There are moments when a stranger’s story feels like a mirror, quietly revealing something we’ve carried for years without naming. In this episode, Aaron invites us into the layered terrain of family origin stories, where identity, belonging, and inherited narratives begin to take shape long before we have language for them. Through a deeply human encounter and a series of gentle questions, the conversation settles into the quiet realization that much of who we believe ourselves to be may not have been chosen at all. As the night unfolds, listeners are asked to sit with the stories they’ve lived, the roles they’ve carried, and the subtle edges where those inherited patterns begin to soften, shift, or ask for release.

Invitations to Consider:

1. A powerful real-life encounter that opens the doorway into reflecting on human resilience and chosen identity
2. How family origin stories shape identity, often before we are aware of it
3. The role of belonging, attachment, and emotional conditioning in early development
4. The hidden influence of family roles, myths, and power structures on adult life
5. The possibility of rewriting inherited narratives and choosing new ways of being

About Aaron:

Aaron Tabacco, PhD, has spent more than thirty years guiding people through growth and change, often in complex and high-stakes environments. He currently serves as the Director of Staff Experience at a major academic health sciences university. With a background spanning nursing, neuroscience, education, coaching, and mediation, his work centers on helping individuals and organizations navigate identity, connection, and transformation with greater clarity and care.

Known for his grounded presence and compassionate communication, Aaron works with students, clinicians, faculty, executives, and senior leaders across healthcare and other industries. His approach integrates relational depth, reflective practice, and a commitment to creating more humane, integrated ways of working and living. He works in San Francisco, California, and lives in Vancouver, Washington, where he continues a lifelong engagement with writing, music, and the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest alongside his husband and three adult sons.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-tabacco-phd-83359b9/

https://lucusgroup.com/home

https://substack.com/@aarontabacco?r=b5ap9&utm_medium=ios

https://www.youtube.com/@CirclesEdges

Email: aaron@circlesedges.org

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Our lives. Move in patterns, things. We repeat things. We return to rituals, stories, people and places, the familiar cycles we experience as our sign posts, our stations of attention, and then sometimes we awaken more fully to these patterns, reaching a moment that asks something of us, a boundary with an invitation to turn those lines into thresholds of growth and transformation. I am Aaron tabaco here again with you tonight. You are listening to circles edges,

good evening and good wishes, everyone. I have really been missing you the last few weeks, and I have to apologize for a little bit of a delay in this next episode of circles, edges radio. I don't know how you are arriving tonight, but I am arriving on the heels of several weeks of very intense work in my everyday life, my day job, as we call it, and in addition a little bit of a period of being under the weather. So I've been thinking about you so much and thinking about getting back to our time together here on the program, and deeply thinking about it as I always do, and I'm wondering how you are arriving tonight. I'm here as always, in my very comfy, burnt orange armchair in my office with my candle burning and the night time surrounding me, a little tired but excited to be here with you. Perhaps you are also a little tired and excited to be here. Please know I wonder about you as I see the list of locations across the globe that people tune in to this radio program to spend time with me. I think about you. I wonder who you are, where you are, and I'm always grateful for those of you who reach out and say hello through email or some other method and share with me your experiences of listening into the program. This is exactly what I wanted from this project of mine was to draw closer to people everywhere in the spirit of kindness and safety and comfort. So thank you for joining me in that and our first three evenings together, I did a deep dive into just a few of the many circles of our interior life, and I promised you that I'd start moving a little Bit outward. And this week, we're going to begin three evenings of exploring our relational circles, those that are closest to us, those in our inner social lives. I want to begin tonight by telling you a story of something that happened to me recently, a few weeks ago, I guess it was about four weeks ago now, I was traveling for work where I was participating in teaching a three day course on

