Conception under the influence of the healthy psychological structures of the parents
In an ideal world, a new child would be conceived through a sexual encounter between two harmonious people who love each other and want to establish or expand their family. These parents conceive the child based on their healthy psychological parts. After conception, these lucky children grow in a womb that is filled with love for the child. The child experiences that the surroundings are warm and safe. The parents care for the child from the first moment, also emotionally.
Many people imagine that they are conceived precisely by such loving parents who can hardly wait until they can hold the child in their arms and start a safe and loving attachment process. This means that the parents give the child care, warmth, love, closeness, take care of it in every way and support the child's individual development towards healthy autonomy. In reality, unfortunately, the situation is often completely different.
Conception under the influence of the parents' trauma and survival parts
Conception can be the result of both survival parts and traumatized parts of the parents being set in motion.
- The conception may occur due to thoughtless passion, perhaps with someone other than the permanent partner.
- The child can be born during rape or other forms of coercion, inside and outside a partnership.
- The parents may conceive a new child in desperation after another child died before or after birth.
- The child can be conceived because it gives status.
- The child can be conceived because the mother or father wants to prove that it was not their fault that the previous relationship was childless.
- The child can be conceived as a guarantee that the mother or the family will have material security.
- The child can be a means of preventing the father from leaving the mother.
- The child may be conceived because it is hoped that a new child can save an ailing relationship.
These children get a different starting point for life. Already at conception, and throughout pregnancy, a transfer of negative feelings, moods and ideas can take place from mother to child. The mother's uterus may be contracted and feel almost hostile. Right from the start, the opportunities for bonding between parents and children are lacking. The time in the womb can be experienced as inhospitable. The child may sense emotional coldness or a lack of interest.
The sexual relationship between the sexes before and now
Modern Western societies have gone through major changes in relation to sexuality.
- The old norms began to disintegrate from the 1960s. Safer contraceptives became available to everyone, sex could be enjoyed without the fear of pregnancy.
- Liberalization of abortion laws and safer methods pulled development in the same direction.
- Freer and safer sex became part of women's liberation and equality.
- Education levels rose sharply in Western countries, especially for women.
- The influx to the cities increased.
- As the economy improved, it became increasingly common to travel - also to find sexual partners in new places.
- The means of communication became more effective, mass media grew strongly. Television in particular, and eventually the Internet, made the world smaller and the exchange of information and impulses faster and much more extensive.
- The importance of religion for attitudes to sexual life was weakened.
- The values regarding cohabitation and sexuality were greatly liberalized. Homosexuals have taken up important leadership positions and become both presidents and
ministers. - It became common for both women and men to have several sexual partners during their lifetime. Sexual life before marriage became completely normal.
But this sweeping development did not happen all over the world. Western countries notice this when they meet immigrants from areas where the old values such as circumcision of girls and boys, forced marriage and honor killing of women still apply. In strongly patriarchal cultures, men and their needs will still come before women's needs, as was also the case in Europe 100 years ago.
Intellectual property that has its roots in peasant culture means that a mother in some countries and families still has to give birth to a son to ensure the line of succession to the family farm, the shipping company or the royal line. In some countries, politics and culture are also structured in such a way that girl children still have less value than boy children. Girl children are sold or given away, with the consequences this will have for the small, vulnerable child and her descendants. Some of my clients come from countries where this was common during their mother's upbringing. The mothers have been given away as children, used as slaves and often sexually abused in the family they came to.
Daughters and sons who come to therapy have experienced the consequences of their parents' traumatic birth and upbringing. They have been traumatized themselves, and they have developed strong survival strategies. These vary slightly from culture to culture, but the feelings of trauma are the same, just as painful and raw regardless of background. The children conceived under such a framework are always confused about who they are.
Historically speaking, the Western view of love as a justification for partnership is of relatively recent date. Traditionally, marriage has just as much been an arrangement to secure succession and property and not least to forge ties between different families, preferably within the same social class. The women's primary task was always to ensure the order of inheritance, 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 changed the framework conditions for both sexuality and conception dramatically. Society has no structural obstacles for mentally healthy couples who love each other to welcome a child. At the same time, we know that the relationship between biological parents, now as before, is not always harmonious. Rights gained and lives lived are different sizes. Requirements and reality are often far apart in both couple and parental 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 the sexuality in the relationship takes place based on the survival parts, the satisfaction is often one-sided. It means that only one of the parties enjoys it, while the other one lets the sexual act get the best of him. This can happen because one is forced with violence or allows himself to be used as a sexual object, for example to hold his partner. Sexuality governed by the survival parts means that feelings of attachment, love and sexual arousal are separated. The sexual act becomes just a bodily reaction. It does not lead to the parties being tied together more strongly, but to them becoming more separated. The attachment disorder that thus occurs can arouse many reactions from the abused parties
- fear and panic
- accusation and rage
- grief and resignation
- mental and physical disorders
A woman who, based on her survival parts, allows herself to be used as a sexual object and becomes pregnant, is in danger of feeling rejection in relation to her future child right from conception. She may despise the life that grows within her, feel it as a burden. As the pregnancy progresses and the budding life grows within her, she feels more and more disgusted. Sometimes it is
it so strong that she has an abortion. Other times, the disgust is less, and she simply neglects the child's needs. It could be that she lives unhealthily, with the consequences this has for the little one's development. She cannot emotionally attach herself to the little sprout growing inside her. (Recommend the documentary "IN UTERO" by Kathleen Gyllenhal ( http://www.inuterofilm.com ). Based on specialist material by leading researchers such as Dr. Gabor Mate, Dr. Rachel Yehuda, Dr. Thomas Verny and Ludwig Janus, etc.)
