What kind of psychological content do we inherit from our lineage? How does it influence our sense of self, our relationships and our choices? How does it actualize in our lives? The attempt to answer these questions may require the help of both psychology and spirituality, taking us beyond Western cultural individualism.
We will focus on the relational patterns we inherit from our parents and their parents – our ancestors – while acknowledging that what we are made of and what we can become goes well beyond what comes through our bloodlines. As we shall see, relational patterns serve as vessels for emotional “packages” and life event forms. The effort to identify these patterns will lead us to an exploration of the ancestral realm in psychology and in spirituality.
While some forms of ancestral veneration are present in practically every culture, this text connects Carl G. Jung’s structure of the unconscious, Martyn Carruthers’ therapeutic method of Family Maps based on the Hawaiian Huna shamanism, and the Vedic notion of ancestral karma, with its implication of cross-generational chains of consequences. While the notion of karma and the work of Jung give a wider perspective on this question, the Family Maps method represents a suitable therapeutic intervention that can help individuals explore and resolve their own ancestral inheritance within therapeutic settings, in pursuit of psychological well-being and spiritual advancement.
The Price of Individualism
In the West, we have been formed within a highly individualistic culture. While this has helped us develop our individual potential and attain a degree of personal freedom unimaginable in a collective mindset, it has also set the limits to our personal development.
We take pride in thinking of ourselves as isolated, free individuals who can do anything and everything, our destiny in our hands. And, we go into crisis when we experience our powerlessness to change everything to our will and to our purpose. Especially when our relationships fall apart, or when we find ourselves alone beyond words in a world crowded with disconnected human bodies, technology, and alienated minds.
We already know that many of our contemporary problems are of psychological nature: from depression, anxiety and various forms of socio-pathology, eating disorders, stress-related diseases and psychosomatic illnesses. The hallmarks of our age do not do us honor: rising divorce trends with devastating consequences to partners and children; suicidal and self-harming drives; dehumanized behavior toward our fellow beings; pathological profit-driven and homicidal behaviors, in economy and politics. Much, if not most, of the drives behind these phenomena can be seen as gross products of unhealthy individuals with destructive relationship habits in their personal, societal and environmental existence.
One of the dimensions we have disregarded is what we used to know in every culture: the importance of the family name we carry, the rituals concerning our dead, the regard for bloodlines. We still sometimes practice cultural rituals concerning our ancestors, although mostly as an empty form, a superstitious recidivism of “primitive” times, or as habits of sentimental value, without truly understanding the place of the past in our present. Somewhere along the way we have lost that general sense of intrinsic, intimate interconnectedness with those who came before us, and consequently, I’d argue, with those around us. In the same time, we’ve lost the sense of personal connection with forces greater than us. This is not a coincidence. We have substituted this sense with an image of an equally disconnected, individualistic, self-willed, and often threatening God; or, with nihilism, with self-interested behavior, etc. These are often accompanied by a general sense of inadequacy and/or its twin, supremacy, a feeling of not belonging, of being out of place, of general ill worth and resentment, senselessness, or power drive, pathological narcissism, short-lived materialism, framed in the general setting of disconnectedness.
With the predominance of individualism, one of the aspects that have fallen behind in value and regard concerns the quality of our relationships. While relational aspects are many, this text focuses on our relationship with our ancestors. While we continue exploring the secrets of the DNA, we have lost the knowledge, the sense, and the context of why bloodlines are important – and how our ancestors can be active influences in our daily lives and circumstances.
What Comes Through Our Bloodlines?
We know this: we inherit physical features, good health and longevity, or genetic disease and biological weaknesses. We still do not know why one sibling may inherit talents and gifts, while the other may inherit violent or addictive behavior.
Even further, it may often be the case that we ourselves are prone to inexplicable, irrational emotions that we have no personal experience to match, such as uncontrollable waves of anger, fear, sorrow or guilt. Cravings with inexplicable force may drive us to self-destruction. Sometimes it is as if we suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms without having experienced an actual trauma ourselves.