leadership and one morning to get there on time. Of course, you know, you have to get from where you're staying. In my case, it was a hotel to the facility where we were hosting these events. And for me that meant calling a ride share. So it was quite early in the morning, probably 7:30am requested a car, and short time later, someone arrived, and I opened the back door, as one does, and greeted the driver, who was a man about I don't know, nearly 15 years younger than myself, with a warm smile. In an engaging tone. And I found that a little surprising for that time of day, but immediately I just felt a sense of connection and joy being in his presence. There was nothing performative about him at all. He was so authentic and so genuine and exuded so much positivity, of course, that drew me in, and we started a really lovely conversation, getting to know one another, and I couldn't help but reflect back to him that he seemed like a person who was truly joyful, and that the energy he was bringing to me to start my day was very appreciated and noticed. And I just wanted to thank him for that and being who I am. Of course, I asked a question, How did you find your way to living in this space of positivity the way that you do so naturally and you know, so effortlessly, it seemed to me, and he took me on a journey with him, a deep journey, very quickly, sharing that you know, his life had a very rough start, and as a young child of about eight or nine years old, I forget he witnessed some horribly violent acts that had resulted, first in the death of his mother and a few days later, his father. I don't feel it is my place to tell this man's story fully and very intimately as we shared it together, but I did want to honor that he would trust me with revealing the deepest part of himself and the most shaping experience in his life. And he went on to talk about his older sister and himself being immediately taken in by older siblings in the family over the course of

many years, and as you can imagine, a great deal of trial and difficulty having lived through such a horrific experience and through all of it, through all of the ups and downs and the years of anger and difficulty and feelings of loss and maybe being lost, at some point, He made a decision to step away from that inheritance of those dark losses and events, and choose to cultivate a life of beauty and happiness and joy and service to others in service to the world. And I found it so incredibly moving to hear a bit about his story, that when the brief ride came to an end, and I have to share, I mean, I think we were in his vehicle together for about 15 minutes, and we pulled up to the curb in a little bit of a state of laughter, as the conversation had turned into a space of happiness and joy, I said to him, you know, this is a very unusual request, probably, but everything inside of me tells me that I can't leave this car. I can't leave you without giving you a hug. And he chuckled and looked at me across the seat and said, Sure, why not? And I grabbed my little knapsack for the day, hopped out of the car and came around to the driver's side and embraced him and hugged him so tightly, and something said to me that I needed to share a message as someone who was a father of three sons, about how proud I was of him for how he has decided to live his life, and how positively he impacted me and how grateful I was to have met him, and we both sobbed together and. Embraced in this deep hug. There were many words exchanged as we said goodbye in this profound and deeply connected state, and I walked away, taking that incredible connection and energy with me thinking about this incredibly inspiring man and his journey and his choices, I have to say, I think this was one of the most profound connections I've ever had with a stranger in my entire life, and I thought about him all day. I continue to think about him. I continue to wonder if ever our paths will cross

again. I hope for that. I'd like to know more about him and his story,

the power of what happened in our exchange, and perhaps what it meant to him as well. But all of this today is for me to help us find our way into tonight's circle, which is really all about family, and I understand that for many, many people, family is a really difficult topic. So I will ask, regardless of what family means to you right now, that you would trust yourself and perhaps even me tonight, to listen in deeply and go on this journey into that really formative circle, probably the most formative circle of our social lives, spending this evening together, considering our origin stories.

We arrive in this world, in a family circle, and we'll spend the rest of our lives, navigating what that has meant to us, whether we arrived in a circle that was loving and supportive and generative or dysfunctional and factious and distant, whether our family was deep and rich and wide or narrow, isolated or even completely absent, leaving us to spend many, many years of our childhood and development, searching to understand family and what it is to us, the effects of the family circle are really the foundations of our deepest understanding of ourselves. There's just no more formative circle than our experience of family and also no other circle where we so broadly and deeply discover our edges for growth and transformation, no other circle that tests us as powerfully as our family circle, I'm already thinking about you right now beside me, and I'm so curious to hear what the idea and experience of family means to you when I bring this up tonight, my guess is there are many complicated, joyful, sad, highly variable feelings and thoughts family brings up for you that is absolutely true of me as well, and it's such a big subject. There's so many dimensions of family, so many phases of family. Tonight, I just want to spend some time unpacking our families of origin, the places where our identities began, and the influences that we carry through the rest of our lives, from the inheritances that we received from them, or maybe are still receiving from them. Within the family circle, we. So there are dimensions of inheritance, as I've mentioned, the formation of our identity, the myths we receive, ideas of loyalty, connection. We have ideas of our formation, not just our identity, but the belonging of that identity, attachment, the navigation of our emotional vocabulary, our ability to be present for ourselves and others. And of course, all of that takes place within the concept of structure. There's so many unspoken things about the roles and rules and