A man can also allow himself to be used for breeding or as a sexual object. This may be because the mother wants children so badly or because the mother has a greater sexual drive than him. Then the father can also end up neglecting his wife even more during the pregnancy. He may also feel revulsion at the nascent life that is emerging.
One can determine that everything that is good for the mother is good for the child, and everything that is bad for the mother is harmful for the child. When a man has sex with and impregnates a woman based on his healthy psychological structures, he is a blessing to his wife and children.
In the following, various examples will show what significance it can have for people when conception and the start of life takes place under the influence of trauma.
Conception through rape
Clients who have been conceived during sexual violence tell of inexplicable anxiety and anger that is greater than the current situations would indicate. They tell of numbness and nightmares about bombing and war, even though they were born long after the war was over. They talk about their doubts as to whether they have the right to live. Some tell of sensations of being in a container surrounded by semen and blood.
Monica: No right to live
Monica has suicidal thoughts, "maybe I don't have the right to live", she asks, but because of her children she still wants to. Her intention is the right to live .
Under the constellation, it turns out that the client, as a little girl, 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 had shared responsibility for during the Second World War. The client's grandfather and grandmother were in NS during the war, i.e. on the wrong side. Grandfather killed countrymen and was put in prison when the client's father was two years old. He was convicted in the settlement after the war. When Grandpa came home, he was just skin and bones. At this time, the client's father was about ten years old and did not know his own father. Grandma ran away when Grandpa came home, but came back. The grandfather was severely traumatized, and he brought up his son with violence without the grandmother intervening.
Monica's father was also violent, both towards his wife and children. He raped his wife. Monica reckons that she was conceived as a result of rape. The parents' survival strategies were to keep up a nice facade, have nice jobs, a nice home and nice and apparently well-groomed children.
Bright. The boy who wasn't allowed to be a man
Bjarte says 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 trace the cause of these feelings through a constellation.
During the constellation, the representative of the intention looks out the window, stiffens and closes his eyes, sways, takes a step towards the client who withdraws, and feels that he is in a fog. Intention collapses on the floor with her hands over her head, curls up and cries. The client is stiff, backs away from the intention and clasps his hands.
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 little Bjarte to survive than to know that he was a boy. He displaces sensation and enters into a symbiosis with his
mother's anxiety. He has not been aware of this anxiety. Now he realizes that it is awakened in him uncontrollably when he meets others. This is what results in uncontrolled anger. Bjarte now realizes 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 surrogate child
Many clients say that they were conceived because the parents have lost a child, and some are also given the dead child's name. These clients often struggle with a feeling of not being good enough. They may struggle with low mood, lack of energy and bottomless sadness. They may sense that they are the wrong gender, and they may search their entire lives for a sister or brother they often have never heard of. They can talk about a lack of connection with their mother, "she was somehow not there". This leads to the formation of a complex identity in the child. This means that the child does not know his true self. It cannot develop as it naturally would have if the mother had not been traumatized after losing a child. For boys, this can be fatal because they have trouble finding access to their male identity. For girls, it also represents a significant burden. They cannot live out their womanhood unaffected by the trauma that their mother has experienced.
Anna: The boy girl
Anna, who came to the seminar because she collapsed after her mother's death, was diagnosed as burnt out by the 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 involvement in her mother's repressed grief and her feelings of trauma after the client's brother died during childbirth. The client's entanglement in the mother's repressed feelings of trauma and in her deep grief over the loss of her first child came to light through the representatives of the mother and what stands in the way. The representative of what stands in the way mirrored the mother's all-consuming love and then grief over the loss of her firstborn. Mother could not see the surrogate child Anna, who was conceived two months after her son's death. In Anna's unconscious and desperate search for connection with her mother, she had pushed away a part of herself and tried to substitute this child for the mother. This part of Anna lives on in her as a separate trauma part. It contains the mother's repressed grief and survival strategies. As a child, Anna looked for her unknown older brother everywhere, she played boy's toys, she tried to be something she was not. When she became an adult, this developed into overwork, burnout and long-term sick leave. The collapse when the mother died can be seen in the context of the fact that now hope was lost. She would never be able to reach her mother.