Or, we find ourselves caught in relationship patterns that do not work. While we can rationally understand our errors, we keep finding ourselves within an identical pattern the next time we try, only different actors play the exact same roles in the same invisible script. In other context, we may fail every time within the reach of our goal. Or, we don’t even have a goal or a sense of meaning and purpose to our lives. And no amount of science, analysis, pleasure, medications, meditation, or religion help.
In other cases, we know what is wrong with us but we are powerless to change. We may hurt those we love in anger and we cannot help ourselves, or them. We may seek people who hurt us. We may fall in depression. We may lead a just life but still suffer from numbing guilt sabotaging every opportunity for happiness, while other destructive persons walk their paths without a pang of conscience. We may suffer from unexplained diseases and dysfunctions that doctors have long names for but no cure for them. Medical science may call it genetic or psychosomatic, but that does not help us heal.
These are typical examples of ancestral “baggage” at work. In short: that which did not start with us but continues living through us – and on to our children. That which sets the boundaries of our individual freedom and shapes our choices. That which conditions the love we give and the love we receive. That which shapes the life we have been granted and the life we pass on to the descendants of our bloodline.
Spiritual Influences on Contemporary Psychology
Both psychology and spirituality are united in their interest for the human being, its drives, its choices, its place and purpose in life, as well as what we sometimes call “fate” or “destiny”. Spirituality and some forms of therapy are also interested in what lies beyond individuality and in our relation to it.
Carl Gustav Jung claimed that a human being represents a span of consciousness between the source of Life (the so-called “central fire”) and the individual life (its “spark”), with layers of patterned unconscious material in-between. Unlike Freud and Adler who treated the unconscious as a dumping ground for unwanted conscious material, for Jung, this was merely the rather thin layer of the personal unconscious (or sub-conscious). He explained: “The collective unconscious is part of the psyche which can be negatively distinguished from a personal unconscious by the fact that it does not, like the latter, owe its existence to personal experience and consequently is not a personal acquisition. While the personal unconscious is made up essentially of contents which have at one time been conscious but which have disappeared from consciousness through having been forgotten or repressed, the contents of the collective unconscious have never been individually acquired, but owe their existence exclusively to heredity.” (C.G. Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious)
Jung is renowned for recognizing the existence and dynamics of the collective unconscious, deeper levels of the unconscious common to all mankind and living creatures. He considered that the layer above the collective unconscious is structured around animal ancestors and next, primeval ancestors. These are followed by layered assemblages, from continental-cultural, through national unconscious, and then clan and family layers of the unconscious[1]. Jung was heavily influenced by the Oriental scriptures and in his work he assumed a latent spiritual drive toward meaning, sense and purpose in every human being. On the same account, he has been criticized for his “mystical”, “non-scientific” approach.
Since Jung, some schools and practices in psychology and psychotherapy have included the spiritual aspect of well-being, as opposed to the rationalistic trends in the understanding of the human being predominant in natural sciences. Historically, the spiritual trend in psychology has been two-fold: (a) incorporating spiritual assumptions and worldviews derived from ancient or contemporary belief systems, and (b) adjusting traditional healing / shamanic / religious methods into the contemporary therapeutic practice. The manner of this reconciliation between the modern and the ancient has been open or covert: some innovative therapists have publicly claimed the sources of their methods in traditional or oriental approaches, while others, to avoid criticism for unscientific, mystical, or quasi-religious bias, have tacitly adjusted their practice without claiming their source.
The following practitioners are just a few of those who have recognized their sources: C.G. Jung – influence from the Vedas, I Ching, Buddhism; Fritz Pearls, Gestalt – influence from the Zulu tribes and Zen Buddhism; Erich Fromm – Zen Buddhism; Bert Hellinger, Family Constellations – Zulu influence; the mindfulness movement – Zen / Buddhism; and, the author of the method we’ll discuss in this paper, Martyn Carruthers, Family Maps – influenced by the esoteric Hawaiian Huna teachings.
What ancient practices add to our individualistic, materialistic sciences, cultures and worldviews is an expanded notion of what we are: we are indeed individuals with free will, however, we are far more part of others, and others are part of us, than we tend to assume. The Vedas, other ancient teachings, and nowadays some schools of psychology, describe an expanded model of the living being: a layered, finely patterned consciousness, individual and yet interconnected in a web-like manner beyond the perceivable world.
