The Toxicity Toolkit – Week One – Family Values Exercise

Week One

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Building a Foundation

Week One: Family Values Exercise

Audio version

If you’re trying to remove the toxicities in your home environment, building a foundation of shared values is a great way to start.

Everyone gets a say in creating the shared set of values, and everyone is expected to uphold the values after they are set. This exercise works excellently in a family setting but may also be adapted to other work, friend, or social groupings. Here we will focus on the family context.

Set a date once a year to reevaluate. This way family values can grow along with the lived experiences and needs of the family, and younger members can contribute genuinely as they continue to develop.

(Consider making it a special event that everyone looks forward to every year, complete with snacks, music, or whatever makes it special for your family.)

The Exercise:

Give everyone paper and a writing utensil. For younger members, conduct a brief interview to gather their responses.

I’ve included prompts for younger participants in parentheses after relevant adult prompts.

Give everyone 10-15 minutes to brainstorm and make notes about values. These notes will be shared with the group.

Have each person answer:

What are your core values? (What’s important for being a good person?)
What are your needs? (How would you like to be treated?)
What would you like to include in our family values? (Similar, but the phrasing leads to a slightly bigger perspective than question 1. The two will overlap.)

If your family struggles with coming up with values off-the-top of their heads, you can google “Core Values,” or here is a list to get you started.

Have each person go through their list and rank their items, as some values may seem more important than others.

Use a 3 for items that seem VERY IMPORTANT.

Use a 2 for items of medium importance, and a 1 for less important values.

Next compare the family’s values list. Which values appear on multiple lists? For these, combine their ranking. If the family has 4 members and 3 of them list honesty as a core value, add the number given by each of the three.

So, if two people rated HONESTY as an importance of 3 and the other assigned it a 2, its “family value” would be 8.

Make a big list of values (on separate paper) incorporating lists from every member, in order, from most important to least important.

On a piece of poster board, work together to create a visual representation of this list. Display the visual, the list, or both in the home.

References:
Core Values

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