power, communication and conflict within a family that influence how we see ourselves in the world. It's such a rich circle, we probably could do an entire series of circles edges, just on the topic of family. But tonight, I want to explore a few of these pieces, especially the identity piece, and how we're showing up for ourselves now in the world, how we carry things from our past, whether we realize it or not, what from our families we cherish and esteem and seek to pass on, and what we have received that has held us back and harmed us, and that we've strived not to pass on as an inheritance to others, and also maybe when we are looking at the edges, how successful we've been with both of those things, and how has negotiating All of that resulted in where we are in our lives and journeys at this very moment. So with that in mind, let's start a little bit with the circle of our identity within our family context. Sometimes I think we forget that our identity is a story we were given that began before we even arrived on the planet, that so much of the identity that was expected of us that our parents, parent, grandparents, aunts and uncles, older siblings, considered who we would be, what our roles would be, what our behavior should be, what was expected of us. All of that began before our birth. Some of it was shaped by the experience of what the pregnancy was like and the delivery was like. I know as a father, each of my three sons had a very different birth story in terms of the physicality of the experience. Now, each of them came into the world in their own ways, with their own unique cadences and circumstances at the times of their births, and it's only been in recent years that I've even come to realize how much power the retelling of those joyful stories as part of our family mythology and lore. How powerful those stories have been in the identity formations of my children, each one of them, in some way, has come to see some part of how they

show up in the world based on that storytelling that we did in rehearsing the joy of bringing them into the world, only recently started to even wonder how wise we were in Our storytelling. Sometimes you just don't think, as a parent, that something like telling the story of someone's birth will shape how they see themselves in the world, that they might listen to the story and extract from that some characteristic that they believe is determinant of who they are. I should have thought about this more fully several years ago, to be honest, because a couple of times in the years I was a professor of nursing working with undergraduate students. A couple of times in my. Office, I worked with different students who were really struggling with different aspects of the program, whether it was coursework, grades, a clinical experience, the board exams that came after graduation, all of those things, and in both of these cases, the students would begin telling the story of their difficulties with the present moment by taking me back to their origin as premature infants born several weeks early, fighting for their lives in NICU, NICU and how, because of that, everything in life has been a struggle, as though that particular moment of their existence was to define everything about their lives,

they had no doubt, received the story of their birth from their parents over and over and over again as part of family lore. This is how families pass on the knowledge of the family story across generations, and for some reason, in the retelling of that story over the years, these two students, different students, different times of my career, had believed that it defined who they were and how they had to experience the world around them. Those origin stories profoundly shaped who they saw themselves to be and how they expected their lives to work out experience by experience, and there are so many ways our families of origin shape these scripts and stories inside of us. So I just want to invite you to pause for a moment and ask yourself a really important question, and that is, how many different stories of your identity exist, and which ones are you living? Are you living your own story, one you've explored and crafted and chosen, or is it a story you inherited, a story that belongs to someone else in your family, and if there are ways in which those stories you've inherited are holding you back, are these maybe not gifts that need returning or releasing? So let's think about some of these different influences for a moment, as you're considering that question, because there are so many stories related to our families that may be having an impact on us, both positively and negatively, maybe the First of those to go into a little bit is just that foundation of belonging. The big question that a child has that they don't even know they have as they're growing up, is this question of, Where do I belong? And that's absorbed from the world around them, that sense of belonging, how it's communicated through affection, attention, protection, inclusion, or is it conditional? Is it fragile? Does belonging have to be earned. Is it contingent? That sense of belonging is one that fundamentally drives us in how we interact with the rest of the world, how

