Bert Hellinger, the father of Family Constellation, said: “Success has the face of your mother.” He claimed that our movement towards our mother or away from her, affects our movement towards success, towards relationships, towards abundance and towards the manifestation of our dreams. So, while not everything that Bert Hellinger had said is necessarily always accurate in every situation, from my extensive studies and experiences which also include Recall Healing and German New Medicine, this statement does connect many dots for me.
A few Words about Success
First, we must define for ourselves what success means for us.
Each person has a different perception of the experience of success, what it looks like and feels like.
If you don’t love what you do and it feels like a struggle and/or you don’t feel that it is possible for you to make a living from what you truly love; Maybe you work really hard and put in effort but don’t receive proper compensation or are not promoted; If you have invested a lot in your business but success is not materializing; If you are unable to recruit good employees or suitable partners and feel that you can only rely on yourself… all this and more…. you may be carrying unresolved conflicts from the period of pregnancy and childbirth and/or living out of an unconscious loyalty to the movement that was interrupted in your childhood towards your mother.
Some Biological Aspects of Success:
The first event that is recorded as a success in our biological memory is the moment of conception. It is not a trivial matter that the egg and sperm meet and fertilization occurs. It is not a trivial matter that this fertilization takes hold and there is a pregnancy, and it is not a trivial matter that the pregnancy develops properly. Of course, there are many other aspects that I will not go into in this article, such as artificial insemination, previous miscarriages, how a mother feels when she discovers she is pregnant, and more.
The next decisive event is the birth itself. What happens at birth represents what will happen in certain aspects of one’s life. Our brain wants to keep us alive for many years and the way I started my life will always be recorded as a great success because I am here. At the same time, everything that happens at birth has an impact on what happens in life, especially through the fields of work, career, and studies.
Contractions during birth are called “LABOR” after all….
What will happen to someone who is born through a difficult and long birth? Is it possible that everything he tries to initiate will be accompanied by a long and exhausting process? On the other hand, someone who was born through a short and quick birth, sometimes expects everything to go quickly and easily and will not be competent in dealing with challenges or will always be the one who acts quickly and impulsively. In terms of success, the attitude may be, I succeed on the first try and/or I give up. What happens if I was born by cesarean section? The question is, did the mother decide or was the decision made for her? If the decision was made for her, the child may have difficulty making decisions. If the birth started as a normal birth, and something went wrong and then it became a cesarean – the child may not trust himself in his choices. If I was born prematurely, am I not ready yet… not mature enough… to grow up? To be independent?
There is no doubt that the greatest success is when the fetus comes into the world without the need for external help. The message that will be passed on to the fetus that needs external help to be born is “You need help to start things in life”. If there is an induced birth, then there is a possibility that the person will feel a tendency to procrastinate in adulthood and wait until the last minute to solve problems.
There are many more emergency situations in childbirth, each with its own symbolic implications. The brain reproduces what happened during childbirth later in life to optimize survival – as it did during childbirth.
There is also what happens in the delivery room. How much support does the mother receive? Who is present during childbirth? What is the attitude of the doctors? What words are said there? Does the mother receive an epidural? Is she present? Is the newborn baby given to her and placed on her body, or is it taken from her? How are the parents looking at the baby? what is their impression? feeling? And how does this affect the child’s self-image later on?
The Reaching Out Movement Towards Our Mother
The next decisive event and our next success is the natural movement towards our mother, who is now in front of us, to take us to her breasts and nourish us. Is this possible? What passes through her besides milk? This is an active taking. We need to suckle so that her milk flows. We need to cry so that she comes. We need to rejoice in what she gives us. To the extent that we have managed to take her as the source of our life, with all that flows from her to us, so we take our life as a whole. In the constellation this movement is called The Reaching Out Movement – the baby’s reaching out to its mother.
For many people, there are all kinds of early experiences that challenge them to “take” their mother…
Perhaps they experienced an early separation from their mother. For example, when they were given up for a while, or they stayed in the hospital without her or when she had to stay in the hospital without them… Our mother may have experienced some trauma and could not be there for us in the way we needed her to be, maybe she was even raped, or we were born during a war and she took care of our father, or maybe she did not want children at all. Of course, there are babies who are given up for adoption; there are mothers who experience postpartum depression… and so on and so forth.
Bonding has a profound meaning for our emotional health. It occurs through creating immediate contact, body to body, skin to skin; through sensory perception (smell, sight, hearing, etc.); emotionally (experiencing fear or love) and through thoughts and speech. The situation of interrupted movement occurs when the mother, for whatever reason, cannot bond with her child and he waits for her because he needs a mother. The younger the child, the deeper the trauma, the more the flow of love is interrupted, and as a result, a complex dynamic develops at this critical stage of development. Such experiences have far-reaching effects and can cause profound emotional and behavioral changes.
In psychology, Melanie Klein developed the object relations theory, where she emphasized the contribution of primary relationships with caregivers to psychological development, while British psychologist John Bowlby, as a conclusion of his work with orphaned and homeless children after World War II, developed the attachment theory, which reinforces the notion that children must experience an intimate, warm, and ongoing relationship with their primary caregiver in order to grow up mentally healthy.
