Mental disorders can stem from trauma in earlier generations.
Marta Thorsheim is a therapist and has edited the book "Understanding Your Inner Wounds" by Franz Ruppert. She talks about the path out of complex mental illnesses.
Sometimes panic attacks, depression, or similar issues can come as a surprise. Seemingly, the victim has lived a life free of trauma. The German professor and therapist Franz Ruppert provides a fascinating explanation for this phenomenon. A person's psychological problems may stem from entanglements in relationships that go far back in time. Therefore, diagnosis must include the patient's family system.
The best therapy children can receive is for their parents to resolve their own trauma and entanglements. Traumatized mothers can pass on their experiences through interaction with their children. The children become active, but inappropriate, participants in the mother's attempt to find meaning and peace. Children can sense their parents' suppressed emotions, such as the fear of being exposed, guilt, and shame. Around 80 percent of children with traumatized parents show such traumatized attachment patterns. They can experience overwhelming emotions without knowing the traumatic event that would give those emotions meaning.
How does Franz Ruppert explain psychosis?
Psychosis is not just an escape from reality, but also an attempt to find creative solutions to major life crises. By understanding psychosis as a coping strategy, victims and helpers can more easily uncover their potential for recovery. Psychosis thus becomes a strategy for surviving after traumatic experiences. These can be self-experienced traumas or traumas inherited across generations.
Coping and survival strategies thus become unhealthy reactions, even if they feel necessary. How can this dilemma be resolved?
In most cases, psychological struggles are not one's own fault. Once a psychological split has taken root, people often make decisions that worsen their condition or harm others. To get back on track, one must consistently choose to walk this path forward. Survival strategies will constantly cast doubt on this decision and threaten perseverance with their tricks and excuses.
stepping out of survival mode is often exhausting at first, which is why recovery can be slow. Experienced therapists are needed to anticipate this inner struggle and support the patient's healthy parts. Survival strategies can disguise themselves as sensible, but good therapists can unmask them. It is important to use methods that capture the complexity of psychological processes rather than focusing only on isolated aspects. In my view, Ruppert's constellation method offers tremendous advantages here.
What is the constellation method?
It is not just a single therapist trying to understand the confusing connections in a person's psyche. The therapist, called a facilitator, asks the client to choose representatives for events, subpersonalities, people, and other factors that may lie behind the problems. The representatives are people participating in the group. With their help, hidden feelings and dynamics become something concrete that the client can relate to. The client can get in touch with repressed feelings and work through them.
The psyche may insist that nothing traumatic has happened and hold tightly to illusions. Constellations can provide access to stored, wordless memories. In addition, they provide a supportive environment from other participants in the constellation seminars. As individual therapy, constellations work in the same way, but instead of representatives, figures are used, for example, to clarify fragmented parts of the psyche. The facilitator can also use themselves as a representative, and the client can stand as a representative for the various elements in a constellation. Once again, the entire therapy process is a mutual collaboration between therapist and client.
How widespread is this type of therapy in Norway?
Norway currently has approximately 100 facilitators and trauma therapists. There are just over 100 members in the Norwegian Association of Constellators. The German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger learned about family constellations in the USA. He brought the method back to Germany, developed it further, and made it known worldwide. Since Hellinger, the method has evolved in many directions. Franz Ruppert combines two theoretical building blocks with one practical method:
1. Attachment theory
2. Trauma theory
3. The practical method of constellations
What is the drawback of trying to medicate away mental disorders?
The downside is that emotions are adjusted artificially, usually without the suffering disappearing. Such medications can also have significant side effects. In my view, medication is sometimes necessary, but preferably in combination with processing underlying trauma.
Why can't time heal wounds when it comes to trauma?
That is a good question, but experience shows that trauma repeats itself. A bodily reaction that is normally time-limited stops when you are traumatized. In other words, it is not completed. This often leads to both physical and psychological symptoms. These are often confusing and frightening. The feelings are suppressed, but they do not disappear. They are stored in the part of the psyche or soul that Dr. Ruppert calls "the traumatized part".
Then survival strategies develop. The repressed feelings naturally want to surface. Something inside us believes that if we just experience something that awakens these emotions, the stored reaction can finally be completed. However, experiencing trauma after trauma does not make things better. In fact, it gets progressively worse if these emotions are not processed so that the body's reaction patterns can release what is stored inside.
To heal a trauma, we must therefore release and complete the physical fight-or-flight energies that were mobilized to face a danger. This happens by bringing the client in contact with the repressed feelings in a constellation. Often he or she gets a physical reaction, such as freezing and shaking. This is the same thing that happens automatically in a traumatic situation, but then it becomes too much for us and is pushed into the subconscious. A trauma can be anything that overwhelms our ability to cope with a situation, which is why young children are most vulnerable.
