Conception under the influence of parents' healthy psychological structures
In an ideal world, a new child is conceived through a sexual encounter between two harmonious people who love each other and wish to establish or expand their family. These parents conceive the child from their healthy psychological parts. After conception, these fortunate children grow in a womb filled with love for the child. The child experiences the environment as warm and safe. The parents care for the child from the very first moment, including emotionally.
Many people imagine they were conceived by loving parents who could barely wait to take the child in their arms and begin a secure and loving bonding process. This means the parents provide the child with care, warmth, love, and closeness, look after them in every way, and support the child's individual development toward healthy autonomy. Unfortunately, the reality is often quite different.
Conception under the influence of parents' trauma and survival parts
Conception can be a result of both survival parts and traumatised parts in the parents being activated.
- Conception can happen due to thoughtless passion, perhaps with someone other than the regular partner.
- The child may be conceived as a result of rape or other forms of coercion, both within and outside of a partnership.
- Parents may conceive a new child in desperation after another child dies before or after birth.
- The child may be conceived to provide status.
- A child may be conceived because a mother or father wants to prove that it was not their fault the previous relationship was childless.
- A child may be conceived as a guarantee for the mother or family to achieve financial security.
- A child can be a means to prevent the father from leaving the mother.
- A child may be conceived in the hope that a new child can save a struggling relationship.
These children start life from a different place. Already at conception, and throughout the pregnancy, a transfer of negative feelings, moods, and thoughts from mother to child can take place. The mother's womb may be constricted and feel almost hostile. Right from the start, opportunities for bonding between parents and child are missing. The time in the womb can feel unwelcoming. The child may sense emotional coldness or a lack of interest.
The sexual relationship between the sexes then and now
Modern Western societies have undergone major changes regarding sexuality.
- The old norms began to dissolve starting in the 1960s. Safer contraceptives became available to everyone, and sex could be enjoyed without the fear of pregnancy.
- The liberalization of abortion laws and safer methods drove development in the same direction.
- Freer and safer sex became part of women's liberation and equal rights.
- The level of education rose sharply in Western countries, especially for women.
- The influx of people to the cities increased.
- As the economy improved, traveling became increasingly common—including looking for sexual partners in new places.
- Means of communication became more efficient, and mass media grew significantly. Television in particular, and eventually the internet, made the world smaller and the exchange of information and impulses faster and much more comprehensive.
- The impact of religion on attitudes toward sexuality was weakened.
- Values regarding relationships and sexuality have become significantly more open. Homosexual individuals have taken on important leadership roles and become both presidents and
cabinet ministers. - It became common for both women and men to have multiple sexual partners throughout their lives. Sex before marriage became completely normal.
However, this rapid development did not happen everywhere. Western countries notice this when they encounter immigrants from regions where traditional values—such as the circumcision of girls and boys, forced marriages, and honor killings of women—still apply. In strongly patriarchal cultures, men and their needs continue to take precedence over women's needs, just as was the case in Europe 100 years ago.
Traditional mindsets rooted in farming culture mean that in some countries and families, a mother must still give birth to a son to secure the inheritance of the family farm, shipping company, or royal line. In some countries, politics and culture are also structured such that girls still hold less value than boys. Girls are sold or given away, with severe consequences for the vulnerable child and their descendants. Some of my clients come from countries where this was common during their mothers' upbringing. The mothers were given away as children, used as slaves, and often sexually abused in the families they were sent to.
Daughters and sons who come to therapy have experienced the consequences of their parents' traumatic conception and upbringing. They have been traumatized themselves, and they have developed strong survival strategies. These vary slightly from culture to culture, but the trauma feelings are the same, just as painful and raw regardless of background. Children conceived under such conditions are always confused about who they are.
Historically speaking, the Western view of love as the justification for a partnership is of relatively recent date. Traditionally, marriage was just as much an arrangement to secure inheritance and property, and not least to tie different families together, preferably within the same social layer. The woman's primary task was always to secure the lineage, preferably through one or more sons. Within this worldview, individual romantic feelings were seen as irrational and disruptive.
Traumatized parents – a historical constant
The modern world has dramatically changed the framework for both sexuality and conception. Society has no structural barriers to prevent psychologically healthy couples who love each other from welcoming a child. At the same time, we know that relationships between biological parents, now as before, are not always harmonious. Achieved rights and lived lives are different things. Demands and reality are often far apart in both couples and parenting relationships.
