joelogs

joelogs edited the first sentence of Elder Wisdom: Crafting Your Own Elderhood Tuesday, December 22, 2009.

• Elders carry with them a long legacy of family experiences that in often undetected ways impact on their satisfaction in later life. Families of origin launch us into life, give us our earliest experiences of love and self worth, and influence our relations with others. Yet our parents and siblings, as psychotherapy knows so well, affect us so profoundly in positive and negative ways. Usually our families exercise a mixture of both benign and unhealthy influences. Of course, what we become is not solely determined by how we were "marinated" in childhood. Our personalities in older age are a changing amalgam of the external influences combined with our own genetic propensities and our own decision-making. Moreover, we can change to some extent at any stage of life. The challenge is to understand and integrate family histories so that we can continue to develop toward our fullest human potential. In this chapter, we look at a number of ways in which creative elders reflect on their fam