43. The Sacred Gravity of Family Structures

What happens when the person holding a family together is suddenly gone? In this episode, we look beneath titles and roles to reveal the quiet power shaping every inheritance story—sometimes spoken, more often felt. You’ll discover how emotional blueprints and unspoken systems can bind or divide families, and why true resolution means seeing what’s beneath the surface. If you’re willing to listen for what isn’t being said, this conversation offers a new lens for your work—and for the families you serve.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Sacred Work Podcast

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to Sacred Work, the podcast for professionals navigating the emotional and logistical layers of inherited property. I'm Alexa Rosario, and here we explore how to serve families with strategy, systems and soul. Every family has a structure, whether it's spoken or unspoken, and when somebody dies that structure gets exposed, especially when it's the matriarch or the patriarch of the family. Today we're talking about matriarchies and patriarchies and the emotional blueprints and how these families come together, because if we don't understand the family system, we end up misreading the room and we end up misserving the people that we're called to help. Matriarchies often are not named, they're not talked about, but they're absolutely felt. That power comes from the emotional labor, the history, the relational influence, the way that she did the holidays. It's not a position or a title, it's just something that she inherited and she owned, and there's typically no coronation, there's no recognition for it, but she does it and that's just who she is.

Speaker 1: 1:13

In matriarchal families, decision-making is often informal, but it's deeply binding, like when the matriarch says so, like everybody moves. And these women are memory keepers. They're peacemakers, they're bridge builders. They're the ones who remember every holiday, everyone's birthdays. They're the ones who remember what your favorite food is, you know. They're the ones who make sure that you feel home and you feel welcomed and you feel like you're part of the family. And especially when the matriarch dies, the emotional gravity shifts. Everybody feels it, even if they pretend not to, and typically you'll find that somebody in the family is going to step in and try to own that role to honor the legacy of the woman that passed. Now, in matriarchal societies, the executor may hold the legal power, but the room still looks to the woman in charge, the woman of the family, to make those big decisions. Now in patriarchies it's a little bit different. In a family that runs more like a patriarchy, power tends to be more clear. It's typically the dad, then the eldest son and there's, like you know, head of household types and things like that Authority is respected, but typically it's relationally distant and emotions are generally suppressed, but actions are emphasized. Decisions happen quicker, but they often leave emotional wreckage and when the patriarch dies it creates a vacuum that, like the firstborn son, may rush to fill before grief ever ends up taking shape. So patriarchal systems move fast legally, but often leave the deepest emotional incompletions behind. But often leave the deepest emotional incompletions behind.

Speaker 1: 3:08

Now we have to talk about culture here, because that is a huge part of determining if a family is going to be matriarchal or patriarchal and how we serve these families individually. So in Black households, in Latin households, in Asian and Indigenous families, the matriarch often holds both the emotional and the practical power, but it's not typically named as such. Now, in westernized white families and also in some Middle Eastern families, patriarchy shows up more formally as like title control assets, but the emotional power either is absent or may fall still on the woman. Now, immigrant families often carry sort of this dual layer. They have this sort of balancing between their traditions and their culture and then also layering in the American legal systems and things like that. Now, when we think about the fact that women were not even allowed to have credit cards until like 1974, that's where a lot of this comes from. Right Is, even though technically, yes, maybe the woman might have a bigger role in the family, the husband still has kind of the tangible power, if you will, and in older families that still very much is the case. Think about how many clients that you've had where maybe the husband passes away and the wife has never done anything related to money and she has never done anything related to money. She doesn't know how to pay the bills, she doesn't know where the bank accounts are, she doesn't even know what they have, because the patriarchy in that case was the one who was leading. Now this becomes super important when we start getting into the topics of inheritance, because these unspoken systems determine who gets the house, who gets the stuff in it, who gets the blame, and also how the family grieves through the process.

Speaker 1: 4:58

Matriarchies often pass down emotional inheritance. They pass down traditions, they pass down legacy, they pass down holidays. They pass down how birthdays are celebrated, the way that the towels are folded, how food gets seasoned. Now patriarchies often pass down financial or structural inheritance. They typically are the ones who pass down the property, but they're the ones who typically pass down the property. Let's say, for example Now both systems can end up leaving the heirs unseen, unchosen or even carrying guilt, and it's not necessarily that it's designed or intended to be that way, but I think that the absence of conversations like this is where a lot of those hurt feelings end up coming from.

Speaker 1: 5:43

So if you don't understand who holds the heart of the family, who kind of is the heartbeat, then you'll never understand why they can't let go of the house, why they shut down, why they get frustrated, why they start stonewalling and disappear and ghosting you, and it comes down to the fact that we're dealing with really complex family structures and if we're not in tune with that, we just can't get through to the family. So what I want to dig into here is, firstly, we have to stop assuming that the executor is the decision maker. They might be the person who's signing the documents, but if there's another family member who has a bigger voice is the one who kind of was the unofficial heir of whoever the person that passed, or maybe they were the one who, or maybe there was something unspoken where maybe the sister is the one who is handling all the stuff for the estate, but it's really the brother who has the final say on everything. We have to understand and be able to ask the right questions and really listen for what's not being said, so that we can serve these families better. If you can get the heirs in the room at the same time, one of the best ways to do this is to pay attention to who everyone glances at before they answer. That is going to be a dead giveaway that almost nobody can hide.

Speaker 1: 7:07

And if you really go in with the intention of listening and observing, you'll notice very quickly who the person is that holds the power. They may not be the person who says the most, but they're going to be the one that, when they do speak, everybody stops and listens. If you can't get all the heirs in the room together, another great way to do this is to ask about the family, ask about their traditions, ask about who held the keys, ask about what their family was like, ask about who made Thanksgiving happen right. And then we want to learn how to read emotional architecture of the family, not just the legal one, not just what the documents say. So with that, I want to leave you with this. Number one is that inheritance is not just financial, it's emotional, it's spiritual, it's cultural right, and every family system carries its own unspoken rules about who matters and who doesn't. And when we understand those power dynamics, we can stop pushing paperwork and we can start guiding families towards true resolution. And that, my friends, is sacred work.