I’m Arrogant, Are You?

I once thought I knew a lot about my ancestors. There was this arrogant idea in my head that because I knew about a few of them that I knew everything. Teenagers can be that way. Mature adults can be too.

Have you ever been struck upside the head with information that radically changed your perception of something in your family? Did you have that information but never truly recognized what it was telling you?

A Sick Father

My grandfather, Siegfried, had wanted to be an engineer, not a railroad engineer, a mechanical engineer. He was living in Tilsit, East Prussia, attending school. I was loving learning.He had great aspirations. Then he received the call to come home.

His father, Ernst, had to have stomach surgery and my grandfather needed to take over operations of the estate. If there was one thing he did not want to be, it was a farmer. When he went home, he hoped to go back to school. That never happened.

How Did I Miss That?

This is where things went wrong for me. I somehow stuck the story in my head that Ernst died and that my grandfather thus took over the operations. I was so sure of that story that I missed important information that told me the story was wrong. This went on for years.

Stuck in my head, it became so powerful that my subconscious was protecting it. I would see death dates and places, pictures, and I heard stories that contradicted the story, but I was always sure that he died before World War II.

You see, that story is one that made me so proud, and sympathetic to my grandfather that any other possibility was blasphemous. If his father didn’t die, why did he not go back to school? Why did he not become and engineer? Why was it not a shockingly horrible story of loss, loss of opportunity, loss of family? It had to be that bad, right?

The reality was that his father remained weak and less able to work than before his stomach illness. Man, that is not nearly as cool a story.

Why Hold On To A Story?

Can you see how the story took on a life of its own? It helped me gain identity. But, the identity was false, so any information to the contrary was an attack on me, my identity. How did I discover the error? I was listening to recordings of my grandfather telling stories when I heard this familiar one with a twist. His father didn’t die. Yeah, that made my head twist. For all the years of knowing the truth, suddenly, I knew nothing. Remarkably, I quickly found the death dates and places. I comprehended the pictures. There was a new truth staring me in the face, and I could see it.

Such change can be forced. It requires you to get outside your own story and start questioning what you know. It is liberating to learn from new perspectives and have truth reaffirmed and errors corrected. If you want to learn more, then take a look at some of my audio trainings, especially, Learning to See.