Author. M.V. Lukovnikova
Translated from Russian by Violeta Book
During the initial interview (a 6-years-old boy; severe neurotic disorder):
– Who do you live with?
– Mom.
– And dad?
– We kicked him out.
– How come?
– We divorced him… He humiliated us… He’s not a man… He ruined our best years…
During the initial interview (a 14-years-old teenager; severe migraines, seizures, delinquent behavior):
– And why didn’t you draw your father? After all, you are a family.
– It would have been better if he didn’t exist at all, such a father…
– What do you mean?
– He ruined mom’s whole life, acting like a pig… Now he’s not working…
– And how does your father treat you?
– Well, he doesn’t scold me when I have low grades…
– … And that’s all?
– All … What did I get from him?… I even earn my pocket money…
– And how do you earn it?
– Knitting baskets…
– And who taught you that?
– My father… He taught me a lot of things. I can also fish… I can drive a car… a little, in the village… In the spring we tarred the boat, so that my father and I would go fishing.
– How do you sit in a boat with a man who’d better not exist in this world?
– … Well, he and I have such an… interesting relationship… When mom goes away, we’re fine…. She doesn’t get along with him, but I can get along with mom and dad when they’re not together…
During the initial interview (a 6-years-old girl; communication problems, attention issues, nightmares, stuttering, biting her nails…):
– Why did you draw just your mom and your brother, where are your dad and you?
– Well, we’re somewhere else so mom can be in a good mood…
– What if you’re all together?
– That’s bad…
– How is it bad?
– … … (the girl starts crying)
After a while:
– Just don’t tell mom that I love dad too, a lot…
During the initial interview (a teenager with severe neurotic disorder):
– … Does your son really believe his father is dead?
– Yes! We specifically told him that… Otherwise, God forbid, he could ask to meet him, then we won’t be able to get away from the heredity… But his grandmother and I say only good things about his father so that he doesn’t worry and strives to become a good man.
During the initial interview (a 8-years-old boy; severe depression and multiple other diseases):
– … What about dad?
– I don’t know…
I turn to the mother:
– Don’t you talk about the death of his father?
– He knows, we’ve talked about it… (The mother cries) He doesn’t even ask and he doesn’t want to look at the pictures.
When the mother leaves the room I ask the boy:
– Would you like to learn about your dad?
The boy fills up with energy and looks me in the eye for the first time.
– Yes, but I shouldn’t…
– Why?
– Mom will cry again, I shouldn’t.
During the time I have worked with children in my practice I have come across the following facts:
- Children love their parents equally regardless of the parents’ behaviour.
- The child perceives their mother and father as a whole and as the most important part of themselves.
- The child’s relationship to the father and the father’s to the child is always shaped by the mother. (The woman is the mediator between the father and the child, and she is the one who translates to the child who their father is, what he is like and how they should relate to him).
The mother has absolute power over the child, and consciously or unconsciously she does with them whatever she wants. Nature has given this power to the woman so that the offspring can survive without unnecessary doubts.
At the beginning the mother is the child’s whole world. Later she is the one who introduces the child into the world. The child gets to know the world through their mother, sees the world through her eyes, and focuses on what is significant for her. Consciously and unconsciously, a mother actively shapes the child’s perception. The mother introduces the child to the father, she determines the importance of the father. If a mother doesn’t trust her husband, then the child will avoid him too.
During the initial interview:
– My daughter is 1 year and 7 months old. She runs screaming from her father and when he takes her in his arms, she cries and pulls away. Recently she has started telling her father, “Go away, I don’t love you. You are bad”.
– And how do you feel about your husband?
– I feel very offended by him… to tears.
The mother also shapes the father’s attitude towards the child. For example, if a woman doesn’t respect the father of her child, then the man may refuse to pay attention to the child. I have seen this situation often: it is enough for a woman to change her inner attitude towards the child’s father, and suddenly he wants to see the child and participate in their upbringing. This happens even when the father has ignored the child for many years.
