When is it time for radical inclusion? If you are struggling in life in some way, or you feel stuck and unable to move forward, sometimes this inertia has origins in your family system. It’s time to take responsibility for your own wellbeing. When family members suffer pain or trauma, it sometimes remains emotionally unresolved or unprocessed. This suppressed emotional response travels down to the next generations of the family system through epigenetic inheritance. These emotional response patterns don’t change the genetic structure of the body, but they do change how the genes express themselves. The emotional trauma of past family members becomes an issue for a family descendant when it’s not resolved in a healthy way. Until it is resolved, some family member will carry the suppressed emotion within the cells of their body as some sort of symptom physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, or relationally.
The Family Tree
It’s up to you to investigate how your parents and forebearers were impacted by major emotional events and traumas. This is a necessary step even in situations where there is no one to help you gather family information. When possible, you can find out the history as best you can from other family members or genealogical sources. Reading about another family in a similar situation may be a catalyst to understanding your own family dynamic. You can choose to do systemic family constellation work with a facilitator. While systemic family constellation work is based on specific family context, there are some broad generalizations that can be made about family systems that are useful to understanding the greater collective soul or collective consciousness of your family system. The collective soul is the energetic ties we have to one another and to the universe as a whole. You may have moved across the country to get away from your family, however, the energetic ties are never severed and the emotional response patterns are carried in your body so they move with you. Systemic family constellations tap into this greater family system energetic resource for information.
It’s important to take a brief look back at the events and environment that were instrumental in creating the unconscious emotional holding patterns embedded in your parents, grandparents, and the ancestors further back. It’s time to for radical inclusion. All of your family system members have an energetic role in your life, but some more than others.
Radical inclusion means to include it all. You and your children may be energetically experiencing the fallout of the emotional responses, decisions, and dynamics of your earlier generations. These might include war experiences; forced immigration due to starvation, persecution, constant warring, or lack of opportunity; serious accidents; family deaths or tragedies when children or parents died too early; abuses; addictive behaviours; children lost to miscarriage, abortion, stillbirth, or adoption; acrimonious relationship breakups where a prior partner was not honoured; death in childbirth; unaddressed family secrets; struggles for life; or other emotional events.
Family Candle Ceremony
As you contemplate your own family system, you may want to sit in a quiet location and light a candle to create a sacred space for this emotional work. You may want to gather family photos or mementos around you. This is an opportunity to really explore your family system at an emotional level. These emotional response patterns are stored in your body and this means healing has to occur in your emotional body, not in the rational or conscious mind. You can’t think yourself to wellness. There is a saying that, “To heal one must feel.”
If you’re imagining a war situation, I want you to feel the impact of the war on your family members. Feel free to go back a few generations. Consider what it would have been like if you were a small child in the war, or perhaps you were a young mother with several children, or a mother sending her children to war, or you were a young man dragged into this violent event and had to watch many others die around you. What ages were your family members when the war broke out? Feel free to approximate ages or dates if you don’t have exact details. I want you to feel what your family members felt emotionally during the wars. How did the wars impact their daily life? Who was directly impacted by the war?
Include Them All
Other questions to consider when focusing on radical inclusion:
- Who was emotionally traumatized by the war?
- Is their guilt or shame over levels of war participation?
- Did someone have to kill others?
- Did someone do something heroic?
- Was someone responsible for the suffering or death of others?
- Was anyone tortured?
- Did anyone participate in torturing others?
- Who worked at jobs supporting the war effort?
- Who spent time in prisoner of war camps?
- Who spent time in concentration or forced work camps?
- What family members died in the war?
- Who was victim to mass extermination?
- Who succumbed to the extermination camp ovens?
- Who survived the concentration or forced work camps?
- Who lost their love partners during the war?
- Who starved because of the war?
- Who fed off the suffering of others?
- Who benefitted from the spoils of war?
- Who lost or gained family fortunes in the war?
- Who risked their own life to help others?
- Who was left behind when family members went off to war?
- Who became silent and emotionally distant after the war?
- Who experienced lung damage due to chemical warfare?
- Who created weaponry or other war equipment?
