The Family Constellations series : Being in our right size

💛In the first episode of this special series about family constellations, I talk about the most common story that keeps us from finding our place and thriving in life. 
If you have no idea what constellations are, I recommend listening to S1 Ep5: Family mythology, the told and the untold or read more about it here : https://www.laureporche.com/modalities

🎬You can also watch :
Another self : https://www.netflix.com/fr-en/title/81380432
Ep 5 of Sex, Love and Goop: https://www.netflix.com/fr/title/81459349
This great video on hidden loyalties by Shavasti: https://youtu.be/Sd7umLz77Cw

❔For any questions or requests for this series, you can reach me through my website http://laureporche.com

👩🏻People I reference in this episode:
Francesca Mason Boring : https://allmyrelationsconstellations.com/
Elena Veselago : https://constellationintensive.com/elena-veselago/

Get notified when the Silken Mirror membership opens in 2023 : http://eepurl.com/dxzCk9

Follow us on Instagram @moonlitpathchannel

This podcast is hosted by Laure Porché: http://laureporche.com. You can follow me on Instagram @laureporche
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Transcript

[00:00:00] Laure: So first I wanna say that I'm so grateful to everyone who listens to this podcast and who sends me messages and feedback about the episodes, and I have a favor to ask you as I would really like this podcast to expand a little more this year. I have quite wonderful guests coming up and I would love for more people to benefit from their wisdom.

[00:00:29] So I'm asking if you do enjoy the podcast, if you would take a minute out of your day to send just your favorite episode to one friend, as that might make a big difference. I would like to keep this podcast ad free as much as possible and so that means that I rely mostly on word of mouth to make it known. So if you are enjoying it, if you think it brings something to your life and to your day, please don't hesitate to share it.

[00:01:02] I've been thinking for a while of doing a series of episodes centered or devoted to family and systemic constellations first. First, because I love talking about family constellations. . And second, because I can tell that a lot of people are curious about it and it's becoming more mainstream thanks to the Netflix series "Another self", and also because I really think it intersects with the theme of this podcast, which is stories.

[00:01:39] I have a couple of guests coming up that are Constellation facilitators, and I'm also planning to do an episode that will be a conversation with my friend Tracee Kafer about our love for family constellations.

[00:01:54] But, but as far as solo episodes are concerned, I didn't wanna do episodes about explaining what constellations are because they're impossible to explain. You have to experience them, and if you want to see constellation in in action, there's actually both the Another self series on Netflix and there's also a Goop episode, I think, where you can see constellation and understand what it looks like.

[00:02:23] And, and if you don't know at all what constellations are, you can listen to. I think it's episode five of season one that is called Family Myth: the told and the untold, where I talk a little bit about, I guess the great, the great tenets of constellation work. So for the solo episodes, I wanted to, stay in keeping with the podcast theme, which is stories and how important they are and one of the strengths and, particularity of Constellation is that they allow us to see in an embodied way, an another story that the one that we have running in our brain and in our system.

[00:03:10] And so I thought I'd do solo episodes about I could say the most unhelpful story that we have running in our system, and what a constellation lens allows us to replace them with. And so for this first solo episode about constellations, I wanted to look at the story that is the most common, and that's the story that we are bigger than we actually are in our system, in our family system. You might call it the wrong size story, and that story takes many forms, but mostly it comes from believing more or less consciously, sometimes unconsciously, very often actually consciously, that we are bigger than the people that came before us, and that we can hold more than they did and hold it better than they did. And it usually gets created as a young child. And it's created out of three things. One is what we call in constellation blind love, which is the love of a child for their parents and more widely their, their family system. The child will do anything including die for their parents. And the second one is loyalty, systemic loyalty, which is a response to a systemic information of "in order to belong to the system, this is what you need to do and this is what you need to carry and this is how you need to be". And I, I should say, like a misunderstood systemic information.