- If there are attention or memory issues, inadequate self-esteem, or the behavior needs to be improved, then the child’s soul disastrously lacks their father.
- The rejection of the father in the family often leads to intellectual and mental difficulties in the child’s development.
- If there are communication disturbances, strong anxiety and fears, or the child hasn’t learned to adapt and feels like a stranger, then they can’t find their mother in their heart.
- Children cope better with the problems related to growing up if they feel that their mother and father accept them fully as they are.
- A child grows up emotionally and physically healthy when they are kept outside their parents’ problems, either as individuals and/or as a couple. This means they take their rightful place in the family system.
- The child always “raises the flag” for the rejected parent. Therefore, in their soul, they will connect with this parent in various ways. For example, the child may repeat the father’s difficult fate, personality, behavior, etc. The stronger the mother rejects these characteristics, the stronger they would manifest in the child. But as soon as the mother sincerely allows the child to resemble their father, to love him openly, the child has a choice: to connect with their father through the difficulties or to love him directly, with all their heart.
The child is equally loyal to both parents and is connected to them through love. But when the relationship becomes difficult, the child (by the power of their loyalty and love) gets deeply involved in the difficulty which is causing the pain to the parents. The child takes upon themselves so much that they can greatly relieve the suffering of one or both parents. For example, the child can become psychologically equal to the parents: a friend or a partner. And even a psychotherapist. Or the child can become more than them, psychologically replacing their own parents. However, such a burden is too much for the child’s physical and mental health. After all, in the end the child will remain without support, without parents.
When a mother doesn’t love, trust, respect, or is simply resentful of the child’s father, she looks at the child and sees many manifestations of the father. Then consciously or unconsciously she is telling the child that their “masculine side” is bad. It is as if she is saying, “I don’t like this. You’re not my child if you resemble your father”. And out of love for their mother, and more precisely out of a deep desire to survive in the family system, the child gives up their father, and therefore the masculine in themselves.
For such rejection the child pays too high a price. In their soul the child never forgives themselves for this betrayal. And they are going to punish themselves for it with a failed destiny, poor health, or failure in life. To live with this guilt is unbearable, even if it’s not always conscious. But that is the price for their survival.
To get a sense of what is going on in the child’s soul, close your eyes and imagine the two people closest to you, for whom you will give your life without hesitation. And now all three of you, holding hands, find yourselves at the top of a mountain. But the mountain you are standing on suddenly collapses. Somehow you have miraculously stayed on the rock, but the two people closest to you are dangling over the precipice, holding on to your hands. Your strength is running out, and you realise you won’t be able to pull up both of them. You can only save one. Who will you choose? At this point mothers as a rule say, “No, we’d better all die together. That’s terrible”! Indeed, this way would be easier, but life’s conditions are such that the child has to make an impossible choice. And they do. More often choosing the mother’s side.
Now imagine you have dropped one of them and pulled the other up. How would you feel about the one you couldn’t save? – Immense, searing guilt. And towards the one you saved? – Hatred.
But nature is wise, during our childhood the anger towards our mother is under a harsh taboo. This is justified because the mother not only gives life, she also sustains it. After the rejection of the father, the mother remains the only person who can provide our sustenance. And expressing our anger will cut the branch on which we sit. So this anger turns inward as self-aggression. “I didn’t manage, I betrayed dad, I didn’t do enough to…. Me and only me. It’s not mom’s fault, she’s a weak woman”. And then the behavioural, mental and physical health issues begin.
The masculine is much more than the resemblance to our own father. The masculine principle is law, spirituality, honor and dignity, the sense of proportion – the inner sensation of relevance and timeliness. Social self-fulfillment (work you love, good income, career) is only possible if one has a positive father image in their soul.
