Inclusion, first families and unbearable loss

I have had the privilege to learn Family and Systemic Constellations. It is a powerful modality, that is not really only a modality, but rather a technology that we can utilize that enables us to tap in to the deepest currents of personal, intergenerational, and collective intra-psychic material. Through accessing these subterranean domains and integrating a sense of inclusion and order and balance, in turn there is a powerful enabling of flow of love and of life.

My constellation teacher Sakino Mathilde Sternberg has rich and deep study and experience, as well as being of German Origin. This healing and transformational work is her most precious gift to all people. Every constellation that we did including Holocaust material was undeniably strengthened by the inclusion of her presence as the powerful space-holder she is and also as someone of German origin.

 A massive source of unbearable pain that has often been neglected and not included, to our peril, has been those of us who has members of our families who had previous families before the Holocaust.  In addition to losing parents and siblings,  many people lost partners and children and then got remarried and started new families after the war. My grandfather was such a man. He passed away when my dad was a young boy. We didn’t find out about this until very late.

Unprocessed grief interrupts the intimacy of parent-to-parent relationships and because of this can also result in intergenerational bonding and enmeshment. Engaging in deep intimacy invites us to continually open ourselves to layers and layers of the life-death cycle, facing our aloneness, and all the grief personal and collective that we are carrying. To experience our deepest togetherness we also have to pass through the gates of our deepest aloneness. And it is in this deepest aloneness that we move through the gateways of loss and grief.

We only exist in this way because of those who passed on before us. We have our lives to thank them for.

This Yom Hashoah I remember and pay tribute to the first wife of my Zaida Max and to his older children who all got killed in the Holocaust.

I invite you to pay tribute to all the first wives and husbands who died, and oldest children, and whose memories accompanied survivors into rebuilding their new lives. We include them. We make space for their memories. We honor them. 

We honor them through our embracing of life.