[00:04:49] And the third one is survival. The necessity of survival, which is when a child feels that a parent is either not available or fragile, out of range, means that they cannot really, provide safety, provide emotional safety for the child, or that the parent is pulled somewhere else.

[00:05:12] And when I say somewhere else, I don't mean a place, but I mean, for instance, if a parent has lost someone, especially, young, like if a parent has lost a parent when they were young or has lost a sibling, part of this parent might be pulled to follow that person into death and the child feels that. This can be all unconscious. But it still gets transmitted and it's terrifying for the child because obviously they need the parent to be there to survive. And so the child will say I will carry it for you Mom, or Dad. And in some instances the child will say, I will go in your place, and they might even die.

[00:05:50] That's an example of what I mean by being bigger than we are, or believing that we are bigger than we are. Because the number one thing that I see in Constellation is adults that are still entangled with their parents and with their ancestors. And when I say entangled, there's several kinds of entanglement, but this specific entanglement is "I will help you"." I will help you, mom. I will help you, dad. I will help you, grandpa, grandma, I will carry it for you. I will stay with you in it. I will stay at your side and help you carry it". Very often it's actually conscious because you know when the constellation is happening and I suggest movement or a sentence towards leaving the parents' fate with them. The reaction very often is consciously, "I don't want to", and it's just a step in the constellation, but it's just to say that very often this dynamic is more conscious than it is unconscious

[00:06:56] And why is it so difficult to be in our right size? When I say our right size is we are the last arrived in our system. Not necessarily, of course now you have children and they are the last arrived, but when we were a child, we were the last arrived in our specific system. And so first, from a Constellation lens, we don't have priority. The people who come before have priority and second, we are not supposed to give to our parents or ascendants. In Constellation, you consider that parents give children take and never the other way around.

[00:07:35] What do I mean by being in our right size? Being in our right size is acknowledging that life has come from them to us, and that that is much bigger than anything we could do. It's also recognizing that our parents and grandparents and ancestors fate belongs to them, and that it is absolutely not our place to try to help them with it. Actually, it's hubris because it's placing ourselves above a parent or ancestor saying, " I can do it better. I can carry what you couldn't". And so it weakens them and by extension weakens us because our strengths comes from them. And so from the moment that we weaken the people before us, we weaken ourselves.

[00:08:21] So being in a right size can take many, many shapes. In some instances, in Constellation, it means bowing but I find it's an inner stance and it's hard to keep, don't get me wrong, especially if you are a parentalized child or if you've been an abused child, it's really hard to keep that stance. And in no way it means that you should submit to your parents' will or even you know, like respect your elders, right? Yeah, sure. Respect your elders. But that doesn't mean accepting behaviors that are not appropriate or that are harmful. Just means truly acknowledging where your life is coming from. That's a different thing.

[00:09:07] And truly honoring the fate and the difficulties of people who came before you and honoring their strength. Because if they have gone through all that, they've gone through and survived, regardless of how they survived. They might have survived and be very damaged. That's a possibility, but they still survived. That denotes an incredible amount of strength.

[00:09:28] And so why is it so hard to be in our right size? And this is something that extends outside of our family of origin, right? It's something that will reflect in all of our relationships if it's not integrated in our family of origin. And the first thing is that to be in our right size, which is basically to say, "I am small and you are big and I cannot help you". It forces us to feel our helplessness and for most of us, that is terrifying because for a child, it's terrifying to feel that you're helpless and that your parent is not in capacity. So it's actually safer to feel like, "oh, I can help. I can do this, I can do this better". So that's the first resistance is to feel our helplessness.