No matter how remarkable a mother is, only the father can initiate the adult part in the child. (Even if the father himself has failed to build his relationship with his own father. For the initiation process, this isn’t so important.) You have probably met adults who are juvenile and helpless like children? They start many things at once, have many projects, but never finish any of them. Or ones who are afraid to start anything, to be actively self-realizing. Or those who can’t say no. Or don’t keep their promises and it is difficult to rely on them for anything. Or those who constantly lie. Or those who are afraid to have their own point of view, who agree with others regardless of their own wishes and surrender to the circumstances. Or conversely, those who challenge everything, are at war with the world around them, opposing other people, doing everything in defiance or even breaking the law. Or those for whom it’s very difficult to live in the society, everything is “overwhelming”. These are all people who had no access to their father.
Only when the young children are close to their father can they learn about boundaries. Their own boundaries and other people’s boundaries. The boundaries of what is allowed and what isn’t allowed. Their own capabilities and abilities. The child can feel how the law works only close to their father. Their power. (With the mother the relationship is based on a different principle: no boundaries, complete merger).
As an example, compare the behaviour of Europeans (the masculine principle is strong in Europe) and Russians (the feminine principle is strong in Russia) when they share a space. Europeans, no matter how small the space is, intuitively shuffle around in such a way that no one is in anyone’s way, no one violates anyone’s boundaries, and even if the space is full of people there is room for everyone’s interests. When Russians show up, they fill up everything with themselves. There won’t be space for anyone else. Through their behaviour they destroy other people’s space because they don’t have their own boundaries. Chaos erupts. And this is exactly what happens when the feminine is without the masculine. Only in the masculine flow highly valued human qualities such as dignity, honour, will, purpose, responsibility are shaped.
In other words, the children for whom the mother has forbidden the access to the father’s flow (consciously or unconsciously) won’t be able to easily and naturally awaken in themselves the balanced, adult, responsible, logical, purposeful human. Now a tremendous effort has to be made, because mentally they have remained boys and girls, and won’t grow into men and women. So for the mother’s decision to separate the child from their father, one is going to pay an incredibly high price all their life. It is as if they have lost the blessing of life.
“If the woman respects the man and the man respects the woman, the children also have respect for themselves. Whoever rejects the man (or woman), rejects him (or her) in the children. The children perceive this as a personal rejection.”
– Bert Hellinger
A father plays different, but equally significant roles for the son and the daughter. For the boy, the father provides his gender self-identification, i.e. the feeling of being a man not only physically but mentally. For the son the father is the homeland, his “space”.
At the beginning the boy is born to a human from the opposite gender. Everything the boy connects with in the mother is essentially alien to him, different from him. The woman experiences a similar feeling. It is therefore remarkable when the mother succeeds in giving her son her love, filling him with the feminine flow, initiating the feminine principles, and then lovingly lets him go to his homeland, to his father. (And only in this case the son can respect his mother and feel sincere gratitude to her).
From the birth until about three years old, the boy is in the mother’s field of influence. Thus he becomes saturated with the feminine: sensitivity and tenderness, and the capacity for close, intimate and long-lasting emotional relationships. The child learns empathy (empathy for another person’s state) with the mother. The child’s interest in communicating with others arises from the communication with the mother. The emotional development is actively initiated, as well as the intuition and the creative abilities – these are also part of the feminine realm. If the mother has been open in her love for the boy, then later in life this man will be a caring husband, a tender lover and a loving father.
Usually after the third year, the mother lets the son go to the father. It is important to emphasize that she lets him go forever. Letting him go means that she is allowing the boy to fill himself up with the masculine and become a man. And for this process it isn’t so important whether the father is alive or dead. The father may have another family, be far away, or have a difficult destiny. Or there is no father and he can’t be there for the child. Then it is important how the mother feels in her soul for the child’s father. If the woman can’t agree either with his destiny or with him as being the right father of her child, then the boy gets a lifetime ban on the masculine. And nothing can compensate for this loss, even the right environment for him to go back to.
