Here we go, a November workshop for you to get sparkly, ready for end of year celebrations with your lovely family! Yes, they are, and wouldn't you like to feel relaxed and relationally competent and grown up in those situations that ususally make you totally revert to five years old, or even cause you to act it out - shout, cry or slam doors? Of course you would! There are very good reasons we learnt to feel that way when we were kids: it kept us safe and able to cope, more or less. But it's healthy to let go of that now that we're adults! Maybe we felt lonely, neglected, or afraid, also with good reason. Whatever causes us degrees of distress around our family can be softened, be seen for what it is, and we can modify our responses to reduce the likelihood of reminiscences or re-living of trauma.
Go for that change, freshen your view, maybe change your sense of your place in your family, or give back abuse to where it belongs - without the perpetrator being in the room. All the stored up relational pain you have can be released. Family Constellations emphasises understanding and responsibility, including the requirement for perpetrators of any and every kind of abuse to take responsbilty for their actions and the pain they have caused. However, 'forgiveness ' is not in the family constellations toolkit for two main reasons. The first is that we may not want to forgive, and the second is that it implies the forgiver is higher than the forgiven. Whatever type of abuse it was, understanding that a perpetrator was almost certainly once a victim and having compassion for that, is not forgiveness. It does allow us to give back the responsibility to the perpetrator and their perpetrator and all the others in our lineage, and to know absolutely that we are not responsible for being abused.
“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.” — Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter
Whatever 'happened' - I have a friend who was locked in a dark room for hours when he was seven years old and already afraid of the dark. He consequently became a stutterer. We all know someone who, to their emotional detriment was not able to attend a funeral of a parent or grandparent or other important relative. Another acquaintance of mine was tied to the clothesline and made to eat their rejected food wthout using their hands. We all know of someone who was slapped or kicked for no reason except that the adult was dysregulated. And so on. We also know of kids who were ridiculed, put down, denied a voice, not allowed to join their friends for normal children's games, were denied food, or who were pawns in their parents' divorce, and so on and on . Whatever happened, there are ways to understand at a deep level and to know we didn't cause or in any way deserve it. Sometimes an adult intended to hurt you, but mostly our parents are just trying to cope with their own accumulaton of unattended trauma.
When cultural or religious festivities are looming, social and mental health services get huge surges of people in need of them. People who have no one to go to on i mportant festive dates, or who remember and relive awful experiences. It may be the dread we feel about sitting next to a boring/creepy/flirty uncle through a festive meal, the pit of the stomach stone cold dread as our implicit or explicit memories wake up and give us hell. We joke, we all joke about the million and one ways that the family gathering seems set up to explode or implode, but these are real issues. The good news is that we can do something to understand what is really going on in the family, find more compassion, healthy ways to stay safe, and eliminate the dread of meetng up wth family on festive and other occasions.
We may not have any specific instance in mind, we may feel we had a good childhood, and we probably did, but we know something is off. Just a little bit. Family Constellations reveals secrets and shame in a safe environment.
Come to the workshop. Connect with your heritage in ways that loosen knots, shake out secrets, and give you fresh perspectives and lasting change.
Karen Sole
Copyright Karen Sole
Karen Sole is a member of the Internatonal Institute for Complementary Therapists, and of the International Systemic Constellations Association (isca-network.org). She took her first training from Yildiz Sethi yildizsethi.com of familyconstellations.com.au . Karen's profile can be found on all three organisational sites.
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