One of the things that most of us desire is a healthy and loving relationship. Nevertheless this seems to be one of the most difficult things to achieve.
Are you living a relationship that is absolutely making both of you happy? Congratulations!! Forget about this article and just keep on cherishing this gift of love.
Are you dealing with relationship issues or are you thinking about leaving your relationship? Then this article might be interesting for you and maybe a turning point as well as a chance to look at you and your partner from a new perspective.
After a first exciting period of falling in love with each other many relationships get stuck in a day-to-day routine. All of a sudden we start noticing as well as experiencing the less attractive things and our prince or princess will transform back into frogs or hags.
Have we been all so wrong? Does love really make us so blind to choose the wrong partners?
It may sound challenging and provocative – but I am convinced that we all choose the right partners at the right time. Many love stories could linger on, if we were able to see the bigger picture.
At my age of 56, and after many years of life and work experience, I can comfortably say that the most loving and effective way to understand this bigger picture is through Family Constellation work.
With this work, we can witness what is going on beyond our capacity of conscious thinking and experiencing. Family constellation work reveals to us that anger, rejection, betrayal, aggression, disappointment, and whatever may ruin a relationship can have a much deeper cause and source than we ever imagined.
From the experience of people working with family constellations, many couples have issues that can lead to separation especially when one or both of them is/are caught up by a systemic story of their family. This means that we often restage unsolved old stories as an unconscious reenactment of what other members of our family system went through and experienced.
Sometimes we can clearly see this repeating pattern, sometimes we have no idea of what happened, sometimes we try to desperately live a life different from our parents or grandparents and still experience old stories coming back to us in changed settings.
Sometimes we got stuck in our firm opinion that our parents should have given us more. We are not aware of the fact that now we are trying to get all this from our partners who will never be able to fulfill our needs, as hard as they may try.
Sometimes we just give all of ourselves and we call it love. When we go deeper we can see that we are acting out of a feeling of duty or fear or hidden self-rejection. At this point we might get an idea of why we do not get anything back in change – or worse – why we are being betrayed or abandoned.
But – how similar the stories of unhappy relationships may seem – the roots of their issues many times lead us back to all different kind of painful experiences within our family systems. And what we can do is to gently go back to heal these experiences and with that heal ourselves too.
However, the Family Constellation work is not for everyone. It is only for those who have the courage to face a truth that might be not so pleasant or easy to accept. Sometimes we are convinced that our partners do not see us or do not care about us, only to understand that we are the ones being caught in our family stories and we are not able to really see them.
The beautiful thing is that there is no good or bad, no judgement, no “should” or “should not” in this approach. We simply witness “what is” and by doing so we softly solve the nodes and entanglements that hinder us from understanding and seeing clear.
This understanding may prepare the path for the needed change in our relationship, so that we get a second chance to continue our life together on a new basis. It may also show that the relationship has come to an end, but still it will give us a key to handle a possible separation in a way that is more constructive especially if there are children involved.
Wishing all of you who read this article until the very end, a happy relationship that allows you to grow and to live your life to the fullest potential.
(© Ursula Maria Bell – October 2016)