Fractal Icebergs
To understand our subject better, let us assume a wider perspective and take a look of Jung’s unconscious, karma, and the patterns that connect in a better detail. The following picture is centered around an iceberg made of fractal progression of patterns structured around an individual DNA strain:
The crowded picture above still does disservice to the complexity of the subject. However, it will be impossible to define and outline all elements and implications of the given categories in anything less than a book. What’s in the picture?
The iceberg is the well-known Jungian visual metaphor of the un/conscious. A DNA twin strain – unique in every individual and every “soul” or “spirit” – runs through the middle of the iceberg representing the core theme of individual existence (”that which makes ‘the essential me’, beyond space-time constraints”).
The fractal patterns superimposed on the iceberg are actually the end part of the same chromosome – its derivates – complementing the DNA metaphor, to illustrate how the individual strain unfolds itself into patterns across various levels of being. The submarine fractal patterns (“what I am made of”) are identical to the patterns surrounding the tip of the iceberg (“what I see as ‘outside of me’”). In other words, the world “outside” is what “I” see through the lenses of the patterns that create “me”. This “I” is a structure resulting from these patterns.
The iceberg as a whole is the self, a potential of active or inactive psychological material structured around the DNA strain and its fractal exhibitions as their actualized form. The overall focus of the illustration is on the correspondence between the patterned layers: the mid DNA streak carries the main patterns that need to be actualized and resolved on various levels of existence.
The left column represents a Jungian scale of the consciousness, combined with life coaching terms and questions common to our human experience, such as where are are, where we want to be, where we come from, etc.
The right column lists the layers of karma. The middle column overlaying the image of the iceberg, speaks in abstract terms of patterns that connect, developing in complexity but following the same simple organizational order.
Notice that in all columns, it is the bottom layers that are more powerful than the higher layers: the deeper layers create the layers toward the surface. Our individuality is a product of our connectedness on levels deeper than our individual experiences. If our connectedness is dysfunctional, so is our individual self.
Patterns in Correspondence
How do we experience patterns at work in our lives? Patterns are how we make connections in the world within and without. Intelligence has been defined as the ability to discern and form connections between seemingly disparate objects. Our ability to “make sense” is basically an ability to form connections between meanings. The meanings we ascribe to forms (events, objects, ‘that’-s) stem from patterns we already carry within.
The patterns represent connectivity molds in multiple simultaneous actualizations: a story, a choice, a metaphor, a body, a conditioning, a landscape, a home, etc. Patterns spread within and beyond individual existences. Functional to dysfunctional patterns are what a diamond is to the coal.
On a relationship level, patterns not only describe how we connect with our parents, partners and children, but also how we choose the people we connect with (e.g. a teenager walks into a club and his eyes fall on a single face in the crowd, immediately feeling a connection – “love at first sight” usually means two people fitting into each other’s pre-existent relational pattern positions). We tend to replicate patterns at work, with our friends, and even project these patterns on societal and national level.
If our founding patterns are “broken”, then we may feel something broken inside, we may inherit broken relationships, we may form relationships that break up or break down, we may live a life of breakages. Until we heal the patterns, their dysfunctionality is our burden, our mystery, and our mission.
Karma, or Life of Consequence
Marital problems may stem from parental issues. At the retreat workshop with the contemporary spiritual teacher Mohanji held on May 28-29, 2016 in Macedonia, Mohanji spoke of a young Indian man who had approached him in Dubai for a solution to his failing marriage. “The body never lies,” said Mohanji, unknowingly repeating Martyn Carruther’s unrelated findings in life coaching. The teacher sensed that something else was going on and inquired about the man’s parents. It turned out that the young man had never met his departed father. Mohanji advised him to visit his father’s grave in India and to offer food to the poor in his father’s name. (Offering food is a form of ritual sacrifice in service of the ancestors, or “the forefathers”, as they are referred to in the scriptures.) On Mohanji’s advice, the man travelled to India with his wife and performed the required rituals at his father’s grave. In effect, the continuous conflicts with his wife disappeared and a child followed. His marital issues had been rooted in his cut-off relationship with his father. Once the connection with his father was established, the young man became capable of being a husband and a father himself. In this context, Mohanji spoke of “ancestral and societal karma” that is at work in us, alongside our personal karma, all three types entwined in the path to Enlightenment.
