This is a continuation of the theme from the previous post regarding “The Sword of Discernment” and its application in healing our relationship with our family of origin. Once again, I will use a quote from Pamela Kribbe’s book, “The Jeshua Channelings”:
*“When you embark on the path of spiritual growth, at some point this question (about the relationship with parents and the family of origin) will stand at the center of your attention.
One can view their birth into a physical body as a process of falling into darkness, provided you do not attach the idea of sin or guilt to this word. The birthing process is truly a dive into the depths, for which a part of your soul has made a conscious decision!
Within your soul, you decided to impose your current incarnation upon yourself, and you felt the trust and persistence needed to achieve the goal. However, at the moment you dive, figuratively speaking, you submerge into a state of non-knowing—a state of temporary unawareness.
The moment you enter the material Earth reality, your consciousness becomes veiled or hypnotized by various illusions, which are actually nothing more than the innate habits of the vast majority of humanity. This resembles a net thrown over you.
The net that catches you as you fall is woven primarily from the life stereotypes of your parents, their reference points in life, their ways of communicating with themselves, their hopes and desires for you… When you enter the specific configuration of energies that constitutes your birth family, your consciousness is wide open and still has almost no sense of its own boundaries. As a baby, you fully accept parental energies as the primary imprint, which exerts a profound influence on how you will experience things in the future…”*
The theme of healing the relationship with parents is vital in psychotherapy, though it hasn’t always been so for me. At the beginning of my practice, I was much more attracted to modalities focused on the present or future—such as solution-focused brief therapy, humanistic therapy, Gestalt, Logotherapy, or Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. They appealed to me because they didn’t require endless “ruminating” over what happened in childhood. After all, even if we realize why we feel a certain way, what then? To “understand” and to “change” are two different things, which is one of the classic critiques of psychoanalysis—insight alone is not enough to change the pattern of our conditioning.
Thanks to my encounter with the Family Constellations method, this attitude changed. I remember being shaken to see the incredibly strong and deeply unconscious bond with our parents and even distant ancestors. Later, however, even this method left me dissatisfied because it didn’t provide an answer to the question of meaning—what is the point of this suffering being passed down to subsequent generations? The quote from Pamela Kribbe above is one of the answers to that question.
I love the imagery she uses to describe the formative influence of our parents—an energetic imprint that acts like a net thrown over us at birth, determining our later reactions in life. Therefore, if we want to understand the dynamics of our unconscious psychic processes, it is best to study our inherited family models.
When doing so, it is important to recognize that what we know about our parents is often different from how they actually felt inside—their true experiences and pains. To understand the family model—and to detach from it—requires the effort of awareness: the so-called “Sword of Discernment.”
Only after we illuminate the darkness of the past and the inherited family “records” will we be able to free ourselves from their influence and create a different, better future for ourselves.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
Note: The quotations are translated from Bulgarian and are not presented as verbatim citations.