The boy may be involved in masculine sports, the mother’s second husband may be a remarkable man, there may even be a grandfather or uncle who socializes with the child, but all of this will remain on the surface, only as a behaviour. In his soul the child will never dare to break the mother’s ban. But if the woman accepts the father of her child into her heart, the child will unconsciously feel that masculinity is something good. The mother has given her blessing. Now, when he meets men in his life, a grandfather, friends, a teacher or the mother’s new husband, through them the boy will be able to fill up from the masculine flow. Which he will take from his father.
All that matters is what image of the child’s father the mother has in her soul. The mother can allow the child to access the father’s flow only if in her soul she respects the father of her child, or at least has a good attitude towards him. If this doesn’t happen, then it’s useless to say to the husband, “Go play with the child. Go for a walk together”, because the father won’t hear these words, just as the child won’t. Only what is accepted in the soul can have an impact.
Does the mother bless the father and the child to have mutual love for each other? Is the mother’s heart filled with warmth when she sees how much the child resembles his father? When the father is recognized, the boy begins to actively fill up with the masculine. Thus his development will follow the masculine pattern with all its characteristics, habits, preferences and nuances. Now the boy begins to differ greatly from the mother’s feminine and begins to resemble his father’s masculine more and more. Such men grow up with a pronounced masculine.
For the daughters this process is different. The girl, too, is with the mother by the age of three, filling herself up with the feminine. When she becomes three or four years old she moves under the father’s influence and stays there until six or seven. During this time the masculine is actively initiated: will, purpose, logic, imaginative thinking, memory, attentiveness, industriousness, responsibility, etc. And above all, during this period the understanding that the girl is different from her father because of her gender, is formed. It’s an understanding that she resembles her mother and will soon become a beautiful woman as the mother. In this period daughters adore their fathers. They actively show signs of attention and attraction towards their fathers. It is healthy if the mother supports this and if the father shows the daughter that she is wonderful and he loves her. Later, this experience of communicating with the most important man in her life will allow her to experience herself as an attractive woman. Daughters who weren’t allowed to be close to their fathers would always mentally remain girls.
After a while it is very important for the father to let the daughter go back to her mother, into the feminine, and it’s also important that the mother accepts her. This happens when the girl starts to feel that the father loves the mother more than her and that being a woman, the mother is more attractive and more suitable for the father. It’s a bitter separation from the best man, but it’s incredibly healing. The masculine principles have been initiated in the girl, which means she can achieve a lot in life. But most importantly, she has the happy experience of being accepted and loved by a man. Returning to the mother now, the daughter will be filled with the feminine for the rest of her life. This strength will enable her to find a good partner and start a family, give birth and raise healthy children.
Usually after such a discovery, mothers feel confused and filled with contradictions. “What happens when I not only don’t love the father of my child, but even hate him?! I don’t even respect him for anything, he is a failure! Should I lie to the child that her father is a good man? I tell my child, ‘Look at your father…. but please, don’t become like him!’” Or, “When I see how my daughter frowns just like her father I want to kill them both!”
When we look at things that way, only anger and despair can come up. But now it’s about the child, not about the woman’s relationship with her partner. And for the child both parents are equally significant and equally beloved. The woman often confuses the father as a partner with him as a parent. For the child this is unbearable. The woman says to her child, “He is a bad partner for me, so he is a bad parent for you.” The child shouldn’t be involved in the couple’s relationship. Figuratively speaking, the door of the parents’ bedroom should remain forever closed to them. At the same time, both parents should remain fully available to the child. A man is two different people: one is a partner and another is the child’s father. The child knows nothing about the father as a partner. And the woman knows nothing about him as a father. So for the woman he is only a partner, and for the child he is only a father.
