By Yael Reiss
This post is about my introduction to Family Constellations, and how it unexpectedly (at the time) helped me deal with a longstanding issue I had with my mother.
How did my involvement in Family Constellations start? I had heard from a good friend about Family Constellations, and she said to me that there’s no real way she can explain what it is; the only way to understand would be to experience it for myself.
I was curious and intrigued, and I had a problem that was on my mind forever. My problem was that I couldn’t feel “belonging”, even though I had friends and family that I love and who love me. I found it hard to trust that I belong and that was painful. It was exacerbated by immigrating to Australia quite a few years ago.
Anyway, I went to this Family Constellations workshop, and I was always very connected to my father’s side of the family, and so I started telling the history of my father’s side. The facilitator didn’t let me speak too much, and she asked me what I know about the history of my mother’s side. I replied that I actually don’t know too much. I told her the little that I knew, and then she started placing representatives for my mother, for my grandmother, and some others. The representative for my grandmother felt a very very deep pain, and emotional grief. This representative felt a sense of grief that she reported felt to her perhaps as a pain of losing a sibling at a young age. There was something there that felt like a very, very big loss, a trauma. I was not aware of any trauma on my grandmother’s side, and the facilitator had a sense that perhaps it had to do with the Holocaust. The constellation continued with a few more movements of the representatives, and a few sentences were said between the representatives, and in fact I don’t even remember a lot of what happened. I just remembered that, although these people did not know much about me or my life – I had shared just a few words about my problem, and a few facts about family history – I was in tears and the representatives were in tears. Something was happening, I didn’t really know what it was but it felt very real. After I finished the constellation, I started feeling a bit better but I didn’t know why and I didn’t really attribute it to the constellation. The next day, whether by chance or not, we had a spontaneous little get together with my mother, my mother’s sister, and a few other family members. I was amazed to hear from my family that my grandmother on my mother’s side had lost her sister when she was young and that had been devastating for her. My aunt is named after this sister. This was early in the 20th century, and they had lost her to appendicitis before they could get her to a hospital. What I didn’t know, and I am quite ashamed not to have known all this, is that my grandmother came to Israel before the Second World War. She got married in Israel and just after my mother and her twin sister were born in 1945, news of the Holocaust started arriving. One by one, gradually, my grandmother learnt her entire family had perished by the Nazis – her mother, father, siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins, even her grandparents. She was the only person left alive from her entire family.
This not only confirmed what had come up at the Family Constellations workshop, but it also made me understand for the first time: How can a person live with such a massive loss, with such grief, and still be available totally for her children? It’s not possible, and although my grandmother was a very good mother, and she did everything the best she could, it helped explain many things for which I was resentful towards my mother. I had carried resentment towards my mum most of my life, and seeing her upbringing in this light helped me realise how she had grown up. There was only so much she could have given me. After years of trying to forgive my mum I realised there was nothing to forgive. Everything was clear, and there was just a very natural flow of love. All the resentment just dropped away. That was a few years ago, and since then, surprisingly, I have felt more and more able to connect with people, to feel “belonging”, with family and friends.
Bert Hellinger, the founder of Family Constellations, observed that when a person can’t be at peace with his or her parents, usually that person suffers a block in some area of their life. Bert Hellinger has a great respect for parents. In a way he says that our parents give us life, and anything else is a bonus. And since life comes to us through our parents, when we cannot take in our parents into our heart, often we cannot take in some other aspects that life has to offer. There are many legitimate reasons to reject a parent, to feel resentment, or deprivation or anger for what a parent did to us or did not give us. Still, it is possible to heal and take in the gift of life that can be given to us by only two people in the entire world – our parents.
I definitely experience a lovely increase in the flow in different areas of my life since that constellation, I now naturally connect with great love with my mum. I am also learning how my grandmother would have had a similar pain to me, of not belonging when she had lost her entire family of origin. I guess in a way, it is the same struggle my grandmother and I had, and perhaps it’s a struggle common to many.
