable. Nothing will make your head explode like that one epiphany.
But how to Find or Create a soul community?
The obvious question birthed by this discussion is, then, how do you find or create that sense of community? Well, the ugly answer is that creating a soul community, or a shared individual journey, is both terribly difficult and shockingly effortless.
What it really requires is what the rock group, The Byrds, sang about in their classic, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” Pulling from Hebrew Scripture, they sing,
A time to embrace
A time to refrain from embracing
1 - Stop Embracing Those Who Don’t Embrace You
Perhaps the very hardest part of creating/finding soul community is the courage to stop embracing those who do not embrace you. The creation of community built upon authentic self demands the rejection of community, or even just persons, whose connection is based on inauthentic self, or the self you’ve been conditioned to believe you must be. You cannot create new unless you have first created room for the new by rejecting that of the old that no longer works, that which no longer gives life. It is to engage the pruning of life and all that you’ve acquired or had foisted onto you, that does not breathe energy into you. In the Diamonds and Raw Sewage chapter and exercise from my book, There’s a Hole in My Love Cup, it’s all the raw sewage that must be de-chosen. And there ain’t nothin’ on God’s green earth that’ll test your nerve like ceasing to embrace those who do not, and perhaps never really have embraced you.
2 - Embrace becoming your authentic self
The second difficult piece that often precedes the de-embracing, or de-choosing, the old or broken is the embracing of authentic self or at least embracing the becoming…the becoming, even if you don’t really know what the hell you’re becoming. For, the embracing of becoming is a rejection of the old forms when you know damn well how any new becoming is going to be received by old family, old friends, and old community. When you know, in advance, that new self will be rejected, despised, or even just questioned, the embracing of self and becoming becomes its own courageous act. It is you saying you matter when the voices of the old community or old family are implicitly saying that authentic you doesn’t matter. And that is a bold statement of self-worth, of self-love.
Both embracing and refraining from embracing are painfully difficult, brutal, ugly tasks because they come at such an extraordinarily high price. Yet, nothing is more necessary for the discovery of soul community. For, to build a community before these two happenings is to create a chosen family based on a version of self that doesn’t work. It is to create connections that you really don’t want to work. Because, if they’re built on old self then those connections will keep you stuck in old self. But, if they are built on new self, or at least the encouragement to become new self, they give room and foster the growth of the authentic soul.
Authentic Self Journaling questions:
Do you see how the openness to or movement toward new, authentic self is necessary for the creation of soul community?
What are the aspects of old self that you’re still too scared to let go of?
Who or what do you most fear losing if you do move toward greater authenticity?
Or, what is the response you fear that would hurt most if you did do so?
How much has the pain of living inauthentically robbed life from you?
How bad does it have to get before it catapults you into the changes you know you need to make? List those changes.
But still, this is all well and good, but it doesn’t answer how to build soul community.
Actually, it does. For, all you have to do is focus on living in courageous, authentic communion with your own soul’s voice and you will begin to naturally attract relationships that breathe life into your soul. In fact, the more you have the courage to simply become your new self, the more the good will just fall out of the sky.
Think I’m full of it?
Maybe you do. I would too. Heck, I did think that.
But the more I took it for a spin, the more I kept cutting away from my life, both outside me and inside me, that which was not me, and the more I embraced paths that spoke to and quickened my soul, the more the magic began to happen in my life. Relationships became deeper. Community began to cluster around me or with me. Shit just fell out of the sky. I know it sounds like total hokum, but it’s so true. And nothing has been more glorious than hearing clients who thought it hokum, too, come back to me months and years later and state, “Holy shit, Sven, you were right!” And it’s not that I give a crap about being right, but that I love to see people experience the divine fruits that come from the authentic life.
If we just naturally go in the directions of our soul’s inclinations, we’ll either find or create connections and families that seem to rise from nowhere, because we’ll cross paths with others who share the very paths or inclinations we do. A community is born; a chosen family sinks its first roots. It will arrive at its own speed when it is time, not necessarily when you want it. And, as long as you are tied to wanting, or needing it, NOW, you are not living authentically but are trying to force the equation of your life. For, living your soul journey demands an openness to the movements, infusions, and waiting of the divine, universal soul that connects all things. The path of authentic life is not grasping and needing but living with an open hand that reaches but lets go, at the same time.
Destruction and Creation of new community
Now, the truth is, there are some folks who have the experience of standing up for the expression of new self, and the family-of-origin (FOO) actually surprises. The FOO, in these somewhat rare cases, responds with openness, acceptance, and perhaps even contrition for not being accepting and welcoming of your new self, in the past. And, nothing will blow away the intrepid soul that is willing to risk revealing real self to family more than that same family saying, “F*******k! We f**ked up! And hell yes, we accept and embrace new you.” It’s the very thing many folks spend their entire lives trying to make happen, only to be met with a lifetime of disappointment. So, when it does come for some, it’s nothing short of earth-shattering.