What is karma. The word “karma” means simply “act” or “deed” in Sanskrit. In Hinduism and Buddhism, it means any action that brings to good or bad results (consequences), either in this lifetime or in a reincarnation. It is what shapes an individual’s “fate” or “destiny”. Karma refers to a chain of consequences caused by any action with conscious or unconscious expectations of results.
The Forefathers. The realm of the Fathers or the forefathers (ancestors) is referred to in the Vedic scriptures, namely the Katha Upanishad and the Bhagavad Gita. “As in a mirror, so in the buddhi; as in a dream, so in the World of the Fathers (italic added); as in water, so Brahman is seen in the World of the Gandharvas; as in light and shade, so in the World of Brahma.”[2]
In the Bhagavad-Gita, the realm of the Forefathers (usma-pah) is a manifestation of the Lord Siva: “All the various manifestations of Lord Siva, the Adityas, the Vasus, the Sadhyas, the Visvedevas, the two Asvis, the Maruts, the forefathers, the Gandaharvas, the Yaksas, the Asuras and the perfected demigods are beholding You in wonder. “[3]
Karma Affects Generations. The acts (karma) of the ancestors, even after their bodies have died, do not die away. If the ancestors have performed wrongful acts, there are dire consequences for their spirits – they cannot reincarnate, move on, and are stuck in ghostly existence: “Sometimes the forefathers may be suffering from various types of sinful reactions, and sometimes some of them cannot even acquire a gross material body and are forced to remain in subtle bodies as ghosts.” (Ibid. Purport, p. 84-85[4]). Consequences affect the following generations, resulting with corruption and downfall: “The ancestors of such corrupt families fall down, because of the performance for offering them food and water are entirely stopped.” (Ibid. p. 84). The way out of the corruption of the families, deceased and living alike, lies in the act of regular atonement of any and all wrongful acts performed by and to the forefathers: “… there is a need to offer periodical food and water to the forefathers of the family… Thus, when remnants of prasadam food are offered to forefathers by descendants, the forefathers are released from ghostly or other kinds of miserable life. Such help rendered to forefathers is a family tradition….” (Ibid, pp. 84-85). The food sacrifice to the forefathers can be replaced with all kinds of selfless behavior, such as giving food to the poor, social service, community service, national service, sacrifice for one’s country, etc. (Ibid, p. 743)[5]
This concept of consequences that may span beyond life, space and time corresponds to the findings in psychotherapy. Although the act of atonement is not prescribed in terms of food offerings or social service specifically, psychotherapy does recommend performing family rituals that create an expanded notion of self, identity, and feeling of belonging, as well as any practice of social benefit. Furthermore, there are therapeutic methods that resolve the ancestral issues on a deeper level, as we shall see in the section on Family Maps. For now, we can interpret the Vedic scriptures as follows:
Ancestral karma refers to acts of consequence related to our direct ancestors – a chain of consequences of actions they have done or have been done to them. The Indian man was inclined toward divorcing his wife due to a severed connection with his father. The common element in these two issues is a relationship pattern: a cut-off. The relationship to the parent has precedence over the relationship with the spouse: those who came first often yield more influence than those who come later. Past parental and ancestral baggage creates a present that duplicates its relationship patterns – the cut off. The past cut-off creates the present conflict with its potential cut-off with the man’s wife. In this case, healing the young man’s relationship with his deceased father heals the relationship with his wife.
Ancestral or family karma affects us as well as those yet to be born. Clearing this karma, according to Mohanji, clears it for the ancestors, for us and for the descendants of the lineage.
Family Maps
The ancestral “material” that we carry consists of, metaphorically speaking, lifetimes of largely unconscious, often repetitive patterns that shape personal experience. It can be both a blessing and a curse, in a manner of speaking, as it includes the family members’ particular propensity toward misfortune, sickness and destructive behavior, as well as the strengths and talents that we may also inherit through our blood.