we interact with all of our relationships, our friendships, our intimate partners, our children, our parents. It's such a deep, profound, basic need that it influences us for the rest of our lives. Of course, that is then deeply related to the circles we experience around attachment in our family. Is this an attachment that I feel I can trust? Is it tenuous? Is it in some way performative? You know, in a previous evening together, we talked about. This idea of being fixers in the world, and this drive to calm our selves and meet our own needs by being valuable to other people, that sort of speaks to this idea of the Family Circle, the origin of that need and how it shows up in our adult lives. Within families. Of course, I mentioned earlier, right? There are these structural pieces. Even families have formal roles. They have informal roles. The best example of one of these is a child who's identified in their family circle as being the rebel or the caretaker or the mascot or the peacemaker. When these stories are given to us and begin to shape our identity, usually without our knowledge, they will absolutely have an impact in how we cultivate ourselves going forward, and whether it's positive or negative, in some way that's for us to decide. I'm not moralizing all of these pieces necessarily, but I'm just calling attention to the fact that there are so many different ways our identity is shaped by those around us, sometimes with our consent and sometimes without but occasionally we have to, in this family circle, rub up against that edge of trying to figure out who we even are and if how we're behaving is truly grounded in our own story, or if we're performing something that was given to us by someone else, it leads me to think about the implications a little bit of things like power and conflict and communication in families of our origin. Who had power? How was it exercised? What was allowed to be spoken and what had to remain unspoken, but

understood what happened when there was tension or conflict? What were the secrets of the family and what was your role in maintaining them? Were you loyal to that you could always discover the edge of loyalty, family rules, family beliefs, power structures, if you expressed some sort of disloyalty or dissent, typically in a family, those things are quickly identified, called out and very often squashed. But the family circle of all those dimensions is something we then carry with us into all the other relationships and functions of our lives. Think about your boss, your supervisor, a church leader, a community organizer you work with anytime something has gone wrong or you have been outside of the lines of expectation in some way. What has the experience of navigating through that felt like very often, we will play out our origin story in those moments, sometimes actually, very often, not even realizing we are doing it. There's an incredible book on this very connection between our origin stories and how it plays out in our work lives, by my colleague Susan Schmidt Winchester and her co writer Martha Finney, called Healing at work that really deeply explores how those early Life patterns of ours in the circle of our families continue to show up with us throughout our professional lives and careers. And if you're interested, and that's a topic that seems to resonate with you, I'd highly encourage you to get their book again, just to say this, I am not. A paid endorser for any of these pieces, but I have found Susan's work and Martha's work to be really impactful to leaders I've worked with who are struggling at this intersection of their lives. So there we are. We've explored at least a little bit our origin story in the context of our family circle, and I've identified a few of many areas in which those origin stories have been cultivated, curated, reinforced or questioned by our families. Now what I want to do is take us to the edges, because our jobs as humans

developing in the world is to at some point,

become independent of our families and move into a state in a healthy way, if possible, of being interdependent with our family, maintaining our relationships, enjoying them, growing from them. For many, many of us, that's a very difficult path. It's not even a path that's sustainable in a lot of cases, but it is the context of that family circle and our desire to become our own people that the edges are exposed. So let's spend a few minutes really considering where you are, which edges have been softened in the family experience, which of them have been hardened, and where would you like to go in relation to those edges and your family and your origin story in the future,

I hope all this talk about families of origin is landing well in your heart and Your mind as somebody who spent many, many years actually scientifically exploring families. As a nurse, researcher and professor, I do understand the breadth of reactions people have to the concept of family. And of course, tonight, we're asking a really deep question, which is, How did my family circle shape me, and is that shape serving me? Am I living a life that is my story, or one I inherited, or perhaps many I have inherited, and that are that I'm living out on a daily basis in many different ways, circumstances and environments, but I do want to share that just because we've received an inheritance of origin stories from our family circle doesn't necessarily mean that we need to accept them, nor does it mean we need to pass them on. We can walk the edges of our family circle, and we can repeat them. We can alter them. We can expand them. We can soften them. We can harden them, as I mentioned earlier, we have all these options available to us. So let me ask now a different question, where in your life, where in your heart, your spirit, your relationships, have you been awaiting permission to move beyond some sort of spoken or unspoken permission or consent from persons or myths beliefs from your family circle, to allow yourself to evolve beyond the story you inherited, some sort of permission that probably hasn't ever come, that you've been waiting for From the outside. And what might happen if you consider that the only permission you really need is actually the permission you grant yourself, what would your life every day look like if you granted yourself that? Permission. If you said, for example, that I'm no longer going to believe that my belonging is conditional, I'm going to give myself permission to choose belonging that I'm going to choose myself on the deepest level and allow myself to explore. That love doesn't have to be earned, that

