Practice Story No. 1. When A Daughter "bears" Pain For Her Mother

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Maria came to the reception from the urology department with her nine-year-old daughter Sasha. The girl had enuresis since birth, but the doctors could do nothing to help her. From a medical point of view, Sasha was “clean”, without pathologies and neurological disorders.

Once again, she was being examined, but this did not change the situation in any way.

During the consultation, it turned out that Maria, Sasha's mother, was already in her second marriage, that she was in a big and protracted conflict with her first husband, and her mother in every possible way prevented her from moving to her current husband, she, of course, forbade herself to cry, because “you have to be strong”, the daughter is sick, and the money for her treatment goes like sand.

Everything turned out dramatically and family troubles could well "trigger" the girl's enuresis. But in Mary herself, in addition to a chronic neurotic state, there was something that was alarming - on the one hand, her soul was worried and looked for ways of healing for her daughter, and on the other, something stony and dead shone through. The soul was as if split.

I offered Maria one of the constellation exercises. She agreed, having previously taken her daughter to the department. We set up the family, put Sasha and the symptom in front of us. The field was so full of pain and violence, so clearly someone else was missing. I asked, after a moment's hesitation Maria answered in the affirmative.

- I never told anyone about it.

- Have you been silent for 24 years?

- Yes.

At the age of 16, returning home in the evening, after some rural holiday, Maria was brutally raped. She was tortured for a long time, she got home only in the morning. Parents were sure that she stayed for the night with her friends, so they did not worry about her absence. The next day and for the next 24 years, Mary lived as if nothing had happened. She did not go to the police, did not open up to anyone, her rapist lived with her all her life, a moment of relief came only once, when he died. She supplanted all feelings, eliminated all experiences and never cried about that night in 24 years. The first husband, in her words "in a strange way" looked like a rapist - humiliated, beat, sexually abused her. The marriage broke up, another man appeared, but the relationship did not work out with him either. After the story, Maria agreed to put the figure of the rapist "somewhere on the edge." At a safe distance from yourself. Then she did what she had wanted for a long time: she told her mother, her beloved grandmother, her aunt, what happened to her at the age of 16.

After that, the figure of the rapist moved to the place of the daughter's symptom. We know perfectly well that, excluding trauma and pain, we still do not get rid of them, they do not dissolve, everything remains in the Field. The daughter began to "bear" the feelings and feelings of the mother.

“Mom, if you cannot cry, then I will cry instead of you, but only downward” - thus, compensation has occurred in the system. Maria cried, but it was still difficult for her to express anger and anger, and most importantly, she saw the connection between her daughter's symptom and her story. At the end of the exercise, Maria felt relief, with tears in her eyes she said: "If only you knew how to keep everything in yourself for so many years."

One consultation is not able to instantly lead to recovery. We can move something, look at something. But this is often enough to start the search process, and in the subsequent psychotherapeutic or constellation work, to find a solution.

Children often try to save their parents with their illness or carry something heavy instead of them. The healing of a child can be interconnected with parental responsibility for his personal history, with all feelings and events, no matter how traumatic they may be for him.