The unhealthy ancestral baggage that we may carry is perceivable through trans-generational repetitive patterns in painful relationships, unusual lifepaths, disease, etc. Illustratively, such dysfunctional patterns may include: substance abuse, mental disorder in the family, unhappy marriages, victimization/martyrdom, obsessions, self-destructive choices, genetic dysfunctions, and so on.
Whether we believe in Jung, in psychotherapy, in ancestors, or in karma – how do we find out what we carry from our ancestors? And what to do we do with it? How do we resolve the painful baggage? Oriental techniques suggest meditation and prayer, even some forms of ancestral veneration; customs prescribe rituals connected to the dead. For contemporary Western individuals, there is culturally closer method, one integrated within the field of psychotherapy and life coaching – Family Maps.[6]
Background. Family Maps are part of Martyn Carruthers’ Systemic Life Coaching. As a concept, it is close to the practice of systemic family psychology and psychotherapy. Its methods were, however, derived from the Hawaiian shamanic Huna methods. It is worth noting that the popular ho’opono’pono is derived from the traditional practice of family councils (exoteric aspect), and not from the shamanic work (esoteric aspect). Also, Bert Hellinger’s family constellations are derived from Zulu traditions with a strong flavor of conservative Christianity and shares little with Carruthers’ work except in appearance. Carruthers’ Family Maps are closer to standard therapeutic work in its client-orientation, Gestalt-like dialogue, David Bowen’s trans-generational transferences, and Systemic Family Therapy’s relational analysis. The premises are compatible with the Advanced Systems model, the holographic model of the world, and with the description of reality that the quantum paradigm has given us: a world made of patterns of potential connectivity.
When to use them? Family Maps represent a powerful yet simple tool for in-depth personal development and healing, where the source of major life predicaments and paths is sought within the basic structures of the unconscious. It is applied when the client’s current issues recur even after their personal psychological issues are resolved, or when the issue they bring does not match their personal experiences.
The Unconscious[7] is structured within connectivity matrices. These are most comprehensible, most accessible to us when represented through an externalized spatial map of emotionally significant relationships, that is, our family.
Try it out. If you stand in a room, take time to deeply relax, close your eyes, and if your parents were present in spirit, where would they stand? The four grandparents, any siblings, spouse, children? The positions where we spontaneously deploy our family members in space outlines our unique matrix of connectivity.
The Body. It is important to note “spontaneity” excludes “randomness”: this exercise is done in a semi-meditative state, under the guidance of a qualified coach/therapist, with amplified client’s connection to their body. The body, as a “spokesperson” of the Unconscious, does not lie. It speaks deeper truths than we consciously are aware of. The body, through a specific body language system made of literal metaphors, seems eager to spill out all content that pressurizes it, as soon as we start paying attention to it. Its language may include bodily sensations (heat, pressure, movement, direction, etc.), images, even sounds and smells.
Who enters a Family System. A person enters one’s family system by four criteria:
- By conceiving: the living family members, those who have already passed away, unborn children, spontaneous and induced abortions, those who died young;
- By sexual intercourse: not casual sex but intense sexual relations, from rape to important extramarital affairs;
- By trauma: non-family victims and victimizers, e.g. murder, torture, crime, may also appear in a family map alongside family members; and,
- Benefactors: by doing something of great value for the family (e.g. a rich person grants land to the family and draws them out of abject poverty; a great spiritual teacher changes the life paths of the family members).
Three Basic Rules of Family Maps. The Hawaiian Huna shamanism assumes three rules in our ancestral relationships:
- No one ever dies. This means that while the body dies, the person’s unfinished aspects full of drives and emotions may continue existing through the generations conceived after the person has physically passed away.
- There are no family secrets. Working with the family and societal unconscious tends to reveal secrets buried in it, such as crime, betrayal, rape, hidden affairs, unrecognized children, sacrifices, etc. Secrets tend to put pressure on the family system across generations.