After the constellation, Anna has reported back that she has gained more energy than she has ever had and now owns her femininity in a new and good way.
Conception to replace own parents
The stories of clients who are conceived because of the parents' unconscious desire for a child who can be a substitute parent are heartbreaking. These clients tell how they doubt that their parents are their real parents. They describe creative attempts to connect with mother as mother, and to reach out to a mother's heart without finding any positive emotional response. We hear how they gradually develop a much too big heart and want to look after everyone else's needs, but forget themselves and their own. As children, they repress their helplessness and powerlessness, their fear, their anger, their pain, their despair and all their inner distress at 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 extreme distress, and between fits of crying, she hiccupped "you were supposed to comfort me" when her mother hit her. Then the mother replied: "That's completely wrong, it's you who should comfort me".
Through the constellation, Mariann's repressed trauma parts are mirrored: She sings together like a small child and shuttles between the representatives of mother and father, without achieving contact. In the end, she resigns. She sits quietly for a while, activates herself, slides further in behind an empty chair, all while her intention curls up behind another empty chair. When Mariann is asked whether the dynamics that are reflected also resonate in her, she says that she remembers her early childhood as if she "stretches out my whole heart towards my mother, but there is no one there to receive". Early on, she started wandering around to the neighbors, who kept returning her to her parents. During the further constellation, the representative of mother lay on the floor and hit herself on the head, saying "It's not my arm that hits me." The client then remembers that she has always been afraid of her grandmother. That grandmother could have beaten 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 abusers
An attachment system trauma is defined by Ruppert (2013) as victims and abusers living in the same system and dependent on each other. All members of such an attachment system become trapped in their abuser or victim attitudes. They see no possibility of ending the victim/abuser relationship in a good way. The abusers feel pressured by the presence of the victims. The abusers experience themselves in a victim role. The victims, on the other hand, develop aggressor characteristics. But because they see no possibility of getting back at the actual aggressor, they let their aggressor energies go out on weaker people, preferably their own children. Siblings living in an abuser/victim family allow their abuse to spread to younger siblings and possibly animals too.
Regardless of whether the clients are men or women, there is often talk of abuse by their mother when they were children. It may involve threats, beatings or sexual abuse. Incest is always a very difficult topic to address, especially the sexual abuse of sons and daughters by mothers. It takes great courage to shed light on these themes and painful memories and to accept and process the fact. This reality is almost too painful to bear. In the case of sexual abuse within the family, both dynamics become attachment trauma/symbiose trauma
and existential trauma alive in the child at the same time. Female incest abusers have often themselves been victims of sexual abuse as children without getting help. They stage the same sexual activity with their son/daughter that was carried out with them themselves when they were children.
Alexander:
Alexandra is a beautiful woman in her 40s, and she is visibly touched when she sits down next to me. She tells of a family where both previous generations and those living now have experienced incest, sexual abuse, abortions, infanticide and war trauma. This applies to both sides of the family. Her own children also lead difficult lives, with drugs and crime.
The mother has told her that she did not want her, that all the children she had should be stains on the sheets, and that she applied for an abortion, but that the application was refused and the mother was referred to a psychologist. The mother has talked about how many pregnant women at that time used knitting needles to remove the child. This being an unwanted child, but still being born, created an ambivalence in Alexandra that she has known as an undercurrent all her life. She also says that father was violent towards mother while she was pregnant. During World War II, he was in a prison camp and was severely traumatized.
Alexandra has been a prostitute and drug addict since childhood. She has many times thought of taking her own life, but after years of therapy, she has decided that she wants to live. Her intention is "to take back life, to roll life back."
The representative of her intention and Alexandra stand holding hands, looking into each other's eyes. Alexandra tells the intention of her life, cries and stomps on the floor. Suddenly she comes into contact with the traumatisation, starts shaking and cries and the intention falls 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 starts to stand up and they again hold hands and look into each other's eyes and cry together.
After the constellation process is over, Alexandra tells more about her life and how difficult it is for her to accept that this is her reality. How she still looks at her mother and is unable to understand that she will never have the love she so desperately missed in childhood. She says that all her life she has felt an ambivalence and an inner struggle for
- to want and not to want
- to like and to dislike
- to agree and to disagree
This has led her into difficult life situations and conflict-filled relationships, not only within the family, but also among friends and colleagues. She also says that at times she has been almost psychotic, that she is easily irritated and that she has outbursts of aggression against the "wrong people", for example her therapists, her children and colleagues. She says she knows that the mother is "the right address for this", but that it is no use talking to the mother about this. The mother plays innocent.
Alexandra often comes to therapy, she wants step by step to be able to understand, also emotionally, what this start of life has meant for her. She also knows that she has to do this by accepting the realities and acknowledging that she is a victim of the family's abuse, and that going into combat and trauma survival strategies with abuse does not help.
