Are you stuck in life? Systemic family constellations provide insight for shifting unhealthy relationships into healthy relationships. This past weekend I spent three days in a systemic family constellations workshop and training. These relationships may be with your intimate partner, parents, children, siblings, friends, co-workers, or other community members in general. One underlying theme continually reveals itself in constellations and that is an unhealthy relationship with one or both parents. Often an unhealthy relationship with one parent creates an unhealthy relationship with the other parent. The relationship with our mother is our first relationship and it becomes our template for relationships throughout life. Are you stuck in life with feelings of anger, resentment, hate, guilt, sadness, shame, anxiety, or depression when you think about your mother or father? If you are still waiting for them to change in some way than you are likely stuck in your childhood emotional response patterns. This is where healing begins.
These patterns occur when you can’t fully take in vital life force energy from one or both of your parents. This is essential whether your parents are living or transitioned to the other side. If you left childhood behind feeling like you didn’t get enough from one or both of your parents, or feeling like you got too much from your parents, you may struggle to feel anything emotionally in your body, or contrarily, be continually overwhelmed with emotion.
Your First Relationship in Life
Your first relationship in life is with your birth mother and all future relationships will draw from that experience. If you were given up to adoption or raised by anyone but your birth mother, your healing will come when you develop compassion for your birth mother. Emotional healing frequently asks you to create a healthy relationship with a parent where an unhealthy relationship currently exists. A rigid response to that request comes from the reactive unconscious mind, programmed to protect and seek safety. Often the parental relationship lacks a felt sense of safety or love.
“Children often have difficulty in honouring their parents because what they are looking at are their parents’ personal characteristics or actions. What parents have or have not done, however, is a limited, narrow perspective. Parenthood, in and of itself, is much more than this. Respect and honour are possible if we look at our parents in their totality, and also beyond them, at their families and their fate. This is a reverent and humble attitude that leads us to healing. It also counters any impulse to carry our parents’ ill-fated needs.” – Stephan Hausner, Even If It Costs Me My Life
Shifting a Relationship With a Parent
To shift a relationship with a parent usually involves accepting the parent as he or she is or was. It means understanding the parent from a big picture view, not the child’s perception. You take the time to discover what your parent endured within his or her own family of origin and community. In you are open to this work, you develop compassion for the parent, and pave the way to move toward respect, honour, and love for that parent. The more traumatic your life events were, or the more you suffered at the hands of one or both parents or others, the more difficult this healing work will be. Sometimes insight will bring a rapid healing response and sometimes it will take a long while to transition.
Look at Life From the Bigger Picture
Family constellations encourage you to look at life from the bigger picture, taking the helicopter view. As adults, we are encouraged not to take every event that occurs personally, even though we feel personally impacted. We begin to understand that we are part of a greater whole. We embrace the fact that we cannot change the past. We learn that we have a choice to make. Do we remain in victimhood and continue to float in a soup that is filled with malignant energy? Or do we make the conscious decision to change our narrow perception to embrace the whole and let our cells live in a swirl of life-giving energy? Family constellations show that many chronic illnesses and conditions stew for a long time in a malignant soup. Family members may be shunned or missing from your heart, you may hold pain from an early separation from mother, you may feel disconnected from father, you may lack a strong sense of self because you energetically merged with mother or father, or you may be caught up in an energetic entanglement with another family member. Healing work is required to create a healthier soup within which the cells of your body can simmer.
As we leave childhood behind, much of what happens to us on a daily basis is long forgotten because there was nothing unusual about it. If a trauma occurs in childhood, much of our earlier memories become stuck in time. Just like the news media, we focus our attention on those aspects of life that impacted us in a negative or traumatic way. These events may total to 10 or 20 items in an 18-year childhood. That is not to minimize the painful impact of these events, but we are asked to look at the rest of the 18 years in order to find healing. If you survived, your parents did many things well.
Our unconscious memory becomes overwhelmed with these challenges in life, filling our conscious mind with a child’s narrow perception of life and time. Children don’t understand everything going on emotionally in their parents’ lives, or in the lives of their grandparents. Children don’t understand all the external environmental aspects that impact their life and that of their family. The child forgets to include all the other individuals who have impacted their life. The child reacts to life through the ego personality and a priority is given to the brain pathways that are set at the time of the early traumas or wounds. These wounds may be as early as conception. These wounds play over and over in the child’s mind like a movie and he or she begins to believe that these traumas make up their whole life.
The baby or child is focused on survival, continued existence, and keeping from being a
nnihilated. This same focus, if not shifted, keeps an adult stuck in life. If you’re as old as I am, you remember what happens when the needle of a record turntable gets caught in a flaw on the surface of the record. It gets stuck and grinds over and over at the same spot. Someone has to move it past the flaw to hear more music, just as we have to shift past the trauma to find healing. Are you stuck in life needing to shift forward?
The child has one narrow perception of life. A child that doesn’t resolve any deep emotional hurts carries them into adulthood. The reality is usually far from this narrow perception. Each child that survives childhood and adolescence has been given much love by their parents. If they didn’t, they would not have survived childhood, be psychologically sound, or be able to function reasonably well as adults. What commonly happens is the love of the parent is offered in a way that doesn’t meet the expectations of the child. The parent may be there physically every day of the child’s life, however, at the emotional level the parent was unable to give more because they had their own unresolved emotional wounds.
Are you stuck in life, feeling ready and willing to shift past the trauma and participate in your own healing?