- The Gift of Life cannot be repaid. A gift is not given or accepted as a debt. The gift of Life that parents give to their children should be an act of no expectations, no conditions, an a-karmic life. This concerns the issue of inappropriately expressed loyalty of children to their parents and ancestors: children tend to follow them even at the cost of their lives, health and happiness. The very act of accepting our ancestral burdens is an act of loyalty and often an attempt to express primordial gratitude for the received Gift of Life.
Client Case 1. Marriage Crisis, or Multiple Dysfunctional Loyalties
To the right is an example of a family map on paper. Imagine that we are looking at the room from above, and the circles represent the heads of the family members:
Legend: I – client; F-father; M-mother; FF – father’s father; FM – father’s mother; MF-mother’s father; MM-mother’s mother. The darkened circles mark the unborn and the deceased. For the sake of simplicity, the partner’s ancestors are omitted from this map, as well as the generations prior to the client’s grandparents.
Client case: The map has been drawn by a woman who is undergoing a marriage crisis and is considering a divorce. She complains of her husband’s mother dominating him and sabotaging their marriage. Their sex life is dead, largely due to her own diminished sex drive. Prior to her marriage, she has had a series of short relationships that had failed due to: a partner leaving with another woman, another partner’s emigration, her own career choices – and other reasons that somehow “stood between” her and her then-partners.
The invisible wall. The map reveals that these actual situations are mere surface reflections of an underlying “wall” that always separates her from any and all partners: this wall is her own aborted child, conceived at a too young age, a painful, shameful memory that she had tried to bury and is never spoken about – a “secret”. The map makes it obvious that the client has unresolved issues with her abortion that prevents her from intimate relationships by “forming a wall” between her and each potential partner. This theme belongs to her personal experience.
The gaze (the direction in which the family members are turned) expresses where their main attention and energy flow. Looking away from someone is interpreted literally. When two people on a map cannot “see” each other due to someone else standing between them, it means a severed relationship – just like the client’s aborted child prevents the partners from “seeing each other” or “looking with the same eyes” on things.
Unconscious ancestral loyalties. This pattern has not started with the client and therefore cannot be resolved on the level of her personal issues. If we take a look of her parent’s marriage, her mother also keeps a wall of unborn children (spontaneous and induced) between herself and her partner (client’s father). In modern days, abortion is not a rare case. In the past, women conceived often with high child mortality rates, so that similar configurations may show with stillborn children, spontaneous abortions, and children who have died very young. These relationships often, but not always, prove problematic. They burden the family only when they are unrecognized, unnamed, shamed, hidden in secret, whereas trauma or indifference hurts the relationship either way.
(It is important to note that the case of unborn children is one of the many ways people form “walls” between them and others. A parent, a lost lover, a job, a pet, or an imaginary entity, among other things, may serve just as well to cut off relationships.)
Generational lines, power and responsibility. Even further, on the client’s mother’s side, she has a grandmother in equal partnership position not with her husband but with her son (who never married). The same configuration can be seen between her father’s mother and her father. If we measure the distance between the circles, her father is closer to his mother than to his wife. This is a pattern of closeness and loyalty, as well as of inappropriate relationship roles. Problems issue when a child behaves like a partner, or a parent behaves like a child, etc.
When we draw the line of time in a map (future is downward and past is up in this map), we should be able to see generations deployed each on their own line (or, generational wave) perpendicular to the line of time. In this map, the generational “waves” are transgressed in the case of mothers and sons. Partners should stand on the same line (wave), meaning equal maturity, power and responsibility. Parental lines should be behind their children’s line, in their past. When persons are drawn outside their line, it means that they have taken more or less responsibility and power in the family system than it’s due to them. Illustratively, in this map the mother’s mother is below the mother’s father’s line: this may mean that she has either married a much older man, or she chose to behave like a child in relationship to him. Instead, she stands on her son’s line, meaning that she has partnered with him. (In this case, the client confirms that her grandfather was 20+ years older than her grandmother).
Analysis. We can now read this map as an expression of multiple dysfunctional loyalties:
- The client is loyal to her mother by duplicating her mother’s example of “wall in-between partners”, in this case, created by conceived children.
- She’s also loyal to her own aborted child, not allowing any man to stand closer to her than her unborn child. Her relationship with her child controls the distance from her partners. Suppressed guilt, shame and pain bind her so.
