“ Raymond” came to me wanting a closer relationship with his father. He knew their estrangement was sapping energy from his life, but there was so much enmity and misunderstanding, he couldn’t see any way through to closeness.
Wouldn’t it be nice to trust that we were born into the very best family for us? The truth is…we did. Even the dangerous, crazy families are the source of our life. Take out even one member of our direct ancestry, and we…are…not…here.
All members of a family have this sense, and it creates spectacular loyalties and confusions. Every member belongs equally, and can never unbelong. Each member has his or her particular respect and place in the system. These are, as Bert Hellinger puts it, a result of “Orders of Love”: everyone always belongs to their family, and everyone deserves respect.
Another Order of Love is that those born first send life down to the younger ones. Life and “help” never flows the other way. But when the younger ones look backward and see the older ones suffering (or having suffered, if they have died), they often reach back in an effort to help. We do this naturally and lovingly, but it never has good effect. We see this quite explicitly in the lives of the descendents of Holocaust survivors, who in an effort to honor and help those who suffered so much, make their own lives completely unlivable. And we see it many other ways in which we take on others’ problems as our own, structuring our lives around trying to resolve and heal their wounds.
This turns out to be the source of many common issues: financial problems, relationship difficulties, food disorders, depression. We are making our lives miserable in an unworkable effort to say “I love you” to someone upstream. Argh! How do we begin to unentangle this?
What if we could gather the family together? All of them: kids, parents, grandparents, great grandparents. Bring them together so that we could see and honor the suffering, include the lost ones, notice how much bigger the older ones are than the younger ones, and hear the ancestors lovingly say to those pesky younger ones “Cut that out!” What if we could bring them together and unentangle all the inappropriate attempts to help, bring peace to the heartbroken, and put everyone back in their proper and right place in the family?
As it turns out, nothing is ever truly lost, and everyone’s family is still available through the presence of their unique “Family Soul.” Family Constellation work gives us access to this ongoing and real phenomena. We tap into what Rupert Sheldrake called the “Morphogenetic Field” where all information is accessible, and discover the love of our families—the kind that is stuck and the kind that is flowing.
In that safe, contained environment, Raymond was acquainted with his long dismissed Mormon ancestors, his father’s family. The constellation quickly revealed that these people had been both on the end of terrible victimization, and had themselves committed crimes. As a result, they had been rejected, and all but forgotten.
Our family souls will not put up with this. No one may be rejected or forgotten. Apparently, Raymond had offered to be the one who would make sure they would be included by sapping his life of energy and being alienated from his father. By his own suffering, the dishonor done to his ancestors could be addressed. The little ones in a family are almost always willing (if unconsciously) to do this out of love for their family.
But the constellation offered a new and much more effective solution. We made these Mormon ancestors visible. We watched them willingly take responsibility for any wrongs they had committed, and also offered them our respect for their sufferings and losses. The strength of these ancestors became re-accessible to the entire family, which is what the little ones always need to be able to live their lives fully. And Raymond received his ancestor’s blessing to live the life that they had given him. In this context, it became easier for him to respect his father’s limitations and challenges, and once again accept the full blessing that his father is able to give. In this tableau, we could see Raymond’s energy beginning to return, now that he wasn’t cut off from his own family’s life and love.
Love freely flowing. This is what our whole family wants for all of us.
Chandalar River, Alaska, by Leslie Nipps
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