"Who says "I will not be like my father" is already following his steps.”

If my mother could not love me the way I needed, it is probably because she had a traumatic experience during her childhood. In order to survive she had to suppress her feelings and may never have talked about what happened to her. Silence was the best way to survive and to protect the dignity of the family.

When this happens, as a child I sense that something is missing, I feel my mother as incomplete. But I will not ask because my instinct says that it is not safe to ask. If I talk about it, if I ask, my mother may not survive. So I adopt the same survival mechanism as her.

If I have children myself, they will also be connected to this part that is missing in the history of our family. My mother´s difficult event is still not talked about, not acknowledged. But it may be distant enough, it may be safe enough to give it a place in the system now. So the systemic conscience will say: “There is no need for survival mode anymore, now it is safe to bring it up.” And one of our children will bring this event to the surface, through a symptom or a difficult behavior. When a child´s symptom makes no sense in the life of the child, it is a sign pointing at something in the past that needs to  be seen in the system.

When something is not allowed to go through because it was too difficult or shameful to look at, someone in the younger generations will unconsciously take it on, and say: “I carry this for you, dear grandmother”.

Children are connected to what is absent in the system. When we block the difficult aspects of our upbringing and we say “I don´t want to be like my parents”, our children will resemble those aspects of our parents that we reject. In the rejection is the seed for repetition. In rejecting the way my parents were, I am creating the field for our children to connect with that. “Who says I will not be like my father is already following his steps. Because in the rejection lies his presence”, says Bert Hellinger.

When we decide “I don´t want to pass onto my children what I received from my parents, I don´t want to do to them what they did to me, I want to break the pattern”,  we often end up repeating that very aspect that we wanted to change, or our children will. Looking with compassion and curiosity at the context of our parents´s childhood, we realise that they did what they could to survive. And that they gave us what was possible. Giving a place to what was difficult for them can help us better understand their behavior and complete the picture we have of our parents. The more we can integrate those painful chapters of our family story, the less they will have to be remembered by younger generations.

Tyson Yunkaporta says in Sand Talk: “In my great-grandmother kinship system every three generations there is a reset in which your grandparents’ parents are classified as your children, an eternal cycle of renewal. Kinship moves in cycles, the land moves in seasonal cycles, the sky moves in stellar cycles and time is so bound up in those things that it is not even a separate concept from space. We experience time in a very different way from people immersed in flat schedules and story-less surfaces. In our spheres of existence, time does not go in a straight line, and it is as tangible as the ground we stand on.”

I like this... “an eternal cycle of renewal”. We can try to block the unbearable events of our past, a recipe for more suffering down the generations. Or we can choose to give those painful memories a place in the history of our family. Integrating our past will give our present a chance for renewal. Every generation healing something, doing it better than the previous one.   

“Kinship moves in cycles.” I am hopeful for our children. I see young people attending workshops, passionate about their work, engaged in their communities, wanting to grow, asking the bigger questions. In our children I see the light of our parents and grandparents. They have inherited the resilience and the wisdom of their ancestors. If we, as parents, come to peace with our past, our children will be able to step out of survival mode and move on to flourishing.

Photo: Pep Gasol