Psychotherapists recognize that the cause of this is early trauma that parents carry with them into adulthood. Both self-experienced traumas and those inherited from previous generations can lead to psychological splits and symbiotic entanglement. This affects the love between man and woman and the relationship between them as parents. Trauma affects the child's vital attachment process to the parents very negatively.
If intimacy in a relationship is driven by survival mechanisms, satisfaction is often one-sided. This means only one partner enjoys the experience, while the other simply endures it. This can happen because one person is forced or allows themselves to be used as a sexual object, perhaps to hold onto their partner. Sexuality driven by survival parts means that bonding, love, and sexual arousal become disconnected. The act of intimacy becomes merely a physical release. Instead of bringing the partners closer together, it drives them further apart. The resulting disconnect in bonding can trigger many strong reactions in the partner who has been used.
- fear and panic
- accusation and rage
- grief and resignation
- mental and physical disorders
A woman who, driven by her survival parts, allows herself to be used as a sexual object and becomes pregnant, runs the risk of feeling rejection toward her unborn child right from conception. She may despise the life growing inside her and feel it as a burden. As the pregnancy progresses and the budding life grows within her, she feels increasing disgust. Sometimes this becomes so strong that she chooses to have an abortion. At other times, the disgust is lesser, and she simply neglects the child's needs. She may live unhealthily, with consequences for the little one's development. She is unable to emotionally bond with the small spark of life growing inside her. (We recommend the documentary "IN UTERO" by Kathleen Gyllenhal (http://www.inuterofilm.com), based on research by leading scientists such as Dr. Gabor Maté, Dr. Rachel Yehuda, Dr. Thomas Verny, and Ludwig Janus, among others.)
A man may also allow himself to be used for procreation or as a sexual object. This may be because the mother desperately wants a child or because the mother has a higher sex drive than him. Consequently, the father may end up neglecting his wife even further during the pregnancy. He may also feel disgust toward the budding life growing within her.
It can be stated that everything that is good for the mother is good for the child, and everything that is painful for the mother is harmful to the child. When a man has sex with and conceives a child with a woman from a place of healthy psychological structures, he is a blessing to his wife and children.
In the following, various examples will show the impact it can have on people when conception and the start of life are influenced by trauma.
Conception through rape
Clients conceived during sexual violence speak of unexplained anxiety and anger greater than the situations warrant. They report emotional numbness and nightmares about bombing and war, even though they were born long after the war ended. They share doubts about their right to live. Some describe sensations of being inside a container surrounded by semen and blood.
Monica: No right to live
Monica experiences suicidal thoughts, asking, "perhaps I have no right to live," but she still wants to live for the sake of her children. Her intention is the right to live.
During the constellation, it becomes clear that as a little girl, the client found no other connection than a symbiotic entanglement with her traumatized and guilt-ridden grandmother. The grandmother struggled with the question of whether she had the right to live after the atrocities she was partly responsible for during World War II. The client's grandfather and grandmother were members of the Nasjonal Samling during the war, meaning they were on the wrong side. The grandfather killed compatriots and was imprisoned when the client's father was two years old. He was convicted in the post-war legal purge. When the grandfather returned home, he was skin and bone. At this time, the client's father was around ten years old and did not know his own father. The grandmother fled when the grandfather came home, but later returned. The grandfather was deeply traumatized and raised his son with violence without the grandmother intervening.
Monica's father was also violent towards both his wife and children. He raped his wife, and Monica believes she was conceived as a result of rape. Her parents' survival strategies involved maintaining a polished facade with respectable jobs, a nice home, and well-groomed, seemingly put-together children.
Bjarte: The boy who wasn't allowed to be a man
Bjarte shares that he has an anger that can get out of control. He is 40 years old and a former professional soldier. He never felt anxiety during dangerous war missions. His intention is to track down the cause of these feelings through a constellation.
During the constellation, the representative for the intention looks out the window, is rigid and closes their eyes, sways, takes a step toward the client who pulls away, and feels as though they are in a fog. The intention collapses onto the floor with their hands over their head, curls up, and cries. The client is rigid, backs away from the intention, and clenches their fists.
