Illness
Illness is a survival programme of the species and the individual (Hamer).
Illness is a movement of the spirit to heal the family conscience, leading the individual to reconciliation with the excluded from his clan (Hellinger).
Illness and family system
The family system transmits to all of its members, all the information pertaining to them; this transmission occurs in a circular movement that integrates all what happens. The system is moved by two opposite forces whose articulation is in perpetual readjustment: a cohesion force and an individuation force that seeks autonomy, both in the service of life.
The need for order and belonging allows for cohesion in the family system. The need for compensation or balance, either creates a movement forward every time adult compensation takes place, or else it creates a repetition movement, towards death, when the person follows an archaic compensation.
When order or belonging are not respected, the cohesion in the group becomes rigid, preventing the individuation of its members. Every time exclusion takes place, the family system starts up a ‘blind’ mechanism, a new compensation mechanism, in order to promote the reinclusion of the excluded person and thus reinstate the system’s cohesion at a higher level.
That blind mechanism targets the youngest in the system, who are in the service of their elders, bringing suffering upon a young member, suffering that is a metaphor of the situation that caused the exclusion and which is aimed at being read, understood, until the excluded person is included back again.
This suffering, this metaphor, is the illness. Its mission is the reconciliation between someone who excludes and someone who is being excluded.
Both, the excluder and the excluded one, had moved away from life, and their return to life consists in such reconciliation.
The sick individual, or descendant appointed to highlight this exclusion and this separation from life, will imitate those ancestors he is entangled with, by rejecting life as it is, excluding, or being excluded.
When the sick individual says yes to his situation, yes to his illness, he tunes in with the movement of the spirit, and adult compensation starts. The healing force begins to unfold in him. Illness is a journey back to life.
The sick person is linked to an excluder who did not take responsibility for the hurt he caused. For this reason, she will show the same loyalty and ‘weakness’ as the excluder, and will go through conflicts she will not know how to solve, just like that excluder. Dr. Hamer has discovered and established that all illnesses are the somatisation of a blocked conflict.
Blocked conflicts are a rejection of life as it is. The person appointed by the system to highlight the excluder or the excluded (a process that Hellinger calls ‘movement of the soul’, where ‘soul’ means ‘system’) faces conflicts that she does not manage to solve, and these conflicts are somatised as an illness.
When the sick person finally accepts her illness, she begins to look at her conflicts and to assume what she rejected, realising of whom she also excluded from her life. As a result, illness leaves.
Thanks to Hamer, we are also able to recognise that illness is a biphasic process constituted by a first phase characterised by stress, a part from specific symptoms, and a second phase characterised by fatigue and vagotonia. The illness of the first phase represents a loyalty to an excluder, and the illness of the second phase, a loyalty to someone excluded.
Illnesses that end in ‘itis’ (i.e.: bronchitis, arthritis), belong to the first phase, and are the result of an entanglement with an excluder. Illnesses that end in ‘osis’ (i.e.: arthrosis, thrombosis), belong to the second phase, pertaining to the loyalty to someone excluded.
All reconciliation is the result of a movement of the spirit. The illness is a complete process of reconciliation, and it is, therefore, a movement of the spirit.
When a sick person heals, when she comes back to health, this means that she is in a powerful movement of healing and growth. The previous disorder in the system has been healed thanks to the sick person’s healing process. The system loses its rigidity and gains cohesion again at a higher level of consciousness, enabling all its members to achieve a greater autonomy and more life.
What else do Constellations tell us about illness?
The inability to deal with a conflict is a rejection of life as it is, a rejection of the mother.
Physical health usually comes to us via the mother line, via the line of the Mother together with Life. Mental health comes from the father’s presence.
In serious illnesses, we can see at least three generations where the mother has not been taken. This means that we usually have to work including the grandparents also, and get to a stage where the person takes her mother just as she is, even if the latter is not in her place as a mother.
Regarding mental illness, the father is absent for at least three generations as well. In illness such as schizophrenia or psychosis, the person has a minimum of two entanglements with a hidden crime in the family, and this person represents both, victim and perpetrator, at once.
Concerning serious illnesses, a part from several generations ‘without mother’, we also find several entanglements with excluders or excluded people and several conflicts, where each entanglement brings forth a ‘programming’ conflict (a concept of the New Medicine: a conflict that programmes illness).
Constellations shed light on the blind dynamics that cause disease. The person responds to her appointment by the system, from her blind love, characterised by the child’s magical thinking, with one of these sentences:
- To the excluder or the excluded person: ‘I follow you’, ‘I replace you’.
- To the excluder: ‘I pay for you, I atone for you’.
- To the excluded one: ‘I atone like you’, ‘I am a victim like you’, ‘I follow you into exclusion’.
- To her mother or her father: ‘I am greater than you’.
- To someone sick in her family system: ‘I follow you into illness’, ‘I die in your place so you can come back’.
- To one of her relatives who has transmitted to her a ‘you for me’ statement, the person replies: ‘I for you’ (taking that relative’s entanglement away with her as a result).