Clients come to me for all kinds of issues, but right at the top is wanting to have an intimate relationship, or to fix one that isn’t working well. Usually, these clients have tried many things to get what they want: couples counseling, dating apps, relationship coaches, self-help books, communication training, and much more. Although many of these approaches may have improved the situation or given them powerful insights, they still come to me because there is a sense of stuckness that eludes resolution.
The power of constellations is its ability to see beneath the surface and to reveal the invisible dynamics that keep a situation stuck. Having facilitated hundreds of relationship-oriented constellations, I know that this kind of stuckness can be related to a wide variety of systemic issues: a family history of broken relationships; trauma with one or both parents; troubled relationships with siblings in childhood; ancestral history of war that impacted healthy family development; and so much more.
But I have also noticed that two problems most often lie at the heart of relationship struggles: 1) difficulty or interruption in the attachment between the client and their mother, in pregnancy and/or in infancy; and 2) conflict between the client’s parents. These are so commonly at the center of a client’s relationship issues, that I usually start by inquiring into those two things before moving onto other possible sources of the problem.
Do you struggle with intimate relationship? Either an inability to find a partnership at all, or the tendency to find yourself in unhealthy ones? If so, you might take a look at your bond with your mother, which is the first relationship that teaches us about intimacy, what it’s like, what’s workable, and what we will be open to for the rest of our life. Or, you might look at the relationship between your parents, the first model of sexual partnership in your life (and the one that presumably led to you being alive), which teaches us what meaningful connection looks like, and whether trust between two adults is possible.
As you reflect on these, you might begin to despair. Please don’t! The good news is that, with family constellations work, there can be a kind of honoring of what we had to cope with in childhood, and a re-learning that allows our whole bodies to open up to possibilities that weren’t available back then.
In the case of the early bond with our mother, what we often do is explore BEFORE the client was born – what ancestral conditions were present for our mother when she was young, that may have limited her ability to be fully available to us? Often we find a family history that was focused on brute survival, where nurture and connection was perhaps a luxury they couldn’t afford. Or we find the residue of immigration or slavery trauma, where the separation of the young from the elders happened too early. There are so many ways in which mother/child bonds can be injured by the vagaries of life.
As we can honor and acknowledge what our ancestors had to do to survive so that our mother and we could be here at all, something in the system begins to relax, and our mother can become strengthened, somehow. Then, as we feel our mother becoming strengthened, we might begin to feel our original reach for her – so instinctive in earliest infancy – also begin to come “back on line.” This allows a recovery of our capacity to bond intimately and safely, without any kind of force or trying to tell falsely pretty stories about how we really feel about our mothers.
As for working with conflicts that our parents may have had, constellations makes it possible to see beneath the surface of the conflict that we witnessed, to what was really driving the relationship. For example, it’s not uncommon, when we set up the mother and father, that they fall into each others’ arms saying “I love this one!” The client is perplexed; this is not what it was like at all. They fought all the time! They didn’t love each other!
But what if – due to their personal histories – fighting was the only way they could show and feel love? The only way to connect and feel intimacy? It might not change how it felt for the client growing up, of course, but it can completely change how they see their parents. And, perhaps, they might begin to see that, in some way, they came to life through a kind of love – and this can begin to change everything.
What is your experience of relationship like? If you’ve ever struggled, what helped you move forward? Have you ever noticed that a new way of seeing your connection with your mother, or your parents’ connection with each other, makes something let go, so you can begin to imagine the kind of relationship you want? What questions do you have? Please share on my blog, below!
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