08/04/2025
Family loyalty, often unconscious, can have many consequences.
Join us in Margaret River on 3rd and 4th May to shed light on this and other dynamics in your family system and to find greater freedom in your choices.
https://www.systemicsolutions.com.au/constellation-workshop-3rd-4th-may-2025
"Strong, but often hidden, ties may exist between those who have an advantage but have a secret desire to share the fate of those with a disadvantage. Healthy children, for example, may want to become like their sick parents, and innocent later family members may want to become like guilty parents or ancestors. On some level, the healthy ones feel responsible for the sick ones, the innocent ones for the guilty ones, the happy ones for the unhappy ones, and the living for the dead.
Thus, those with an advantage over others are often willing to risk – and lose – their health, innocence, and happiness and life for the health, innocence, happiness and life of others. They hope that by renouncing their own happiness and their own lives they may save the lives and happiness of others. Often, they even hope that through their sacrifice they can regain and restore the life and happiness of other family members, even when those people are long gone.
This loyalty among the members of the family and kinship manifests as a need for systemic balance between the advantages enjoyed by some and the disadvantages suffered by others, between the innocence and happiness of some and the guilt and misfortune of others, between the health of some and the illness of others, and between someone’s life and another’s death.
It is this systemic urge for balance that leads one member of the group to court misfortune when another is suffering, or that tempts one person into illness or misfortune when another is ill or guilty, or that makes someone long for death when a close member of the system dies.
Thus, within this confined community of fate, loyalty and the need for balance and compensation bring about participation in the guilt and illness and fate and death of others. It leads to attempts to pay for someone's well-being with one's own misfortune, for someone else's health with one's own illness, for someone else's innocence with one’s own guilt, and someone else's life through one's own death.”
Bert Hellinger, What causes Illness in Families and What Heals
Sunday contemplations 2015-40