Healing — like learning to walk or to play an instrument– is a developmental process. It is rarely all-at-once. And it’s also rarely linear, with ups and downs that can make it hard to believe we’re getting anywhere at all.
No single step in healing is the final one. This can be a bit discouraging! Aren’t we done yet? 🙂 A common refrain from my clients is something like “I thought I’d already done all the work on my father!” Healing simply isn’t like that, any more than life is like that.
The steps we take in healing are each, in their own way, critical. And then later a different step — sometimes apparently contradictory — can show itself also to be necessary to moving forward. If we are too attached to an earlier step which at the time really helped us out, we can stop our process entirely, in ways that limit our growing wellness and capacity.
For instance, often an early step in healing is “accountability.” This is when we clearly name for ourselves that someone did something specifically hurtful to us. Whether we ever name it to someone else or even to the person themselves, we find strength is saying “That was wrong. I was hurt. It shouldn’t have happened that way. That action injured me.”
It’s important to do this for lots of reasons, but in particular it is critically important for clearing up the confusions that can persist when another person hurt us repeatedly, especially in childhood. We can end up foggy about the whole thing, and it’s hard to know what’s what. But naming accountability gives us clarity and strength. We didn’t cause our own injury; we know what happened.
This can be such a strengthening step; it can be hard to imagine that it has limitations. But it does. Many people notice at some point, as strengthening and encouraging as this naming is, after some time — often after quite a few years — re-naming and re-stating this ceases to be very helpful. In fact, we start to intuit that the focus on accusation — which at one point was so critically important and useful — may now be holding us back from next steps in our lives, steps we really want to take.
This is where our larger culture offers a possibility: forgiveness. What a great idea! We release the injury and the chance of ever being able to put it right and move on without rancor. There’s a problem here, though — from my observations, this is incredibly hard to do! Especially if the injury is substantial and really shaped our lives — which is often the case for harms we experienced in childhood — putting aside and forgiving may sound terrific, but in practice nearly impossible to implement.
Here, constellations offer a much more effective approach that accomplishes what we hope forgiveness would do. It is not primarily an act of the will. It’s more like a change in the atmosphere that makes us simply feel different going forward. It is a system intervention, rather than a personal one. It is the lifting of a burden effected by something larger than ourselves and which allows us to take the next step.
When something has not been properly seen or acknowledged in a system, it really is impossible to let it go. Even if I’ve named an injury with my own personal strength, if it hasn’t been properly acknowledged in the wider system, it’s really hard to move forward. In constellations, we do that acknowledging, not just personally, but at the level of the entire family soul. When that happens, and we can really feel it, then there’s a letting go that is like forgiveness, but isn’t an act of willpower. We find ourselves living in a healthier and more loving family system than previously. Naturally, then, we can move forward.
This can happen in good ritual spaces, like a well-done funeral, for instance. Occasionally, communities have the creativity and capacity to provide this kind of system-wide honoring and including which heals. (Indeed, if communities could do this for each other more consistently, there would be no need for constellations!).
Have you been wanting to forgive someone in order to move forward, and found yourself unable? I invite you to give yourself a break and imagine what a wider reckoning with history might provide. In the meantime, share your stories about the power of naming injury, trying to forgive, and finding a more enduring release, on my blog.
Leave a Reply