Family (re)Patterning: Life as descendant & ancestor-in-the-making

I am a mother, and a step-mother.

I am a daughter, and twice blessed to be a daughter-in-love.

I am a descendant, open to learning the riches and aches of my soul inheritance.

I am an ancestor-in-the-making, doing my best to mend, and to resource those who follow.

I feel the presence of my paternal lineage behind me on my right, the hard workers and pragmatists. I honor their survivorship and what it cost that I might exist.

I feel the presence of my maternal lineage behind me on my left, the innovators and entrepreneurs. I honor their place, their pain, and their gifts, that I am ever becoming me.

I stand at the live edge of a long story, a mix of woe and glory. I sense them when I reach for courage. I feel their constraints when I’m up against my own.

And this I know: there is not a single human being in that whole expanding vertex who deserves to be reduced to a singular notion of who they were or what their life meant.

As a facilitator of Systemic & Family Constellations, I am well acquainted with the tendency of reduction. Clients say things like, “that’s the grandfather who died in prison,” or “that’s the great aunt who was killed by her gardener,” or “my dad is an ass-hat who abandoned the family,” or “my mother is an addict.”

When I hear reductions like this, I’ve trained myself to take a pause, and a deep breath. With luck, the client will mirror that offering. Continuing, I might say, “Ah, so your great aunt had a garden, a significant garden from the sounds of it. I’m curious, was she known more for growing flowers or food?”

I’m interested in this, not because the answer is important, but because now that this ancestor has been introduced, I want to hold her in a field of remembrance more vibrant and nuanced than her death. As she, I assume, deserves.

When I ask about her garden, we suddenly see her surrounded with what she loved about life. If we surround her with life, then we have placed her in context.

When she is placed in context, there is also a gardener. And he, I trust, is also more than this one terrible act.

This is the gritty business of acknowledging the humanity of both victim and perpetrator.

This has value, not only, we imagine, for those who came before us, but for how it builds our capacity to take in what is, even when gritty, difficult, or tragic.

Through this process we become resourced enough to look at what was un-seeable. We start to know what was unknowable, begin to accept what was unacceptable, so we bring love to what was unlovable. We can better metabolize and integrate what was exiled.

And if we can include what our ancestors dispossessed, we have a chance to bring them and ourselves (and our descendants) a new kind of peace. Not a shallow or incomplete one, built on exclusion, secrecy, denial, bypassing, or the hard edge of anger (no matter how righteous); but rather, an informed one, of depth, awareness, acceptance, and the soft, enormous wisdom of soul.

We courageously look at all the troubles and those involved and say simply, “I see you.”

It may be simple to say the words, “I see you,” but to truly mean it is radical.

Human beings get themselves into all sorts of trouble, and we reflexively avert our eyes. This work is about taking a look at what’s hard to see. I have found that with the right support, we can build the capacity to even look into the abyss.

In a family constellation session eventually I can ask, “I wonder what happened to the gardener. How did it come to be that he did such a thing?”

We are not (at all!) excusing what he did when we also remember that he was once someone’s child. Rather, at the systemic level, we can hold the complexity that the same person can be both guilty and innocent.

And whether we experience ancestors as energetic presence or epigenetic source code, that expansion and inclusion changes something. Certainly for us, maybe for others as well.

For what if the gardener’s ancestors and descendants also ache over this terrible thing one of their own once did?

In the systemic principles in which I’ve deeply trained and practiced, a significant trauma can bind the family systems of perpetrator and victim - at the very least in the realm of story. So in this situation, we can imagine there is not one family system, but two, that might be longing for release. Release we can facilitate for our systems today.

Without an orientation to the systemic principles of human systems, it might be wondered why do I assume the great aunt needs to be seen in the fullness of life and the gardener deserves release? Such acts of compassion might seem like granting unearned grace.

But I don’t experience it that way at all.

For one thing, perhaps we can allow that a time arrives where enough people in the system have paid enough of a price… where the reactions have reverberated long enough. With this method, we say ‘enough’ to the cycles by bringing our humility, acceptance, and respect.

Systemic & Family Constellations happen in the space of open curiosity, without judgement or agenda, because we’re interested in these questions of not only what happened, but what made it so? What problem was trying to be solved? What did the solution serve? What did it cost, or how does that cost live on as symptoms someone is bearing today?

…bearing today, most likely beyond any intention of the ancestor who got that ball rolling.

…bearing today, beyond the relentless efforts of the descendant to do something new.

So far in my experience, our present day pain points, persistent patterns, and even physical symptoms, hold the resonance of something that could not be metabolized at the the original point of trauma - either for our ancestor, or in our own lives.

So we receive the opportunity in new forms, asking, “How about now, can you bring new tools to this situation now?” or generations later, “How about you, could you look at this?”

I see my facilitator role not as helper, but as collaborative accompanist. I sit beside the Turn Taker ( looking with them, with open curiosity.

In a family constellation the core question is essentially and humbly, “ Well, how did your family do it?”

I mean by this: how did your family adapt and carry on and pass forward life despite what happened?

Because something happened.

Go back four or five generations, for example, and we are in a field of maternal and infant loss. Personal losses that cannot be integrated show up in families all sorts of ways. It can be as simple as a traumatized mother who cannot mother well, and her child gets less than they need and deserve. And that child in turn might become a parent who cannot foster attachment well enough for their beloved offspring to thrive. And unimpeded, onward it flows.

Or it might be a more nuanced transmission, something as unconscious as mother says one thing, but shows another. Even her very young child understands, “Ah! This is how we do it.” This is where we don’t look, or what we don’t say, or who we don’t acknowledge.

Dutiful, loving, loyal children take that in as easily as food. The unconscious sentence is, “I’ll belong by carrying that on.”

Collective traumas like war, famine, invasion, slavery, echo behind all of us, waiting for those with the courage and capacity to look, and say, “I see what happened. You did a thing. And you over there - something happened to you. And as a family we forgot what we once knew. I feel the cost. Despite all that it took, thank you for finding a way to pass life along to me today.”

One of my teachers, Stephan Hausner says, “When one person in the system has the courage to look at everything that happened, and to include everyone who belongs, then movement is possible for everyone in the system.”

I live and work as I do, weaving systemic principles of human systems into all of my ways of knowing, because this is how I mend the part that’s mine to hold. One stitch at a time for my family system; some threads of which I pull through to resolve whole sections of the tapestry.

And as I learn what seems to work well, I guide others to stitch something essential for themselves and the systems to which they belong.

Small moves, big pauses.

That which is most subtle is often the most potent.

A little bit of water for the parched, a small offering of food for the famished.

A bit of grace for the exiled.

Move by move, family by family, organization by organization*, community by community, to the scale of the collective, we can take a look at what’s longing to be remembered in the fullness of grace, so that something new can finally have a way to emerge.

As we expand our sense of those who came before us, we expand the breath in our bodies and with that the possibilities for our lives.

The great aunt, and her garden, and the gardener all exist together in an ecosystem where love wants to bloom.

As we also long to do**.

fire and grace,

Amelia