NEW FAMILY CONSTELLATIONS

June 2012

What to do from the orders of love, when faced by economic injustice? How to balance the giving and receiving? How to balance the hurt received?

First, we need to see ourselves within a systemic context, where we are all in the service of something greater. In No Waves Without the Ocean, Hellinger states that the ‘greater soul, or whatever it might be, directs and takes the individual in its service, as it wishes. Some have pleasant tasks, some very difficult and heavy ones. Some have healing tasks and some destructive, terrible ones. All of them are in the service of something greater. To the greater soul it is the same. No one can resist this greater soul.

There are people who believe that the world has been placed in their hands, as though it were possible for someone to destroy the world, or to save the world if they so wished. All of them are detached from the stream of life …

This has profound consequences for our stance towards perpetrators and victims. They are both in the service of the greater soul, hard as it may be to accept. The so-called ‘good people’ and the so-called ‘bad people’ are called upon in the same way. This understanding ends any feelings of superiority and presumptuousness …

When we have this understanding, we become humble and can agree to the world as it is, without claiming to improve it, as though the greater soul were not holding things according ot its own measure. We are in reality only embedded in these greater processes’ (pp. 48-49.)

Every time a human being is attacked, a natural hormonal reaction is triggered, allowing him to respond immediately with another attack against the aggressor that is proportional to the hurt received, not greater, just enough to stop the aggression. At that moment, both people look at each other, discovering in each other an equal. However, when the victim enters into an escalation of violence, this is not the natural response pertaining to a genuine primary emotion anymore, but it rather means that the victim has entered into automatic responses of the family unconscious which stop her from living in the present, and only in the present.

Where does that submission to the family unconscious come from? When an ancestor left something unfinished, like owning his anger, an unfulfilled desire for revenge, guilt that was not assumed or a crime for which responsibility was not accepted, a field of ‘archaic compensation’ opens: the family unconscious appoints a descendant to point out, and include, what still needs closure. This descendant is then trapped since conception in that field of archaic compensation and cannot do anything else but repeat that past, until he becomes aware of this dynamic.

And it is when he becomes aware of this, that he detaches himself from the past and accepts his present, his emotions and his actions, without blaming others, leaving the field of archaic compensation and entering into a field of autonomy.

This whole process is totally unconscious. And life will keep sending us mirrored situations of what the ancestor went through, for us to experience those situations from the present and from an adult state. As soon as we experience the conflict assuming it, from the adult state, what pertains to the ancestors is solved at the same time, and we become liberated from the burden we were carrying.

But living in the adult state is one of the hardest tasks. Unconsciously, it is easier to imitate an ancestor than to be in the adult and in the present.

The family system asks its members to balance the giving and receiving, and in particular, to balance the hurt that has been received. This means that the victim shall also hurt the aggressor back, but just enough to achieve a balance.

And what do we observe?

The victim’s feelings of pain, victimisation, desperation, fear, impotence, abuse, etc., are immediately followed by anger, a desire for revenge, a desire to return the hurt to the aggressor and cause even more, remorse, resentment, frustration, hate, and so on.

It has been demonstrated in our time that hate, remorse, envy, and all other negative feelings, penetrate in the energy field of the hated person, attacking her immune system.

This means that we are already balancing in a natural way the hurt we have received. Our thoughts and emotions are taking revenge on our behalf.

As soon as we realise of this, we can accept our part, and this puts us in the present and in the adult state. From this moment on, we are able to know what to do in the current situation.

Now, we imagine one of these economic, political or financier predators in front of us, and we say to him:

‘You have hurt me greatly.

I leave you with your loyalties and your responsibility.

You are wanted the way you are by something greater.’

Now we look at ourselves, at our feelings towards them:

‘I am like you’.

Now we look at our life:

‘I acknowledge the hurt I have caused. I accept the consequences’.

Now we look at his and our family systems, and we realise that we are part of a greater compensation movement:

‘Now I see what my ancestors have done to your ancestors’.

We look at that person again and we observe the change that has taken place in both of us. Then we can say to him:

‘Thanks for being the way you are’.

When we see ourselves as a human being in front of another human being, with respect toward those who take decisions that are harmful for us, that is when we are able to decide what actions to take. We see that they do what they have to do, even if it goes against life. It is their responsibility.

And we assume our responsibility of supporting life, in opposition to that which undermines it.