As a constellator, I ask if the client wants to hear my interpretation of what I see here, and he wants to. I interpret that it is an early trauma that is reflected, and that the client has repressed a part of himself. Feelings and images from early childhood are shifted to the unconscious and are reflected with the help of the representative. The client agrees with this and comes into contact with memories and sensations. He says that as a child he had to sleep between mother and father, even if he didn't want to. Eventually he remembers that his mother told him that she had been raped by a strange man. She told it as if it happened in a dream, and with emphasis on stranger. He himself has feelings that he has been "tampered with sexually" during the time when he had to sleep between his parents. Now the fog disappears and it dawns on him that mother has used him as a shield against father. He says: “This is something I have always known, without knowing. My mother was afraid of the masculine, so I had to hide the man in me."
It was more important for young Bjarte to survive than to feel that he was a boy. He represses this sensation and enters into a symbiosis with his
mother's anxiety. He was not aware of this anxiety. Now he realizes that it is uncontrollably triggered within him when meeting others. This is what results in uncontrolled anger. Bjarte now suspects that he is the result of a rape, and that his mother was not raped by a stranger, but by Bjarte's father.
Conceived as a replacement child
Many clients share that they were conceived because their parents lost a child, and some are even given the deceased child's name. These clients often struggle with a sense of not being good enough. They may battle low mood, lack of energy, and a bottomless grief. They may sense that they are the wrong gender and can spend their entire lives searching for a sister or brother they have often never heard about. They may describe a lack of connection with their mother, "she wasn't really there". This leads to the formation of an entangled identity in the child. This means the child does not know their true self. They cannot develop as they naturally would have if the mother had not been traumatized by losing a child. For boys, this can be fatal because they struggle to access their male identity. For girls, it also represents a significant burden. They cannot live out their femininity untouched by the trauma their mother has experienced.
Anna: The tomboy
Anna, who came to the seminar because she collapsed after her mother's death, was diagnosed as burned out by her GP and was on long-term sick leave. Her intention was to regain her energy mentally and physically and to look at what stands in the way of that.
The constellation showed the client's entanglement in her mother's suppressed grief and trauma feelings after the client's brother died during childbirth. The client's entanglement in her mother's suppressed trauma feelings and deep grief over the loss of her first child became apparent through the representatives for the mother and what stands in the way. The representative for what stands in the way mirrored the mother's all-consuming love and subsequent grief over the loss of her firstborn. The mother could not see the replacement child, Anna, who was conceived two months after her son's death. In Anna's unconscious and desperate search for a connection with her mother, she had pushed away a part of herself and tried to replace this child for the mother. This part of Anna lives on inside her as a separate trauma part. It contains the mother's suppressed grief and survival strategies. As a small child, Anna looked everywhere for her unknown older brother, she played boy's games, she tried to be something she was not. As an adult, this developed into overwork, burnout, and long-term sick leave. The collapse when her mother died can be seen in connection with the fact that hope was now gone. She would never be able to reach her mother.
Following the constellation, Anna reported that she has more energy than ever before and now embraces her femininity in a new and positive way.
Conception to replace one's own parents
The stories of clients who were conceived due to their parents' unconscious desire for a child to act as a parent substitute are heartbreaking. These clients talk about doubting whether their parents are their real parents. They describe creative attempts to connect with their mother as a mother, and reaching out toward a mother's heart without finding any positive emotional response. We hear how they eventually develop an oversized heart and want to take care of everyone else's needs while forgetting themselves and their own. As children, they suppress their helplessness and powerlessness, their fear, anger, pain, despair, and all their inner distress over not being loved and seen by their mother.
The child eagerly seeks emotional contact with his parents. This is how they come into contact with their parents' repressed trauma energies. The children absorb these as a substitute for love. The parents' feelings of trauma are left over their own feelings and therefore feel as if they are their own. The children cannot distinguish between their own feelings and sensations and those of their parents, which leads to inner emotional chaos. They also often idealize their parents and take all the blame for the relationship not feeling good, and they feel angry at themselves.
Mariann: The girl with the big heart.
Mariann remembers that in her utmost distress, and between crying fits, she sobbed, "you were supposed to comfort me" when her mother hit her. Her mother replied: "That is completely wrong, you are the one who is supposed to comfort me".
