What is your relationship to Fate? This is a question of central importance to Family Constellations work. But not in the way we often think about “fate” (or “destiny.”)
I like to say that constellations works in two ways:
1) They “fix” things by including what was excluded, grieving what was lost, addressing what was injured, etc.
2) They also change things by, well, not changing things. Instead, they help us accept and have a better relationship with “What Is.”
In constellation work, “What is” is called “Fate.” Fate is NOT anything like “what was supposed to happen,” or “what was written in God’s book and therefore destined to happen,” or anything like that.
Fate is simply what DID happen, and therefore something we cannot change today.
- Our grandfather died in combat in World War II.
- Our lineage endured slavery.
- Our grandmother lost three children in a row to malnutrition.
- Our people were forced from their homes in the Scottish Highlands.
These are all forms of Fate. Every family, nation, village and race has profound experiences of fate. Some fates are easier, and some are much, much harder. Some feel incredibly impersonal – although devastating – like the loss of a whole village in a tsunami. Others feel very, very personal, like a people who are subjected to genocide and barely survive.
As the descendents of these people, we live in the light (or darkness, if you like) of their fate. This history affects us profoundly, often in day to day ways. They are not our fault, and they aren’t something we can fix.
We also have fates, right now – difficult circumstances that we have limited or no ability to change. Like being born with a disability, or having a family member with one. Or being born to poverty, or a people who are systemically discriminated against. We can commit ourselves to robust activism on these issues, and strive for larger cultural changes, but we can’t change the fate of what we were born into in these circumstances.
Life invites us into a special relationship with fate. It’s not a collapse – a sense that nothing matters, and well, why try? And it’s not constant striving against something we couldn’t change (even unconsciously).
Instead, we are invited to acknowledge our fates, with dignity, perhaps grief, but also strength:
- You bow to fact that your grandfather died in World War II.
- You bow to the ancestors who suffered in slavery.
- You bow to the fact that you birthed a child with a disability.
- You bow to to the truth that some are born unjustly to poverty.
When this happens, energy can shift: from opposing reality, as it is, to being profoundly empowered to make choices that will influence our future and that of others.
What is your relationship to Fate? Please share on my blog, so the conversation can continue…
Leslie: I was moved to respond to this post. You may or may not remember that my ex husband and father of our daughter Emily was disabled with cerebral Palsy. He was brilliant, but was quite physically limited. Both his speech and motor skills were impacted. I learned a lot about people with these kinds of disabilities when we were together. One big lesson was the pride that people have about their conditions and how they make them unique. They would not consider being deaf or blind to be something that they would want to fix for example. It is part of who they are. Walking is also not seen as necessarily a worthy goal for those who zip around in their wheelchairs like Stephen did. Lots of painful surgeries and medical procedures are inflicted on children for example in an effort to make them walk rather than providing them with a mobility device that gives them more freedom without more pain. Having a disabled child can be a gift to both the parent and the child if they are not made to feel that they need to be something that they are not.
Thanks for sharing your tender story, Mel. And you illustrate the principle beautifully. Bowing to our fate provides us with so much more resourcefulness, love, and creativity. This doesn’t negate or contradict suffering, but gives us an opportunity to be full human beings within it…