[00:10:14] And the second thing is that when you get back to your right place, usually it involves accepting that you are not gonna get more than what you got. And it's accepting to take life from your parents exactly as they are instead of how you would want them to be. And that's extremely difficult because it's literally letting go of hope. It's letting go of hope that maybe if you help them, if you stay loyal, if you stay by their side, then you'll get what you need, or you'll get what you wanted from them. Another thing that's in the way, and that's especially I think in case of abuse or parents that were really harmful, what happens is that if you are in your right size, that also supposes that you are fully taking life from your parents and accepting it as a gift. , regardless of what their behavior was. And that can be extremely difficult, especially for people who were very harmed or abused by their parents because it is something bigger than anything that you could ever give back.

[00:11:23] And we have to accept that we are never gonna be able to repay them for the gift of life. And so that can be extremely difficult to accept when you are rejecting your parents. Accepting anything from them that you are not able to give back would be extremely hard. And another thing that makes it hard is that very often that means that we have to let go also of being a special child or having a special place. And it's much lighter but it robs us of something that was giving us value in a way, and it forces us to find our value elsewhere than in being special.

[00:12:01] But the advantages or the richness of finding your right place are undeniable. And I've seen countless people, myself included, out of misguided love and sense of loyalty, take on way more that they can carry from their ancestors. And to find a right place again, which is to basically bow and say, "I am too small to help you and I cannot judge you either", is extremely liberating and allows us to drop all that extra baggage that we've taken on. And I wanna say something because I hear a lot, especially since, you know, ancestral healing has become more mainstream and more well known, I guess. And I'll talk more about the idea of healing your ancestors in the next episodes. I have a lot to say about that though you might already surmise what it is just from this episode alone, but I hear a lot about, " oh yeah. This was passed down to me. I inherited this from my ancestors". Or the notion that it was given to you to carry by your ancestors. That, for me, is misguided because first it denies free will.

[00:13:19] It's like, oh yeah, none of this is my fault. None of this is my doing. I'm not responsible for this. My ancestors gave me all that shit and now I'm buried in the mountain of shit. That's not accurate in my experience. Like very rarely do I see a constellation where the ancestors actually want their descendants to carry stuff for them. It's usually the descendants that really struggle to let go of what they're carrying. They feel guilty, they feel bigger. They feel more able, they feel lots of stuff. Uh, But rarely the ancestors or the parents are saying, "here, carry this for me". That almost never happens. So I just wanna remind everyone that what you carry for your ancestors, most of it is from your own free will and your own sense of kind of inflated power of what you can do for them, what you can carry for them, and that you don't have to. And granted it might be really hard to let go and you might need to get some help and you might not be aware of everything that you're carrying. You might be very entangled with an ancestors, and in this case you would really need like an intervention maybe. But that notion that our ancestors or our parents, you know, like drop their weight on our shoulders intentionally is not quite right in my experience. Those weights are taken out of love mostly, and that's part of the difficulty is that in order to feel your right size, and in order to kind of let go of those weights, you have to feel the love that brought you to take them on in the first place. And that's usually very, very tender and very vulnerable and overwhelming.

[00:14:58] It's an overwhelming feeling. And then there's another reading that I'll just sprinkle in there, but it's not something that is necessarily through a constellation lens at all. It's through my own belief system. Is that what you've taken on from your ancestors and your parents actually serve what your soul has come to do on earth. That's my own belief system. Not everybody believes that or can hear that, but I believe that as a soul, you put your own obstacles in your path and you put very specific and precise obstacles that will kind of force you to dive deep into what you've come to experience, you know? So for instance, if you've come to experience trust, you might experience a lot of be betrayal from your family of origin, for instance. Or you might take on a lot of distrust from your ancestors and from your parents. And, that's, that's just my belief. Not every fa facilitator believe that. 

[00:16:02] But yeah, being able to feel your right size is usually the first step of any process that's connected to family. And my teacher, Francesca Mason Boring, who was on the podcast last year, I think it's episode six, if you wanna listen to it, when I was training with her, she said that the first five years of her practice, almost every single constellation that she did was having the person stand in front of their parents and say, I am the child, you are the adult. I am small and you are big . And I relate to that because for me, it remains the most common thing. People can come with very different issues, but very often that's what it boils down to. Most of the time they're just out of their right place and out of their right size. And so what happens is that then they feel out of place everywhere in their life because they're not in the right place in their family of origin.

