For many years, I didn’t realise that I carried that burden of self-imposed responsibility – I thought that the tight shoulders, asthma and a digestive system that needed care were just how my body was. The weight of the world on my shoulders manifested as calcification that had to be removed surgically.
I told myself that story that parents’ divorce was a good one. Yet I discovered in a constellation that I carried the guilt my mother felt as the first person in her family’s lineage to be a divorcee. That guilt sat in my lungs as asthma – once released I no longer needed medication. (It was the constellation that encouraged me to become a facilitator.)
When my father was ageing and ill, I carried the responsibility of feeling that I alone had to take care of my father, and it was overwhelming. In a constellation, I gave back the responsibility of what belonged to the adults (my parents’ divorce and the fallout) that I had taken on as a child and teenager. I moved back to my right place in the family system. By relinquishing the responsibility that was not mine, the weight of the overwhelming obligation to fix was removed and instead, I was able to support him from a place of love.
The Orders of Love (the foundation of constellation work) reminds us that everyone belongs and has a right place in the family system, that there needs to be balance in giving and receiving and that parents give and children receive. Life’s circumstances and blind love cause these orders to be ‘broken’ – and the result is we take on responsibilities that are not ours.
The impact can be both physical illness and discomfort, emotional overwhelm, burnout, resentment, depression and anxiety, and perhaps shirking the responsibilities that are ours to carry – because it’s all just too much.
The beauty of constellation work is that the field reveals where the Orders of Love need to be restored so that you no longer carry the burden of responsibility that is not yours to carry. In the next Constellation Circle, we open the field to look at what it feels like to relinquish responsibility so that we can walk through life with grace.
My wish is that we walk more lightly as we relinquish what is not ours to carry, so that we embrace what does belong to us – and do the work that brings healing and transformation.
