To Be Accepted And Included

If systemic patterns go unrecognized, we can form unconscious loyalties to members or rules of the system such that we stick to them at the cost of our own fortune or health. That’s just the way things are. Let’s say in your family everybody drinks some alcohol. The first forty years of your life, you live in the systemic trance of alcohol . Yet you find yourself struggling not to join the family in a drink when you visit on weekends. Bottom line, the need to belong to the family system is greater than the desire to be healthy and thrive. The comfort of the trance and the need to belong are often at the root of people’s failed ventures or a failure to change. Even when a client says they want to change something and genuinely mean it, often the desire is not enough to break the chains of the need to belong at any cost. When that happens, they have to build a stronger case for their dreams and heart’s desires than the systemic rules that limit them. One of my favorite examples is a military man who came in to see me. He said he was in big trouble. I asked what the problem was, and he said, They want to promote me to a colonel.

The Ultimate Demise Of A Good Thing

Okay, I’m lost, I said. How is this a problem? You don’t understand. My father was a major. My grandfather was a major. They want to make me a colonel. I asked why this was so bad, and his face paled. He said, They were all fine men. He didn’t know if he deserved to be better, and he was terrified of the cost if he took that step. I asked him how it might feel if he thanked his male lineage for a legacy so strong that he could take that legacy even further and hold a good place in the military as a colonel. That worked for him, and he could settle into the idea of his promotion. But notice how loyalty to that one sentence had kept all the men of the family smaller than they might have been for four generations! Such is the power of the trance, our loyalty to the system, and our need to belong. As we have just seen, there are sayings in every family.

Learn To Be Still

Systemic sentences are the things we tell ourselves over and over again and believe are true, things our family system may have been telling its members for generations. Perhaps some of the following examples will sound familiar to you. Every system has systemic sentences about success, failure, love, relationships, money, leadership, careers, health, age . As a member of a family system, because of constant exposure to these sayings, you came to believe they were the truth when in fact they’re just one way of seeing the world. They’re just the family system’s truth, and now yours. And you can change them any time you want. Once these sentences are identified and their origins and effects explored, we can use them to liberate ourselves from the multigenerational patterns we have mistaken for our own current reality. The systemic work developed by Bert Hellinger has three principles1 that are always in play and important to know if you want to use this work for yourself or learn how to facilitate it with others. Any issue you or a client is faced with will fall into one of these three principles. Once you identify which principle is in play, you will have a broad idea of the area that needs to be addressed and how it needs to be resolved. Everybody has a right to belong. Every single event, every member, every decision belongs because each one shapes the system that shapes you.

Are They Humans Being?

Good, bad, indifferent, up, down, and sideways, everyone counts because everyone brings information into the system that is needed for the people in the system and the system itself to evolve and thrive. Yet sometimes family members are excluded because including them is too emotionally difficult, like we saw with Lucia’s grandmother who had seven miscarriages. But as we also saw, just because those miscarried beings were ignored didn’t mean they didn’t exist and that their influence had gone away. Judgment and fear are often in play when we try to exclude someone from the system. I hear clients say things like, We don’t talk about grandmother much. She gambled and almost lost everything. Then they wonder why their child has an addiction or a total aversion to gambling. We all want to belong, to be accepted and included. When we’re excluded, we experience all sorts of negative thoughts and emotions. Yet when we try to fit in, we sometimes compromise ourselves. In this scenario, you want to look at what about belonging is not working for you and how to resolve that. You want to explore the origins of that sense of not belonging and see if it belongs to you or the whole family system. If you struggle to belong or you belong in a way that is limiting, how can you create belonging in a way that brings you joy and strength? Maybe you belong in the family by being quiet like everyone else so that you fit in, but there’s a part of you that’s itching to be the happy extrovert you are by nature. And yet you are afraid that this may cause exclusion. If you can see how to belong in a way that acknowledges the quietness in the family yet allows you to shine, you expand the system and belong by being the authentic pioneer who grows the system. This refers to your exact place in your family or organizational system, for example, the eldest child or the senior vice president. In your family system, this place is fixed. In an organization, it can change. Perhaps you had to take care of your siblings as a child, maybe even your elderly parents.