Who is the person most excluded in families?
It is the father.
According to Bert Hellinger, mothers have a tendency to pull their children in towards them, distancing them from their father, which also distances them from the world and therefore from life. In order to become independent from the symbiotic bond with our mother, we need our father.
He is the first contact with the masculine energy and as sons or daughters, we need to take in our father in order to have the strength to take our place in the world, and with people that come into our lives.
Taking our father into our heart, embracing him exactly as he is and healing the wounds that prevented us from doing so is a deep inner process that each of us needs to go through. It is a different challenge for every person, a different wound, and each journey to take our dad is unique.
How to Heal Father Wounds
When we embark on the inner movement towards our father, we open the door to the masculine energy that comes from our family system in its purest form and we integrate its qualities within us that will help us with how we show up in the world. Interestingly, when we are able to take in our father as he is, the traits that made us reject him are filtered out.
For some people, their father’s role was to bring them into life and then to leave and in these cases, the mother’s inner attitude and the way she relates to him are going to greatly affect the child and his or her perception of their father and the masculine energy. For example, if a mother rejects her child’s father, a boy may subconsciously not want to grow up and become a man for fear that she may reject him too.
Children are very sensitive to what the mother feels inside, so even if she does not speak negatively of the child’s father, if she holds resentment towards him, the child will pick up on that emotion and side with the mother.
However, the child is also loyal to the father and when the mother rejects the father, he will tend to take on the traits that she disliked most about him to be loyal to him as well, unconsciously.
Bert Hellinger observed, through many constellations over the years, that many addictions (alcohol, gambling, drugs, etc.) are linked to a missing father.
It is as if the addict is attempting to fill the void from his father through the addiction.
In some constellations, he said to the client who was suffering from alcoholism, for example, to imagine that his father is drinking next to him next time he drinks, or to dedicate the drink to his father.
In my next theme-based workshop, The Light of the Sun, we will be focusing on healing the bond with our father and our male lineage to receive the clarity and creative strength of the Masculine that comes through the men in our clan. Join us on June 26 and 27, 2021 from 11:00 am – 3:00 pm EST.
Two Family Constellations Online Workshops in July:
- Inner Parts Constellations: We set up different parts of our psyche in regards to an issue in order to begin to see, get to know and integrate them. July 10, 2021 from 11:00 am to 3:00 pm EST.
- Ready for a Shift Family Constellations Workshop: we set up constellations on any issue that arises. July 24, 2021 from 11:00 am to 3:00 pm EST.
“Thank you, dad, for giving me the courage to follow my dreams, the strength to face adversities, the voice to set boundaries, the clarity to discern, the confidence to succeed.”
– Marina Toledo