Through the constellation, Mariann's repressed trauma parts are mirrored: She collapses like a small child and shuffles between the representatives for mother and father, without making contact. Eventually, she resigns. She sits quietly for a while, activates herself, and shuffles behind an empty chair, while the intention curls up behind another empty chair. When asked about the dynamics reflecting in her and resonating within her, she shares that she remembers her early childhood as if she were "stretching my whole heart toward mother, but no one is there to receive it." Early on, she began wandering to the neighbors, who continually returned her to her parents. During the further constellation, the representative for the mother lay on the floor hitting herself on the head, saying, "It is not my arm hitting me." The client then recalls that she has always been afraid of her grandmother. The idea that her grandmother might have hit Mariann's mother resonated with her.
She senses that father wanted children, but that mother didn't really want children, just "someone who could comfort her". Grandma lost her own mother at an early age. During the war, she sent her seven-year-old daughter far away, to strange people in a strange place, to protect her from the horrors of war in her hometown. Unfortunately, hostilities and fighting increased sharply in the place the little girl came to. What the little one saw, and what happened to her there, the mother has kept to herself.
Conceived in a family of victims and perpetrators
An attachment system trauma is defined by Ruppert (2013) as a situation where victims and abusers live within the same system and depend on each other. Everyone in such an attachment system gets trapped in their abuser or victim roles. They see no way to end the victim-abuser relationship in a healthy manner. The abusers feel pressured by the presence of the victims, experiencing themselves in a victim role. The victims, in turn, develop abuser traits. But since they see no way to fight back against their actual abuser, they direct their abuser energy toward weaker individuals, often their own children. Siblings living in an abuser-victim family may direct their abusive behavior toward younger siblings and possibly also animals.
Regardless of whether the clients are men or women, the issue is often abuse by the mother during childhood. This can involve threats, beatings, or sexual abuse. Incest is always a very difficult topic to address, especially mothers' sexual abuse of sons and daughters. It takes great courage to shed light on these topics and painful memories, and to accept and process the facts. This reality is almost too painful to bear. In cases of intrafamilial sexual abuse, the dynamics of attachment/symbiosis trauma
and existential trauma become active in the child simultaneously. Female incest offenders have often themselves been victims of childhood sexual abuse without receiving help. They reenact the same sexual activity with their son or daughter that was performed on them when they were children.
Alexandra:
Alexandra is a beautiful woman in her 40s, and she is visibly moved when she sits down next to me. She talks about a family where both earlier generations and those living today have experienced incest, sexual abuse, abortions, infanticide, and war trauma. This applies to both sides of the family. Her own children also live difficult lives, involving substance abuse and crime.
Her mother told her that she was unwanted, that all the children she had should have been stains on the sheet, and that she applied for an abortion, but the application was denied and the mother was referred to a psychologist. The mother has spoken about how many pregnant women at that time used knitting needles to remove the child. Being an unwanted child yet still being born created an ambivalence in Alexandra that she has felt as an underlying current her entire life. She also shares that her father was violent towards her mother while she was pregnant. During World War II, he was in a prison camp and was deeply traumatized.
Alexandra has struggled with prostitution and drug addiction since childhood. She has considered ending her life many years, but after years of therapy, she has decided that she wants to live. Her intention is “to take back her life and turn things around.”
The representative for her intention and Alexandra stand holding hands, looking into each other's eyes. Alexandra speaks her life's intention, cries, and stamps her feet on the floor. Suddenly, she connects with the trauma, starts shaking and crying, and the intention drops to the floor. After a while, Alexandra stops, exhales, and says, "I think it was mother who used knitting needles and tried to kill us." The intention looks at her, and slowly the intention begins to stand up. They hold hands again, look into each other's eyes, and cry together.
After the constellation process is over, Alexandra shares more about her life and how difficult it is for her to accept that this is her reality. She talks about how she still looks at her mother and cannot understand that she will never receive the love she so desperately missed in childhood. She explains that all her life she has felt ambivalence and an inner struggle to
- to will and not to will
- liking and disliking
- to agree and not to agree
This has led her into difficult life situations and conflicting relationships—not only within her family, but also among friends and colleagues. She also shares that she has experienced periods of feeling nearly psychotic, easily becoming irritated, and having outbursts of aggression directed at the "wrong people," such as her therapists, her children, and her colleagues. She acknowledges that her mother is the "right address for this," but explains that talking to her mother about it does not help, as her mother plays innocent.
Alexandra often comes to therapy wanting to understand, step by step and also on an emotional level, what this start in life has meant for her. She also knows that she must do this by accepting the reality and acknowledging that she is a victim of family abuse, and that engaging in fight and survival strategies regarding the abuse does not help.
