Mending Rather than Healing

I’m interested in mending rather than healing. 

Facilitator Karin Dremel once moved me deeply by saying, “mending is personal, it’s what we can hold in our hands, the step that’s ours to take. Any healing that happens is grace.”

image gratitude to kelly sikkema on unsplash

I never, ever say or write those words without tearing up, at least a little. They bring relief! We are here to show the heck up, yet in concert with grace.

My sense is that as we attend to what is ours to mend, we have the chance to make something new out of something known. We clip away limiting beliefs and ways that were unhelpfully joined. We stitch together fragments that belong together, but which the system forgot were a fit.

We can hold it in our hands. We can take the step that's ours. This is the best way I know to unfold our potential.

My mother did her best to be a cycle breaker. She lived much of her life with the ardent commitment to heal the family. Constantly growing, praying, striving, and giving, I learned how to be from her way of being.

And, the way she held that felt for a long time like an inherited burden, or a directive for my life. Through the principles of Systemic & Family Constellations, in particular the understanding of my size and place within any system, I understand now - I can only ever do what is mine to do. It's the real and human limit for every human life.

So when Karin said that to me, the relief was so strong for me, because it alleviated that burden. That burden was a distortion that I could ever hold an out-sized place.

What I can do, what I can hold in my hands, the step I can take, is manyfold, wonderous, and "brutiful" (to use an accurate word from Glennon Doyle). There's no shortage of opportunity, and in fact, the work is far more sustainable when I understand my part is only my part. My fate is only my fate.

The more I understand this and attend to my work, the less encumbered others in the family system are by my projections, distortions, and entanglements. So yes, it's still "healing the family" but it's really attending to my own mending.