About families, love and entanglements

We received life from our parents. With our partners we create new life that we pass on to our children. Together with our family we preserve that new life. In family constellations we consider all relationships that are about giving, taking and protecting life, including both blood-ties and ties of fate resulting from life-and-death events. Our family system is therefore a bit more than just family. It includes all existential relationships to which we are bound either by blood or by fate. To our family system belong:

•	parents, grandparents, ancestors...	they gave us life
•	brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles...	they protect our life
•	partners and ex-partners...	we create new life
•	children and grandchildren...	to them we pass on life
•	those who saved our life or whose life we saved...	we preserved life
•	those with whom we were in grave danger...	we survived through them
•	people whose life was taken by our family members...	we took their life
•	perpetrators who killed members of our family...	they took our life

All these relationships are about life, about our very existence. Therefore we are deeply connected to them by unbreakable bonds. This family system affects our perception and actions, our relationships, our health and our path of life.

In essence the family system exists to preserve life, and so, vice versa, there are ancient rules deep in our consciousness that drive us to preserve the family system. Those rules cannot be broken without painful consequences. A family system needs to obey fundamental orders so that love and life force can flow from generation to generation. According to these fundamental orders, everyone in the system has a right to belong; there should be balance in giving and taking; and everyone’s place in the order of precedence should be honoured.

Blockages in the flow of life force come to be when these orders are disrupted, for example when someone is excluded or denied, when someone takes at the cost of others, or when someone does not take responsibility for his acts. Then the flow of love and life force stagnates, often with grave consequences for later born children, who carry the burden, suffering, guilt or responsibility for earlier family members. This is called an entanglement. Children will take it upon them out of spontaneous love, unconsciously driven to compensate the unbalance in the family system. Sadly, this compensation never resolves the pain, rather, it perpetuates it: the conflict repeats itself in our soul.

A family constellation may bring together what was separated in our soul, may reconcile what was in conflict in our soul, and may disentangle what bound us to the pain and the fate of others. This work is a powerful therapeutic method that, if used well, can have a lasting effect.