Working With Family History In Bodily Insight

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

The third area that is worked out in the basic course of insight is our back.

Outdated parental and family scenarios are "stored" here on topics: hyperresponsibility, creativity (a ban on emotions and self-expression), fears and anxieties, survival, confused intuition

And since it quite often happens that parents pass on to their children what they themselves at some point received from mom and dad or even from grandparents, in this zone we can work not only with the traumatic experiences of our childhood, but also with the trauma and "childish decisions" of our parents. Or grandparents, or even great-grandfathers or any other ancestors up to the seventh generation.

Of course, at least two questions arise here: what if I don't know my ancestral history? And how could such distant ancestors have such an influence on me?

Working with the history of the clan and / or family can be done in different ways - there is also a thorough analysis, there is a genogram, there are family constellations. But since insight is a body-oriented method, then with family history we work through the body … And therefore (this is the answer to the first question) thorough knowledge of ancestors is not at all necessary. Here we proceed from the premise that a kind of "undigested", perhaps unconscious, deep traumatic experience is stored in generations - it is stored precisely at the bodily level, as the core of the trauma. This can be an experience of childish helplessness, deception or betrayal by loved ones, their inability to do something, a feeling of being forbidden, experiencing intense grief, and so on.

If the next generation failed to heal, somehow change this feeling, it is passed on, remains in the family system (this is the second question), and then, for example, we may have strange, inexplicable heavy feelings that regularly come in a dream or cover us in what is called "from scratch", without being experienced as our own.

Trauma is not always spoken out and transmitted to children at the level of words. For example, a mother who has lost her husband as a result of a tragedy will not necessarily tell her children about sudden loneliness, about her horror, about her unwillingness to live and about the inescapable depth of grief. But at the level of the body, emotions, experiences, she will experience all this - and the children consider the background non-verbal message of maternal longing. Moreover, the deepest "scars" in family history are left by exactly what is hidden (even if it was hidden from the best intentions), what is a secret - because secrets, firstly, are demonized by consciousness, and secondly, they require constant search for truth, which creates additional stress in the psyche.

So, in the insight, we are interested in the experience that is most strongly felt in the body. The point either hurts or it doesn't - you can't make a mistake here, which is why insight is good. A separate question is asked about generations, which may sound like: "Is it important to us what happened in the generations of our ancestors or not?" The answer is determined, as usual, by the pain response. It often happens that this is not important, and we work with the client's childhood. If the answer is "important", then you can go through the generations (from the 2nd to the 7th), focusing on the one that hurts the client the most.

The second explanation of the ancestral history phenomenon is even simpler: generations of ancestors can be a metaphor for how deep in our own psyche certain experiences lie … If some kind of trauma requires working out, but is so painful for the client that the defenses (which, as we remember, serve the good purpose of protecting us from re-injury) do not allow him to admit that this happened to me in my childhood, the psyche can choose a "roundabout way" - for example, it happened in the childhood of my great-grandmother. Well, great-grandmother, it's not me anymore, I can't bear responsibility for my great-grandmother, so it's already easier here:) Or in general, everything happened in the 7th generation, can anyone feel guilty for what did the ancestors do 200 years ago? Those. once again: no one cancels the likelihood that a given particular experience, a particular trauma, actually exists in the generic system, but it is also possible that generations are a symbol, a metaphor, which is convenient for work at the moment. Here, everyone is free to accept the version that is closer to him.

In addition to the depth and importance of the experience, a specific generation of ancestors can also metaphorically denote what a given trauma is "responsible for" in the human psyche, with what, what area of life it is associated with.

Here is a short list of such symbolic links:

7th generation - "this is my Rock, my (unhappy / happy / special, etc.) Destiny"

6th generation - "this is my relationship with power, spirituality / religion, worldview, nationality"

5th generation - "this is my willpower, ability to achieve goals, my impulse to action, military qualities" (Shadow side: lack of will, unmotivated aggression, cowardice, cruelty)

4th generation (great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers) - "this is how I feel harmony and balance; my love scenarios and my relationship with wealth (material values)"

3rd generation (grandparents) - "these are my talents, my ability to communicate, intelligence (mind), learning"

2nd generation (parents) - "this is my health and all my emotional sphere."

Whatever we work with, we end up working with ourselves, with what worries, touches, worries us right now, in this life, in this situation. It is in the solution of urgent, already internally "ripe" for working out problems that all the possibilities lie in order to go further - already as I-Myself.