- Third, when choosing a partner with dominant mother, she’s loyal to both her grandmothers, who partnered with their sons.
- Summary: Transgressed partnership pattern: the women in her family tend to partner with their sons and/or to stand apart from their husbands, behind walls of children.
The woman is unconsciously following in her ancestors’ footsteps, driven by loyalty deeper than her individual will. This map offers insights into how specifically her predicament is tied up with her ancestors’ choices, as painful and unhealthy they may have been. Her original matrix does not include a healthy relationship pattern of equal partnership.
Interventions: This map is enacted in a room, with markers delineating the positions of the family members as drawn in the picture. Interventions are conducted by stepping on various markers in a specific order and by clarifying relationships and emotions from the respective family members’ positions.
First, the client steps into her aborted child’s position, freeing grief, sorrow, guilt, shame and, in the end, love. In result, the child “moves” toward the client’s deceased grandparents, finding peace and belonging there.
Second, the client steps into her mother’s position and, as if her mother, clarifies her relationships with her unborn children, opening connection with her husband (the client’s father) and healing the family pattern of cut-off marital relationships. Third, responsibility and proper roles are restored: in this case, women assume radical responsibility for their fulfillment and for their misfortunes – and stop taking responsibility for their son’s lives. Sons stop partnering with and protecting their mothers and strengthen relationships with their spouses. In each generational wave, relationships between partners and between mothers and children are clarified and restored.
Last, the client faces her partner and she can now see him without a wall, as an imperfect loving person he had always been, just like herself. She feels no wish to divorce him; instead she accepts him for what he is. Her marriage can continue now, without a tendency toward yet another cutoff.
Client Case 2: Running in the Spot
A young woman at the beginning of her career complains that no matter how much she tries, no matter how much she achieves, she still feels that she is going nowhere, like “running fast in the same spot.”
Analysis: Her map shows the reason for this: her uncle (MB – Mother’s Brother), who had committed suicide a few years before she was born, stands in front of her (I), on her first step to the future. His suicide as a student had been kept as a family secret and shame. Notice the size of its circle – it represents his emotional predominance in the client’s unconscious.
When the memory of her uncle is brought back from the past, when a marker is placed for him in a room, transformation ensues. Facing him in the process, the client understands that her frequent episodes of sorrow and senseless tears, and a general sense of life’s melancholy, stem from him, not from her personal experiences. She recognizes that she sabotages her own progress (not stepping into the future) due to his presence there. She also recognizes that her love for words (she is a professional journalist) comes from him (a student of the classics).
Her mother (M) looks at her brother (MB) showing how she is secretly still focused on him, the family secret, even after his death. The client has taken on her mother’s lineage as predominant (closer to mother M than to father F, unlike her older sister S), and with it, in a manner of speaking, the family mission to complete her uncle’s unfinished life.
Interventions: From her uncle’s position, she is able to recall his memories and understand what drove him to suicide: a feeling of failure to live up to his father’s expectations, coupled with a sense of exclusion from the family and his peers – he had been sent to study abroad against his wish and fared poorly in the greater metropolis as a poor provincial undereducated student.
Standing in his position (“walking in his shoes”), the client is able to finally express his sorrow and regret for the suicidal act, and to reconnect and make peace with the family. The uncle spontaneously moves back into the past beside the client’s mother. The client’s future is then open. Follow-up shows that she moves fast forward with her life, in both career and relationship paths.
Client Case 3: Psychotic Episodes
A difficult case of hereditary mental disorder and family violence: the client wants a way out.
Analysis: Notice the multiple triangles perfectly locked around the client – this represents a deadlock, a stasis. The first triangle consists of her mother (M), grandmother (MM – Mother’s Mother) and aunt (MS – Mother’s Sister). Of these, only the aunt had not been diagnosed with mental disorder, possibly due to her early death at age of 9. They all cross each other’s personal boundaries, standing this close to each other, meaning that their senses of selves are mixed and confused – they are entirely enmeshed. The client cannot tell herself apart from her mother, or from her mother’s sister and mother. This illustrates how she inherited the mental disorder, and why in some psychotic episodes she exhibits traits of multiple personality disorder: her personality includes the personalities of the three female figures around her – she is functionally four people.