belonging doesn't have to be purchased by some compliance to a rule that somewhere out there I can be chosen exactly as I am by others who value that. It does not necessarily mean and I don't want to imply that we abandon our family circle to achieve that. Though, sometimes people actually do need to make that choice, but it might mean staying connected without shape shifting, to fit in, to be present with others content that your belonging to them has a limitation that could be accepted and freeing for you. It might come only through a process of grief on your part, but it also comes to you with the possibility of great expansion. You know, there's a very, very common saying that you can't choose your family. We take that to mean that we're sort of stuck with people for the good and the bad. It wasn't something we had an opportunity to choose, then we have other communities who embrace the idea of chosen family, that families of origin were unsatisfying or harmful, and so they have taken a path of creating a family that They did choose. I guess what I came to believe as a family scientist actually, was that all family is chosen family, that at some point, even though we did not choose our biological associations and connections to people, there does come a point in our lives where we can and often do choose to maintain or to sever, to draw close or to widen our space between ourselves And those unchosen biological family members, even if we maintain, enrich, enliven and cherish those biological connections, we still consciously do choose them. So just want to leave you with that thought, because it has powerful implications, not just for the people that we choose to call family, but the stories about ourselves we inherited from them as well. You may have to ask yourself some very different and difficult questions that you might not have ever asked before, like, who am I? If I'm not performing my assigned family functions as the caregiver or the rebel

or the golden child, will I have to risk disappointing others, when one of those roles I didn't ask for but seemed to have given to me stops being useful to me in some way. What might it be like to give yourself permission to move beyond being the secret keeper to becoming a truth teller, to widening the vocabulary of emotion you were given from your family of origin, and how its expansiveness can be enriched or its narrowness be overcome. How might it feel to widen your circle beyond the confines of what the power structures were in your family of origin. Might that be something like learning a way to exert your own power or authority or influence in a way that's Gen. Narrative, if, in fact, what you were born into was power of coercion. Can you use power lovingly and not cruelly? If that's part of your history, or how about expanding your relationship to conflict beyond the circle of your family and their beliefs and their behaviors. What doors might this open up for you and the relationships you are choosing as you are living your own independent life? Might you become more able to sit with conflict. Might you be able to distinguish the conflict from rejection? Might you be able to disagree with another person you love without feelings of shame?

I think about the struggle we have, the developmental, appropriate, natural struggle we have to become our own people as we're growing through our childhood and into adulthood in our family circles, and how that was facilitated by those in our family around us, would granting yourself greater permission to soften some of those scripts of rules to find your own way, open up pathways of greater personal satisfaction and confidence in The world. Might it give you the power to say no to someone you love without severing a relationship or harming it, or to hold different values in the same space with a colleague without abandoning the relationship through conflict because it feels too heavy or too hard. How might it shift your relationship with a sibling if you have one or have many? Something a lot of people don't quite understand in family dynamics, especially in families with multiple children, is that no child growing up in a family grew up in the same family, even if you grew up in the same household, that's kind of a mind blowing thing to consider for a moment. But each person that came into this family, each child, came with an origin story that was crafted before they were born and was cultivated along the way. And each one of them is a different story, and each person occupies a different position, and each individual showed up at a different place in the time line with some of the history missing and some yet to be written. Every individual within the family experiences the family differently. What would happen if you gave yourself permission to push that edge of the family circles story that says we've all had the same experience. If you, for example, have a sibling that you have felt at odds with over the years. Might it be because there's a hardness to this story about the family you grew up in, and that both of your perspectives are actually probably more accurate and have more in common than you realize when you just shift your perspective to