- Who was injured during the war? Where on the body was the injury?
- Who dropped the bombs?
- Who experienced bomb shelters?
- Were there rifts created in the family over whether to resist or participate in war?
- Did current family systems fight against one another in a war?
- Is their emotional distance generated from survivor guilt, when many others didn’t live?
- Did your family discuss the war openly in the following decades?
- Are there family secrets about the war? … and so on.
The answers to these questions will assist you to understand who is missing from your family system, who might need to be honoured in your family system, or who needs your compassion. If you feel you or your children are somehow energetically linked to a past family member, we refer to this as energetic emotional identifications or entanglements.
Energetic Entanglements
Your healing journey includes separating yourself and your children from these entanglements. To give you some examples that cannot be generalized: A young child with breathing difficulties may be energetically entangled with grandfather, who experienced mustard gas in the war. A woman may feel unusually overwhelmed and anxious when she is confronted with the death of friends and family members. She may be energetically entangled with someone who fought in a battle and who felt overwhelmed when death was all around them.
Take your time to understand who wants to be seen and/or who wants to be heard in your family system. Where is radical inclusion needed? What emotional trauma was left unresolved? Is it the dead who want to have their experience or sacrifice validated, do you need to accept the fate of grandfather’s comrades or commanders who fell in the war because he couldn’t look at it, is it the recognition of father’s survivor guilt because he was the only one of many to survive, is it the victim of torture who spent time in a POW camp who needs to feel your understanding and compassion, or is it the collective consciousness that has something to say or acknowledge?
Everyone in the family system has a right to be energetically seen and heard and welcomed into the greater family system, regardless of whether they are deceased or alive. This is radical inclusion. The past generations want the present generations to have compassion for what they endured. Remember that whenever an individual or group of people significantly impacted someone in your family system, they become part of one another’s family systems. Who is missing from your family system? Are you able to feel that they did the best they could with the emotional resources they had passed onto them from their parents or grandparents?
Remember that if you discount their lives and experiences by ignoring your ancestral ties, someone will carry these emotional wounds until they are healed.
Missing Family Members
In reviewing the questions above, whoever is “the other” in the situation may be the missing family member. This is where radical inclusion becomes a very difficult concept to accept. Radical inclusion is finding compassion deep within to see the other as having an equal right to share the planet with you, rather than feeling the need to separate from them, alienate them, or silence them. Radical inclusion is felt as a threat by the ego, that part of you that loves the status quo and the familiar. It’s the part of you that thrives when there is a feeling of safety and structure. The ego doesn’t want to look at past emotional trauma in your family system. The ego will want to separate away from those who are perceived as problematic, different, or a threat in some way. It’s in minimizing the impact of ego that you are able to address your family’s past emotional trauma. By going into your body to feel emotionally, you reduce the impact of your ego. You also learn compassion and how to live radical inclusion, accepting your family system as it is or was.
Everyone Has A Right To Belong
In systemic family constellation work, it is a generally accepted principle that everyone has a right to belong. That’s radical inclusion. Everyone, regardless of what they may have done or may not have done, has a right to belong. Anyone in your family system who is rejected, neglected, shunned, hidden away, distanced, isolated, marginalized, or left out have a right to belong in your family system. When they are missing from the family system, someone else in the family will take on characteristics, behaviours, or symptoms, bring awareness or attention to the dynamic around the missing individual. This often occurs in a way that we may judge to be amoral because it may entangle children, the innocent, and the more energetically sensitive through life difficulties or unwellness in some way. This concept of radical inclusion also expands to the greater global system and the realization that everyone has a right to belong. If you hate or shun others in some way, you will pass on an energetic emotional response pattern to the next generation of your family system.
Don’t Forget Yourself
Healing begins when you able to have compassion for your own past or present family members, including yourself. Are you able to take them all fully into your heart? Are you able to understand that they gave you all that they could give you emotionally given the emotional resources they had available to them, and that has to be enough? Are you able to be compassionate toward those on the other side of any war or battle? Are you able to broaden your perception to take in the experience of the other? Are you able to hold the other in your heart?