Her mother had been in and out of mental institutions, with several suicide attempts. The mother’s mental state is triggered by her husband’s (F – client’s Father) continuous and extreme violence. The client had been also subjected to cruelty and physical abuse as a child at the hands of the father.
The zigazag lines above some of the circles in the map denote acute violent behavior: father, father’s father (FF) – both with controlling behavior through physical abuse – and husband (P – partner) controlling her through emotional abuse and financial control. The father, the benevolent brother, and the grand-grandmother (MMM – mother’s mother’s mother) form the second triangle. The husband, the father’s father and the mother’s brother form the third triangle. Her map illustrates the heaviness of her predicament.
The three client cases offer a brief analysis of ta complexity that even these relatively simple maps exhibit. The practice and the insights of family map work go much deeper than what was put forward in the cases above and would require another book to describe. As we all have unique, and changing relational maps, each client case will be entirely unique, and each resolution will require client-specific resources and interventions.
Conclusion
Each dysfunctional life situation is an actualization of dysfunctional patterns. It is a complex consequence of our own choices and/or a consequence of acts performed by those who came before us – our personal and ancestral influences work together to create what we call our life, ourselves, our destinies.
We tend to repeat the unconscious patterns we inherit, like bits and pieces of scripts that we bring to life with our own life’s content, in many shapes and forms. The family patterns prove to be always more powerful than our own isolated will – unless our will is to delve deep into them and change them within us. Then we align our relational and individual will, and can live life with an immensely amplified strength and purpose, with the strength of our ancestors backing us each step of the way.
This is what the Family Map method does: by means of bringing out the unconscious matrixes, we can transform the inherited experiences and patterns to express liberating love and radical responsibility – to become a blessing and a free gift, rather than a curse and a burden to the people that we walk with and the descendants that follow. Moreover, our quest for individuality, for originality and freedom can be strengthened and reinvigorated with a powerful sense of connection, belonging and balance, which stems from our primordial, fundamental connections to those with whom the force of Life connects us.
Notes:
[1] Barbara Hannah, “Jung: His Life and Work,” pp, 42-46
[2] Katha Upanishad, Chapter III, verse 5. English Translation by Swami Nikhilananda, URL: http://sanatan.intnet.mu/ and http://www.gayathrimanthra.com/contents/documents/Vedic-related/katha_upanishad.pdf
[3] Excerpted from “Srimad Bhagavatam Tenth Canto Part One” by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, courtesy of the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust International, www.kirshna.com.Translation, Text 22, p. 680
[4] Ibid. Text 41, Purport, pp. 84-85.: “According to the rules and regulations of fruitive activities” (explained as: “Fruitive activities are the engagement of one’s reactions from past good or bad deeds”; Ibid, p. 157), there is a need to offer periodical food and water to the forefathers of the family. This offering is performed by worship of Visnu, because eating the remnants of food offered to Visnu can deliver one from all kinds of sinful actions. Sometimes the forefathers may be suffering from various types of sinful reactions, and sometimes some of them cannot even acquire a gross material body and are forced to remain in subtle bodies as ghosts. Thus, when remnants of prasadam food are offered to forefathers by descendants, the forefathers are released from ghostly or other kinds of miserable life. Such help rendered to forefathers is a family tradition…“
[5] Ibid. Text 11, Purport, Page 743. “… by the practice of giving up the fruits of one’s activities one is sure to purify his mind gradually… one may try to give up the results of is actions. In that respect, social service, community service, national service, sacrifice for one’s country, etc., may be accepted so that some day one may come to the stage of pure devotional service to the Supreme Lord.”
[6] The method does not refer to past lives and does not assume the possibility of reincarnation, although there are indications that the patterns that appear in family maps are identical to patterns identifiable throughout past lives experiences, as clients may perceive them. Maps can also be conducted with animal ancestors, sacred animals and elements, although this is not the focus of psychotherapy.
[7] Note: Carruthers doesn’t use Jung in his original teachings; this is my own addition to his framework.
Blue Feather 