consider that your lived experiences were different in the same shared context. Anyway, there are so many different dimensions of this to explore so many personal stories coming up for me, from my own journey with my family of origin, to the family I created, to the families that my children are beginning to create at this point in their lives, moving into an intergenerational perspective that I'm actually going to save for another time in another evening together down the road. But I just want to leave you with a few questions to think about, what what of your current strengths are also old adaptations to your family's way of being, what feeling or truth or boundary still feels a little dangerous because of the circle you grew up? In Is there a family belief or a rule that you've outgrown and are ready to set aside, but for some reason still obey? What might it be my very dear friends, to love your origins without being governed by them. Let me repeat that one as we end this edge exploration of our origin stories in our family circles, because I think this is so powerful. What might it mean to you to love your origins without being governed by them.

Well, dear ones, we have come to that part of the show called circling back, and I want to share that I had a truly lovely voice memo sent to me by a listener who is A creativity coach, a songwriter, a composer, a singer who works with artists and now works with coaches and other sorts of leaders in different domains, who shared she was really taken with the discussion about uncertainty and its connection with creativity, and I was so grateful for her reaching out, Rachel, if you're listening, what a gift it was to receive that beautiful voice memo and to hear you talking with excitement about this connection and then how creativity is What is it, if it if it isn't asking a million questions about what is emerging from you creatively, it was just such a beautiful message, and I really appreciated you bringing that forward and allowing me to re engage with that episode and The conversation that all of us here listening had together asynchronously. And I've kind of wondered how some of these other episodes that are out there, of circles edges, are impacting more of you. I think I mentioned in the previous evening together that there is now an email address. It is Aaron double A, R, o, n at circles edges.org, where you can reach out to me directly and share your thoughts and perhaps have a conversation a little bit asynchronously if you have a question you'd like to ask about any of the episodes, if you have an observation or something that's really hit you as an important insight, I would so love to have you share that it's what brings so much meaning to this work that I'm doing to show up in those wee hours of sleeplessness for all of you and help us find a little shared comfort together. So whether you're sending me voice memos from California or emails from Puerto Rico, or little notes from the UK, or direct messages from Ireland. I see you all. I hear you and I'm with you. To my new listener who has been joining from Yemen. I think of you often and the

difficulty of life right now in this very fragile part of the world, and I can only imagine some of the things you experience there, but I am circling out, reaching out to you to let you know how much I appreciate you and how much I care about you and your story and how I'm here for you. I'm circling back tonight to an Uber driver and dedicating this episode to you. You know who you are, and if by chance, you have a way to reach out to me and reconnect, I would so love to hear more of your story, and maybe even as a witness, walk with you a little bit in your ongoing journey. And. That is true for all of you listening. Please do feel free to reach out and connect with me, closing this loop of listener and speaker, I would love that so very much. You

Well, I feel like tonight I have been talking for a very long time, and I hope you have enjoyed the journey with me diving into this very complicated topic of our family circles and our origin stories, wherever you are in your journey with all of that, I just want you to know you're in the right place right now. There may be things you're working to expand in yourself, to move beyond those inherited stories. There may be ways you're seeking to more fully honor them and cherish them. Or maybe you're in a place right now where all you can think of when you think of your family, that circle you were raised in, and the person you've become is celebratory, and you're just celebrating all of that. I honor all of those places in the journey. And for our one last light tonight, I wanted to read to you a poem from one of my favorite poets and writers, Mark Nepo. If you're not familiar with Mark, I would say, look him up. He's so gifted in his use of language, and he speaks so deeply to the heart and spirit of what it's like to be human. He's written a poem a few years ago now, called breaking surface that speaks so much to what we're talking about tonight that I thought before I blow out these candles and say good night to you, I wanted to be sure and read it. Here we go. Let no one keep you from your journey. No rabbi or priest, no mother who wants you to dig for treasures she misplaced. No father who won't let one life be enough. No lover who measures their worth by what you might give up. No voice that tells you in the night it can't be done. Let nothing dissuade you from seeing what you see, or feeling the winds that make you want to dance alone or go where no one has yet to go. You are the only explorer your heart the unreadable compass your soul the shore of a promise too great to be ignored with that loves I offer you good wishes and a good night. You. You.