5.2- Family Tree of Influence
🌱 How This Activity Helps Women Psychospiritual Leaders:
This activity reveals your ancestral shadow self the unconscious programming, roles, and emotional inheritance that may silently steer your decisions and relationships. When you bring these into awareness, such patterns no longer control you they guide your growth.
By naming, witnessing, and consciously transforming them, you step into psychospiritual leadership a leadership grounded not just in external skills but in ancestral healing, self-connection, and soul-aligned choice.
In Story Image Therapy®, this is part of Finding Harmony in Sylvaheim the symbolic inner place where shadow and spirit unite. Here, your leadership is not driven by fear or performance, but by presence, purpose, and deep emotional wisdom. The wisdom (and pain) of your ancestors.
THE ACTIVITY:
🌳 Activity: Mapping Your Family Tree of Influence
This isn’t your average family tree. In SIT®, your family shadow self includes the ancestral stories, emotional legacies, and unconscious roles passed down through generations. These hidden roots shape your leadership style—often in ways we don’t realise until we pause to look more deeply.
This exercise helps you uncover your ancestral shadow self—not to judge or blame, but to understand, honour, and consciously choose how you wish to lead from here.
✍️ Instructions:
- Draw Your Family Tree
- Begin with yourself at the base.
- Include parents, grandparents, siblings, children—any key figures who shaped your life and emotional inheritance.
- Leave room beside each name for notes.
2. Identify Emotional Energies or Patterns
- Next to each person, write 2–3 traits, stories, or behaviours they embodied (e.g., “silent strength,” “emotional distance,” “nurturing but self-sacrificing,” “controlling,” “resilient under pressure”).
- Don’t focus only on negative traits—note the light as well as the shadow.
3. Reflect on Patterns
Ask yourself:
- What patterns have I inherited, internalised, or rebelled against?
- How do these patterns show up in my leadership—at work, in love, or in parenting?
- Are there “voices” in my leadership style that come from someone else’s survival strategy, not my soul’s truth?
- What part of my Frog (relational/empathic self) or Scorpion (protective/strategic self) mirrors these ancestral traits?
4. Symbolic Action: Root and Reframe
- Choose one ancestral gift you wish to carry forward. Draw a symbol next to it (like a heart, flame, or spiral).
- Choose one ancestral pattern you’re ready to release or transform. Draw a leaf or stone beside it.
- Write a sentence like:
“I honour this legacy, but I choose to lead from a deeper truth now.”