Generational Trauma

But there where you swim, she (Joyce’s psychotic daughter Lucia) drowns.
C. G. Jung to James Joyce

If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people.
Thich Nhat Hanh

All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will transmit it to those around us.
Richard Rohr

This toxic pattern within the broken family system will continue from one generation to the next, until one brave survivor finally ends the cycle of abuse. The dysfunction, bullying, and abuse didn’t start with you, but it most certainly can end with you.
Dana Arcuri

Whenever we repeatedly fall prey to inexplicable winter blues or a nebulous sense of `weltschmerz´, we might be helped in the process of our healing, a process of becoming whole again and remembering who we really are, by availing of innovative therapeutic modalities. Some of these can help us uncover previously unrecognised, even unsuspected, factors which directly impact our lives, factors which reside in the realm of the `unseen´.

In Family Constellation Therapy, as originally devised by Virginia Satir (if we can heal the family, we can heal the world) in the US, and Bert Hellinger in Germany – independently of each other – in the 70s and 80s, the main idea is that energies are carried over unconsciously from generation to generation.

If there is unresolved business in a family (let’s say a suicide that has been kept secret or abuse experiences supressed), members of later generations can `identify´ with their troubled ancestor(s), often without even having knowledge of their existence. This results in people being `burdened´ by energies which today dampen their vitality, lead them into self-destructive addictive behaviours, or, in extreme cases, drive them to making the ultimate sacrifice.

An example I personally witnessed was a couple who had come to a family constellation workshop (3-day weekend event) in Southern Germany to work through a constellation for their teenage daughter, who was in the late stage of anorexia. She was literally at death’s door and, having tried all available conventional medical and psychiatric avenues, the parents, in their desperation, chose to do a family constellation as a last gasp attempt to find a remedy.

Let me outline the context of such constellation work. In the case cited, 14 people (mostly couples) had signed up to spend an entire weekend at a seminar house (on the grounds of which I was living at the time), to work through five or six constellations, as time allowed.

Each person who wished to have a constellation carried out on their issue had already had a preparation session with the facilitators. My dear friends Doris, and Gerhard (now deceased) had been married for over 25 years at this time and had both undergone training with Bert Hellinger. Doris is a non-medical practitioner, Gerhard was a judge at the family court, close to retirement at that time.

On the Friday evening, Doris provided an overview as to whose constellations were on the agenda, and basic ground rules were discussed and agreed. When one person (the client) began their constellation, the rest of the participants were available as `representatives´ in the constellation.

For example, the facilitator would ask the client to give a summary of the topic that she hoped to resolve and would then ask her to select, intuitively, from the participants (many people had never met each other before), people to represent themselves, their mother, father, grandparents, siblings, etc – those people considered to be most relevant to the work at hand. The client didn’t participate actively in the constellation, but rather worked from the side lines in tandem with the facilitator.

In addition to having carried out several constellations as part of my own healing process (in the role of the client), I participated many times as a representative in the constellations of others. This provided `the proof in the pudding´, so to say. I would sometimes be placed as `grandfather´ next to my `wife´ and experienced an immediate somatic reaction (tension, nausea, rage), although I had never met her before in my life.

The facilitator would work with the client to interpret the signals which were emerging within the constellation, sometimes discovering that further family members were necessary. They would then be added. Positions were moved around, and people of no immediate relevance removed. Family secrets often emerged, hunches were followed, and dots joined up. This would ultimately lead to a resolution, often of a surprising nature.

When the facilitator feels that the healing resolution has taken hold among the representatives, the client is invited to take the place of his/her representative in the constellation. This allows the client to perceive how it feels to be part of a healed, reconfigured system. When everyone feels comfortable in their place, the constellation concludes.

In the case of the couple mentioned above, it emerged that the family had been living in Silesia (modern-day western Poland) and were driven out of their homes, with only their shirts on their backs, by the approaching Red Army in 1945. Like many others, two young children from this family, both girls, had died of starvation during the ensuing gruelling weeks of trekking westwards on foot. The family had dealt with the pain of this reality in a very human manner, namely by sweeping it under the carpet. This was the family secret.

The client explained that this topic had somehow always been in the air, almost as if there had been a ghost, or ghosts in the room, but it had never been addressed by subsequent generations.

In the painful work of addressing what had happened, – the work of the family constellation – burdens were transferred back to their `original owners´, conflicts resolved, forgiveness practiced, and commitments to living our lives to the full renewed.

This process really works. It requires great skill and empathy on the part of those facilitating the workshop, willingness to embrace vulnerability on the part of the client, and the courage of all participants to leave their egos (judgement, etc.) at the door when they enter the sacred space to do the work. I am eternally grateful for the experience which has been beneficial to me in my own healing and also stands to me in my professional activities as a mental fitness trainer and transformation coach.

My intuition is that many of us may be carrying a burden or burdens of which we are not aware, and which ultimately do not belong to us. My constellations showed, inter alia, that I was carrying a heavy burden of my deceased father’s grief at the untimely death of his beloved younger brother Peter, long before I was born. Returning that burden to where it belonged was an important landmark on my life journey.

In the many constellations in which I have participated (perhaps one hundred or more), war inevitably played a decisive role. Three `great wars´ – the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, WWI (1914-18), and WWII (1939-45) – had `great´ impact on the inhabitants of Continental Europe and beyond. This impact has affected all subsequent generations. Of course, the history of humanity goes back a lot further, and the cumulative generational trauma `load´ is correspondingly heavy.

In my own family, both grandfathers were soldiers who had direct experience of action. Apart from some general second-hand bluster, I never heard anything about what had really been experienced and what emotional or spiritual effect this had had on these two good men.

It is difficult to put the experience into words and to accurately describe the process and potential for healing of family constellation therapy. It needs to be experienced to be fully appreciated.

Together with innovations from the field of depth psychology, trauma and bodywork modalities that have emerged over the past fifty years, recent research findings from neuroscience, quantum physics, and epigenetics, and the Positive Intelligence (PQ) Mental Fitness Training I am currently integrating into my Transformational Coaching Programmes, it represents an important element in a powerful array of healing resources available to us today.

This reinforces my belief that we are now living in a `Golden Age´ in terms of breaking the generational chains of toxicity and suffering which have plagued humanity since the dawn of time.

Each new day takes us one step closer to the collective transformation we so badly need, to successfully meet the challenges of the 21^st century, and to be the change we wish to see in the world.