An orphan is commonly understood as a child who has lost both parents to death, whose parents are unknown or whose parents have permanently abandoned them. Orphanhood is really a state in which one does not have parents or family and therefore who lacks those needs that usually come from the family. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that the experience of orphanhood exists as on a scale of severity. And on that scale, it is actually possible to feel like an orphan and be alienated and emotionally disowned within a family even though you technically have parents and have a family. Abandonment can exist on many levels, not just the physical. In other words, it is possible to be an orphan IN a family. Many children who are identified with orphans in popular media such as Cinderella or Annie or Oliver Twist are in fact experiencing this.
The scapegoat or black sheep in the family system always experiences some degree of orphanhood. The scapegoat becomes the carrier of the disowned aspects of the other family members. They reject the scapegoat just as they reject those disowned aspects of themselves. Therefore, the scapegoat is in fact disowned and alienated but still remains within the family system. To learn about scapegoats, you can watch my video titled: How to Stop Being a Scapegoat and Stop Being Scapegoated.
When a person is disowned or orphaned but is still living with their family physically, the family becomes in and of itself a kind of active gaslight. To gaslight someone is to sow seeds of doubt in their mind that makes them question their own sense of personal truth and reality (things like memory, judgement, perception, feelings etc). It is to try to convince someone that what they see, they didn’t see, what they hear they didn’t hear and what they feel they have no reason to feel. As it applies to orphanhood within a family, the gaslight is that when a child in a family system is in this type of dynamic, the child is emotionally disowned and alienated. The child feels emptiness, aloneness, neglect, rejection, lack of containment, lack of protection and no support. But on the surface, they have a roof over their heads. They have food. Their parents may say the words “I love you”. There may be other people in the room with them etc. So, like all good gaslighting, the child begins to tell the story that they are crazy and that something must be wrong with them. So, there is a huge discrepancy between how the situation LOOKS on the surface and the reality of the situation, especially on an emotional level. If you would like to understand more about gaslighting in depth, watch my video titled: Gaslighting (What is Gaslighting and How to Heal From it).
When a child suffers from orphanhood within a family, another element that acts as a gaslight and that will make the child feel like something is really, really wrong with him or her is that they have been traumatized. But when they are looking for the cause of the trauma, they will not be able to see anything. The reason is that this type of trauma falls into the category of trauma relative to what wasn’t there instead of what was there. For example, molestation is a trauma about what happened. Belonging that was never granted to you by your family is an example of what didn’t happen. This type of trauma is often called emotional neglect. Emotional neglect is always an element of orphanhood within a family. For this reason, if you want to understand this dynamic in-depth, it may benefit you to watch my video titled: Today’s Great Epidemic (And How to Cure It).
If in our past, we experienced trauma as a result of one of our needs not being met, the aspect of ourselves that could not get that need met, is still stuck in time unresolved. We experience that need being unmet in present time as well. So often, the thing we are lacking or missing in our current life, is that need that was not met at the time in our past that the trauma occurred. For example, say you were wounded as a child because you felt no sense of belonging with your family, that lack of belonging becomes a traumatic imprint. You feel the lack of belonging and that is really what the emptiness in your adult life is about.
The good news is that if you have suffered from this dynamic within your family, you are not doomed to never fitting in and starving for emotional needs for the rest of your life. If you have suffered from this dynamic, you need to consciously resolve the past experiences/ trauma associated with orphanhood within a family. I have created a process to help you with exactly this, it is called The Completion Process. You can learn all about this process by reading my book that is quite literally titled: The Completion Process. You can alternatively go to www.completionprocess.com and find one of my certified practitioners to lead you through the process instead.
The other thing you need to do is to accept the reality that your family did alienate you and emotionally disown you and therefore, whether you decide to keep them in your life or not, you need to find actual family. You need to meet those needs that family is intended to meet. Family is a group of people who are related either by blood (being descended from the same ancestry) or by affinity (being marriage or adoption). The affinity piece is the thing that should cause you to light up with hope because it implies that one can choose who to consider family. It implies that even though the government itself only currently recognizes relationships that are legalized in some way (such as legal marriage or legal adoption), in reality family has more to do with who a person considers to be kin or who they feel belonging with, regardless of whether they are blood related or not and regardless of whether they live under the same roof or not. This means, you need to find and choose your family. And this can be done now that you are an adult, who is not restricted to the household you were born into anymore. You have access to so many more resources. What you are looking for is the people and places where those needs associated with being ‘positively owned’ and belonging with a family can be met. For this reason, it may benefit you to watch two of my videos, the first is: Family (The Truth About Family) and the second is: Own People (How to Take Positive Ownership of Your Relationships).
When you are born into the current structure of society, it feels like your only way to belong in greater society is to belong in a family. Because of this, children who were orphaned within a family feel not only alienated within their family, but alienated from humanity at large. You may feel like you don’t belong on earth. The thing is, when you are disowned by something, you tend to disown that thing in return. It’s often too hard to be rejected by something and yet keep approving of it and pulling it close. This means, when we suffer from orphan within a family complex, we jump in on a self-fulfilling cycle. When our family alienates and disowns us, we tend to alienate and disown them. And we tend to also alienate and disown society. And we tend to alienate and disown humanity. And we tend to alienate and disown the world at large. Obviously, this means that we hold an energy and say things and do things that alienate and disown others. They obviously experience this as a rejection. And so, they reject, alienate and disown us. And this intensifies our rejection and alienation and dis-ownership even further. And so, the cycle continues on and on until we are convinced that we belong with nothing and no one on earth. And the sad part is that we don’t even see that it is us pushing others away. If we want to undo this dynamic, we have to change our perspective drastically. On top of seeking out our chosen family, we must also start being the one to do what was never done to us. This means you must take others as a part of you. You must begin to positively own people. Think about what your family would have or should have done if they really took you as a part of them and thought you belonged with them; and if they really wanted you rather than a different kind of child. What would they have felt like and said and done? Make a list and start doing those things to other people. Not only will this change your entire point of attraction, so you will be a match to the experience of family. You can also rest at night knowing that instead of perpetuating what was done to you, you are breaking the cycle and being the change that you wish to see in the world.
To end this article, I am going to share a different perspective as well. If you look at yourself through the lens of an extraterrestrial, no matter whether you were actually physically orphaned or whether you are an orphan in a family, if you step outside of the social construct called relatives, you are still related to people. You are still a part of humanity, regardless of whether you are a part of a group of related people. And beyond that even, you are a part of earth. You cannot un-belong to humanity any more than a deer can un-belong to the species called deer and any more than it can un-belong to earth as it is one of earth’s creatures. The more you awaken and the day you will consider yourself happy, is the day when you realize that humanity is your family. The earth is your family, the universe itself is your family and you cannot un-belong to it. In other words, if you don’t belong to a family, belong to humanity. Belong to the world. Belong to the universe and as such, see all things in existence as family. Choose them as family. See them as a part of you and see yourself as a part of them. Doing so will inevitably reveal your place and purpose in the grand scheme of things. And when you find that, no matter how much people may resist and reject you and disown you, you will see that they can’t actually erase your belonging. They are simply and quite painfully fighting against what they have disowned within themselves.
This is my hope for you and the gift lying dormant within the experience of being orphaned. To break free from the limitations of separation that occur when you identify with only one group and to instead be able to take your place of belonging within humanity and within the world. And as such, to be able to fly across the world and to shake hands with any person, deeply feeling and knowing that they are your brother, your sister, your mother, your father, your daughter, your son, your kin. You have simply been physically apart until this re-joining. And this being the case, you belong with them all and they all belong with you.
