Support When There Is No Support

So many of my clients have the experience of feeling intensely unsupported in life. Sometimes that’s exactly how they talk about it – they feel anchorless, rootless, like they are walking without direction through their lives. They want help with that.

For other clients, feeling unsupported is what we discover after we’ve dug down into their current-life difficulty, whether it’s chronic illness, underemployment, lack of a partner, depression, etc. Once we get a deeper sense of things, we can see they’re really trying to manage, unconsciously, an intense feeling of being unsupported in life.

It’s nice when we go through times in our lives of being supported, whether by a partner, a good working environment, our family of origin, really good friends, or a strong community.

But what if the feeling of being supported in life didn’t depend on the current condition of your relationships? What if you carried with you a deep, unconscious sense that, indeed, you are always supported, no matter what?

Well, one result would probably be manifesting more concrete support! Because our day-to-day experience tends to reflect and reinforce our deepest unconscious certainties about life. It would probably also lessen the intensity of certain kinds of comings and goings–the betrayals, the surprises, the intense disappointments that some of my clients feel with so much regularity.

(Although it’s important to remember that no matter what, there are always comings and goings – we are mortal, after all, and that’s part of being human.)

One or more of four conditions tend to fuel the feeling of being persistently unsupported:

1. In childhood, our family, (and especially our parents) didn’t support us. This is the obvious one, and for many of us, is definitely the root cause.

2. We had parents who themselves weren’t supported in their families, and so grew into adults who had the problem we’re having today. It’s hard to be raised by people who chronically experience themselves as unsupported.

3. We have an ancestral lineage with some intense trauma or break that leads to a lack of support in the system, and now it’s almost an inevitable part of belonging to this ancestral tribe.

4. We belong to a cultural group which is chronically unsupported within the context of the larger culture (African-Americans and other people of color, LGBTQ people, the economic underclass, etc.), and so lack of support feels like almost the air we breathe.

Given those conditions, how can we become convinced, at a deep unconscious level, that we are supported? For one thing, it’s not a mindset change that will make it happen – that’s a conscious attempt to change something that is lodged too deeply. And, although it can help, it’s probably not going to change just by trying to change your behavior, and hope that by practice you can convince your unconscious mind of how supported it is.

What does give us a sense of being supported, in a deep way? What if the task is not to “get support,” but to find a way to feel, truly, that support is always–and has always–been there, even though we experienced one or more of the four conditions listed above?

If that’s possible, then, how do we feel that inevitable support? That’s where the work of Family Constellations comes in. If we can change our relationship to the system that feels unsupportive, we can begin to feel the support that lies more deeply available and waiting for us. Family Constellations makes that possible, and not so much as a mental experience, but more as a physical one: the world simply feels more supportive.

That’s why I started the Nature Constellations workshops (the next one is July 16th – see more information here). We aren’t just spending a day in nature (although I very much approve of doing that as much as possible!). We’re connecting with the deeper systems all around us that are automatically wanting, needing, reaching, to support us.

All Constellations work gives us that embodied sense of support. In Nature Constellations, the embodiment shows up as we include all the ways in which nature is already inherently “rooted” (trees in the ground, birds in the air, deer in the forest, water in the lake). When we engage those systems and combine them with our wounded ancestral systems, we can finally really feel the support that’s always been there, and always will be there.