My two families:

First Sentence

We All Have Two Families: Taken amass, the following autoethnographic piece explores family in two parallel realms of my lived experience: external and internal. The inspiration for exploring these two realms of experience arose from the following quote: ...we all have two families, one that we live with and another we live by. (Gillis, 1996, p. xv) By chance, I had come across this quote in the initial stages of writing my thesis. For two key reasons, it immediately had a profound affect on me.

Description

Abstract Picture in your mind the ideal family according to Western dominant culture, likely you have conjured a picture of a biological nuclear family form. More often than not, however, a disjunction exists between the internalized family we live by and the externalized family we live with. Using the autoethnographic methodology, the author explores her two notions of the family from these two levels of the lived experience. Eventually, the author discovers that the feelings of lack and failure that she felt as a child, arose from the struggle to reconcile the variable speeds of her two families (that is, the slowed stability of the lived by family; and the infinite unpredictability of the lived with family). The feasibility of a self- fashioned approach to practicing postmodern family therapy that includes both narrative and Deleuzian perspectives is explored.

Subjects