But the work is not done there. For this initial acceptance to truly bear fruit, long term, there must be many conversations that deconstruct the FOO model previously in place. That, alone, will require the other folks involved to effectively engage their own movement toward authentic self. If they, too, do not engage in the journey toward greater soul self, they will snap back into old patterns, old beliefs, and the old family myth that you and they need to be thus-and-so. This is why a family that does this is so rare. Like hitting the Powerball numbers, so many things must happen somewhat simultaneously, not the least of which is others being open to the same hard journey to self that you are on.
In the vacuum of the destruction of the old forms of the FOO, there must be creation of new community that is life-giving. And, this is done one relationship at a time, inch by blessed inch. Creation of soul community requires that each person begin to grow the courage to speak and live authentically, moment to moment, even as there are a million stumbles along the way. There must be room for error, lots of forgiveness, lots of patience, and lots of humility.
It can be done within a family-of-origin, but in so many ways, it is much more difficult than building a soul community outside of the FOO. However, if endeavored and successfully created, there are few things on earth more life-giving and heartwarming than the creation of the very thing you’ve longed for all your days.
Chosen Family and What the Young can Teach
For most, however, the creation of chosen family is the alternative that can be so roundly and surprisingly life-giving, because it gives the hope and confirmation that life is not over, death does not set in, just because the family-of-origin is not the family you wished it would have been. And, the new growth of self within that hope and acceptance is the fulfillment of the longing of the soul.
Of course, the beauty of the internet is that this sense of soul community can happen without people being in person. The young kids have taught us the truth of this. The younger generations who have been doing multi-player gaming for years, even decades, often find their own sense of community there, which is why some become so dependent upon gaming. If I’ve seen it once I’ve seen it a million times with clients or kids of clients. In a world where they feel alone, unaccepted, or even unwanted, strong connections, friendships, and even love can develop in virtual environments.
Online dating is little different. I met my girlfriend of 11 years through an online dating site, when she was in NYC and I was in Oakland, CA, ministering to and living among the homeless. The powerful connections of soul community can absolutely happen online, just as surely as they can happen in person. They come with potential pitfalls, such as catfishing and the like, which I’ll not go into here, because there are ample resources discussing the pitfalls and precautions when online. And those are good things to learn.
But, we need not shy away from connecting online, when done so with clarity and wide-eyed awareness. For, truth be told, even in-person relationships and communities have held the potential for harm and hurt. In all things, grow your connection with your own inner voice, so that you can venture boldly yet safely in the world.
The Soul Journey Journaling Questions
So, as with all things, we come back to the importance of continuing your own soul journey as you now feel called to create, grow, or discover a soul community and chosen family of your own. Here are some journaling questions for you in this time of contemplation and new movement on your soul journey:
Are you living authentically, moment to moment? In what ways can you become better at doing so?
Are you embracing and refraining from embracing those things and people that require one or the other? In what ways can you be doing more of this?
What is your greatest fear in all of this, especially when it comes to connecting?
What do you most fear letting go of or walking away from?
What do you most want out of soul community?
What is most missing in your life regarding connection and community? Be specific.
Are you able to simultaneously let go of the thing you want most in this?
Is it time to reach out in new directions for sharing the individual soul journey with others? Which are the new avenues that naturally resonate inside you that you’d like to consider or try? List your fears and anxieties. List the upsides and possible gains.
Are you ready?
It’s time!
Please feel free to check out my free online moderated community, Badass Counseling Group, on Facebook. If you long for a closer community, and lots more excellent resources for growth and transformation to greater ALIVENESS, go to www.badasscounseling.com and click on CMTY-PLUS! It’s what you’ve been waiting for!
Thanks for reading.
——————
-- Sven Erlandson, MDiv, Is The Author Of Seven Books, Including 'Badass Jesus: The Serious Athlete And A Life Of Noble Purpose' And 'I Steal Wives: A Serial Adulterer Reveals The REAL Reasons More And More Happily Married Women Are Cheating.' He Has Been Called The Father Of The Spiritual But Not Religious Movement, After His Seminal Book 'Spiritual But Not Religious' Came Out 15 Years Ago, Long Before The Phrase Became Part Of Common Parlance And Even Longer Before The Movement Hit Critical Mass. He Is Former Military, Clergy, And NCAA Head Coach For Strength And Conditioning; And Has A Global Counseling/Consulting Practice with offices In NYC, NJ, And Stamford, CT: BadassCounseling.Com