A mother who can’t accept the father of her child can’t fully accept the child. Therefore she can’t love the child with unconditional love. And then the child loses access to both parents. Now the internal, soul relationship with the mother will be difficult. The child will either adapt and please the mother, often getting ill (thus “burning off” the aggression towards the mother), or will actively protest. But in neither of those scenarios will there be open love between mother and child.
By the way, people who don’t love themselves, think they aren’t beautiful and don’t accept their individuality, and also those who have a tendency for excessive self-judgment and judgment of everyone and everything, are those children whose mother judged and rejected their father in them. Now their relationship with themselves and with life is based on a principle they learned in their childhood.
But if the woman has the courage and love for her child to not put the burden of the partnership on them, to separate in her soul the partnership from the parenting, then the child will experience a tremendous mental and physical relief. (Many children stop being sick after psychological work with their mother.) Then, despite the fact that the parents have separated or don’t get along, the child will have enough strength to go on living. Our ancestors knew this: in families where the woman respected her husband, her own parents and his parents, the children wouldn’t get sick and they would have successful lives.
In my practice working with children, teenagers and adults I have seen that the most intense human pain with long-term consequences is the pain of not having your parents in your soul. This loss is often the cause of depression. Therefore, it isn’t the physical presence of the parents in the child’s daily life that is important for easing the child’s life and full recovery, but the kind and respectful relationship to them in the child’s soul. It is as if the parents never abandoned the child, but have stayed behind them. They have stayed as guardian angels from the first to the last day of one’s life. It’s no coincidence that of the Ten Commandments, only one has an explanation and reasoning – the fifth. “Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land the Lord your God is giving you”. It’s this knowledge that allows mankind to survive, remaining mentally and physically healthy.
Only when the heart is filled with respect and gratitude for the parents, at least for the precious gift of life, can one go forward boldly.
I would like to share a case which vividly illustrates what had been said so far. I was approached by the mother and the grandmother of a 7-year-old boy. The child had a very severe condition: besides incredibly uncontrollable aggression, he had hysterics, constant anxiety, problems at school, nightmares, fears, and he also had extreme headaches and an excruciating sensation of chills all over his body. The parents had divorced a long time ago. The child remembered his father mostly from photographs. All his conscious life he had lived with his mother and grandmother. The child was an exact copy of his father. Both in appearance and in character, similarities were becoming increasingly apparent.
The only things the boy had heard about his father were that he was an incredible monster (the mother and grandmother didn’t hold back on epithets), and also that, to their great sorrow, the child looked very much like that monster. So the boy was given the task of overcoming the “evil” qualities and becoming a good person. During the interview before me sat a remarkable child who had great creative abilities, but his views on life were the views of a seventy-years-old man.
We started working together: the mother, the grandmother, the boy and I. The first thing the women did was to radically change the family policy. The mother started telling her son about what fine qualities his father had. About the things that were nice in their relationship. She started saying that she liked how her son looked so much like his father. That he could be exactly the same as his father. And most importantly, that the son wasn’t responsible for her relationship with the father. And despite that they were divorced as a couple, as parents they would always remain together for him. And the son could love his father just as much as he loved his mother. After some time the boy wrote a letter to his father. He also put his father’s photo on his desk, and began to carry a smaller one with him to school. After that, the family added new holidays: the father’s birthday; the day the father proposed marriage to the mother; the day the father won a football game.
Most of all, when the mother looked at her son she said with pride, “How much you look like your father”! When our next meeting took place, the mother said that she didn’t have to lie at all, her ex-husband was indeed a multifaceted person. And amazing changes began to happen with her son: first the aggression disappeared, then the fears and the pain; he began to have better grades in school; the chills disappeared; the child became manageable. And he came back to life again. “I can’t believe it, does the father really have such a role?!”
Yes, each of us is an extension and a result of the merging of the two flows of life: the mother’s (and her kin) and the father’s (and his kin). When we accept this in a child, when we accept their destiny, then we can give them a chance to grow. This is the parents’ blessing of Life.
