1. How the families we are from help to form the families we become
PAINTING A NEW FAMILY
PORTRAIT

2. Where Does One’s current family come
from?
•The above question is really
what I asked myself when
thinking about this project.
•The goals of the project are
relatively simple:
1. To examine the extent to which our
Joseph Tuttle
current family shows remnants of
our families of origin
Family Family
2. To discuss the influence our families
of origin have had on our current
families
3. To postulate on how these
influences may effect our future
family and eventually families
generations removed from ours.
Our Current
family

3. My Current Family
Right now, what I would describe as my current
family exists as really only my wife, Bethany
and I. I say this because we do not interact
with members of our extended families on a
daily basis such that most of our family
communication occurs in a dyadic setting
between her and I.

4. My Current Family
Bethany and I are
both 30ish, living
and working in
Portland. With 3
cats, and a couple
reptiles; the
house is already a
little crowded.
Soon it will be
even moreso…

5. Our Future Family
Come June of 2012, we
are going to welcome a
new little nugget to our
growing family.
It is our hope that the
family he or she is
brought up in both
reflects and expands
on our current family
and our respective
families of origin.

6. FAMILIES OF ORIGIN
“refers to the family or families in which a person is raised(11)”.

7. The Joseph Family
My wife comes from a traditional two parent
biological family. Socio-economically they would be
considered upper middle class with a nice house in
suburbia and a yard. Culturally they are a mix of Irish
and Lebanese heritages.

8. The Tuttle Family
My family is a step family and
also a multigenerational
family as my grandmother
lives with my father and
stepmother. Living in an
apartment and having no
automobile they would be
considered lower middle
class by economic
standards.
Ours is an “old school” Franco-
American family, my
Mamere (Grandmother)was
unable to speak English into
well into her teen years

9. RITUALS
Family rituals include, “a voluntary, recurring patterned
communication event whose jointly enacted performance
by family members pays homage to what they regard as
sacred, thereby producing and reproducing a family’s
identity and its web of social relations(114)

10. Upta Camp and Doubling Down
My wife has told me many
stories of her family’s
annual camping trips and
the joys of answering
mother nature’s call in the
midst of the mother
nature herself.
My family enjoys a family
game night(mostly held
during holidays now)
where we sit at the
kitchen table with a deck
of cards and become
totally absent from the
television or any other
electronic devices.

11. WHY IS IT IMPORTANT FOR
FAMILIES TO ENGAGE IN
RITUALS?
The purpose of engaging in rituals in many fold, they:
•Contribute significantly to the establishment and preservation of a family's
identity
• Serve central ongoing maintenance and relational functions
•Help family members make sense of their lives(113,114).

12. My current family’s rituals
My wife and I have tried our best to adopt
some of the rituals of our families of origin
to our own lives. Besides simply investing
in the relational currency of spending time
together it also helps us see each other
outside of the context of everyday
mundaneness and also harbors the
occasional friendly competition.

13. Humor
“Through humor, you can soften some of the
worst blows that life delivers. And once you
find laughter, no matter how painful your
situation might be, you can survive it.”
-Bill Cosby

14. Importance of humor in our
families of origin
 Humor has been an
important part in both of
our families of origin. It
seems to facilitate creation
of communication
processes as humor is
often an accepted and
welcomed change of pace.
Not too sure this one needs a
caption at all!

15. We certainly have embraced
it…

16. TYPOLOGIES AND POWER

17. My family of origin as a
protective family
 I would tend to classify my family of origin as
being classified as a protective one on the
Fitzpatrick and Ritchie grid(173).
 “Protective families rank low on the use of a
conversational approach and high on
conformity dimensions(173)”

18. Power in My Family of Origin
 My grandmother is the  These orchestrators
matriarch of my family of “delegate unimportant
origin. She is the and time-consuming
ultimate orchestrator of decisions to the partner
power(think Emperor or older child(My dad),
Palpatine from star who derives
wars). implementation power
by carrying out these
decisions(184)”

19. Power in my Current Family
My wife and I opt for a more democratic existence, an authority type that is syncratic.
“A syncratic relationship, characterized by much shared authority and joint decision
making, implies that each partner has a strong say in all important areas(185)”.

20. Finally…
My attempt here was to not only paint a picture of a family, but to try and
show how such portraits are made. Our current families can best be
describe as a hodgepodge of the best and not so best traits of our
family’s of origin.
By looking at our origin families; we can better grasp onto how we see
our current families and further how we wish our current families to
be.

21. Works cited:
 Galvin, Kathleen M., Carma Lee Bylund, and Bernard
J. Brommel. Family communication: cohesion and
change. 8th ed. Boston: Pearson Allyn and Bacon,
2012. Print.
 "Harry Potter and Star Wars." Fabbricanti di Universi -
Per scoprire le più grandi creazioni della fantascienza e
del fantasy. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2011.
<http://www.fabbricantidiuniversi.it/universi/hpswE
NG.htm>.
 "Humor quotes." Find the famous quotes you need,
ThinkExist.com Quotations.. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Nov.
2011. <http://thinkexist.com/quotations/humor/>.