The constellation approach is that there is no right or wrong, good or bad. Healing movements can be made with everything.
Sometimes, our distancing from our mother and turning our gaze away from her, stems from getting entangled with her, which causes us to be overwhelmed and overburdened. Perhaps as children we took it upon ourselves, without conscious choice, to “help” her with the burden she was carrying. We acted in order to heal, perhaps even to save our mother, and then instead of love and affection, we took in the emotional chaos of her trauma. We hesitate to take life from her because it is mixed with everything else. It is important that we understand that no sacrifice we make for her will ever “save” our mother or give her back what she feels she had lost in her life or heal her wounds or change her destiny. We do not help her in any way by being faithful to her suffering/wounds. One of the best healing phrases we could say would be: “Dear mother…. Everything I carried for you, I carried out of love for you, but now I leave it with you and respect your destiny.” The healing phrase that Shavasti, our healing phrases teacher spoke when he began healing his wound with his mother was “Mom, this is too much for me.”
As adults, people who experienced a disruption in the movement toward the mother in childhood, often have difficulty achieving their goals. They start relationships, projects, and then simply stop. “They start every project like happy children walking toward their mother, but then they stop in the midst of the traumatic experience, because their expectations are not met (the people around them cannot replace the mother).” [BH]
“Why do I describe this in such great detail?” asks Hellinger, “because an early disruption in the movement toward our mother later appears as a decisive obstacle to our success at work, in our profession, in our ventures, and it is of great importance that we turn toward success instead of expecting it to come to us….”
It is important that we can move toward our success, step by step and at each step we feel our mother lovingly behind us, connected to her and to the flow of life that passes through her and from her to us. Mother and life are felt as the same kind of energy for our soul.
Healing Movements – How Do We Do Them?
“The question is: How can the movement of turning away, be turned around, into a turning towards our life, toward other people, toward our success, toward our happiness?” [Hellinger, from Orders of Success]. The work of constellation allows us to return to these events in our imagination and complete the interrupted movement. We recreate the situation in our imagination, connect with the emotions that are still present in us, reach out to our mother and, despite the pain and frustration and/or fear that we feel rise within us, we take a small step towards her. The insight [common to all psychological approaches] is that the mother is the “object” to which I am attached and whom I have internalized within myself. I can detach from my physical mother [although this is not recommended] but not from her representation within me that is still active and activates me. This step that I take, so to speak, outside, I do mainly towards her representation as it continues to exist within me. Therefore, this action is significant even when the mother is no longer among the living. Changing our perception and internal relationship towards our mother is a profound healing journey that can continue throughout our lifetime and has far-reaching consequences in our lives. This is a basic movement in family constellations, where we are able to see her and ourselves through a different perspective, through the healing eyes of the soul.
We stop, look into her eyes and wait for the courage and strength to take the next small step. If this happens within a group constellation, we have a representative standing there, true to her image. Slowly, slowly, one small step after another, until eventually and to the best of our ability, we land within her embrace, releasing resistance, being held by her, finally back with our mother, together again, with all the child’s love that has not left her nor us. This is a deep healing process and in no way can it or its rhythm be forced upon anyone.
In preparation for this movement; as an initial step that begins to dissolve the resistance, we use affirmations and healing phrases.
A basic and primary sentence that we can say is: “Mom, I am small and you are big.” Look at how it feels to roll this sentence inside yourselves. When children feel “bigger” than their parents, it does not allow them to take from them. In this way, they lose both a part of their childhood and the experience of the benevolent parent. For someone I worked with, who had cared for her mother since she was a child, just saying this sentence caused waves of tears and we stayed with it for a long time, acknowledging all that burden… Sometimes as I mentioned earlier, healing begins with the recognition that it was too much for me…. or that I was carrying something that was not mine.
Another basic sentence might be “I take you as my mother” – this means that we recognize and come to terms with everything that led to her becoming our mother. We accept everything that led to our existence and stop arguing with fate. It can also be a lifelong journey to say this sentence.
“Mom, I received my life through you. Now I take you as you are; You are the right mother for me” allows me to acknowledge that it was indeed difficult, but I could not have had another mother and I agree to accept life from this mother as it is, as she is.
Also, the sentence “Thank you, mother, I received a lot from you and what you gave me is enough. I will take care of the rest. You did your part and now I will do mine.” is a sentence that expresses a willingness to accept what is, as it comes even if it did not feel good enough and to stop expecting it to change. Or “Mom, thank you for what you could do for me” – we recognize that enough has been given to us to be here. It means that what I am waiting for, I am no longer waiting for and I will do the rest for myself.
Healing sentences are a transmission and not part of a conversation. It is an invitation to change the internal image of the mother along with the feelings that arise when we think of her. The truth lies in the silence after the words are spoken; when they land in the body. This is not a mantra. It is an experiment. If it does not work, we will try another sentence that resonates better.
The movement towards the mother, taking life from her, is not a movement that can be forced, as I have already said, but it is a movement that should be encouraged.
When we make the movement of taking life from mother, the next movement is to give it forward. This happens naturally and is also the movement of our complete success. The more we have taken from mother and in general from our parents, the more we have to give to life.