[00:16:58] And that also works with siblings, right? If sibling places get mixed up or confused, the second born takes the place of the firstborn. Or if you, you know, were born after children that didn't survive, didn't make it, then you might feel out of place all the time because you're not in your right place. You are called the first born, or you treated like the first born when you're actually the second or third born. And so then you would feel out of place in your life because basically you are in a place that is not yours. And what happens when you're out of place in life is that it'll feel very difficult to feel strong and to be able to face life with strength. Also, because when you're out of place, literally it's almost like you are putting yourself out of reach of the strength that is coming to you from the people who came before you. And so, you don't have as much access to that strength. And then that can show up in many ways. But for instance, people who are over givers very often are out of place. People who are over responsible, who feel responsible for everything, and everyone or everyone's experience, are out of place. It usually comes with a very outward centered, validation seeking kind of mentality and issues.

[00:18:18] And that's, that's how it translate in life in general. Usually savior types are not in their right size as well. That includes therapists of course. There's a reason why we become therapists and usually it's to help our parents and ourselves, as well. But definitely our parents. You know Elena Veselago, who is a Russian facilitator, and she said that therapists basically by becoming therapists, they send their energy backwards into the system, into their own family system, trying to heal their mother, and I think that's pretty accurate. From my own experience as a therapist, I can recognize that pattern. And the issue is that when you heal that, or when you get in your right place, then your motivation to be a therapist kind of wanes and you have to find other reasons to be in that profession.

[00:19:15] So this is the first basic story that happens and that gets distorted and it's something that might need to be worked on over a period of time, cuz usually it's very connected to your identity. And so it can be difficult to work it in one sitting, I guess. But if you will, you can do a little exercise, you know, be in a quiet place and place where you have some space and some privacy. And if you don't have that right now, you can come back later to this episode.

[00:19:49] And sit down and close your eyes and breathe and, you know, connect to your body.

[00:20:00] And imagine that you are standing in front of your parents

[00:20:09] And just notice first how far or close you are to them and what you feel in front of them.

[00:20:24] Are you able to look at them in the eyes?

[00:20:33] Are you able to really take in their presence?

[00:20:40] And now don't do it yet, but just imagine what it would feel like to bow to them. To bow to their fate and their life and honor it. And to bow to them as the two people who survived and had enough life in them to give it to you.

[00:21:08] Just imagine for a minute, what it would feel like.

[00:21:14] Can you feel any resistance to it?

[00:21:17] Can you feel resentments creeping up?

[00:21:20] Can you feel your body? A sense of superiority to them or judgment about who they are and how they handled everything.

[00:21:33] And just notice.

[00:21:35] Just notice what comes up for you.

[00:21:40] And then if you feel that you are able to, you can actually very, very slowly bow to them with your body. And just notice what comes up. As you do this movement as slow as possible, feel what happens in your body, in your emotions.

[00:22:04] And you might not be able to do it at all, and that's completely fine. That just gives you an information about where you're at.

[00:22:15] But if you have managed to bow to them, as you are lowered just say out loud: I am small and you are big. I am only your child.

[00:22:35] And see how that feels in your body.

[00:22:38] I am small and you are big. I am only your child,

[00:22:47] And if you are not able to say it, that's completely okay. Just gives you an information about where you're at and if you are able to say it, just feel into what happens in your body when you do that.

[00:23:01] Has your breathing changed? Is there some emotion? And if there is, let it out , don't try to grab onto it. Don't try to understand it or bring a story into it. Let it move through you. Let it come out of your eyes as tears or come out of your mouth as breath, come out of your body as shaking. All of that is great.

[00:23:27] And then you can stand back up and notice how you feel.

[00:23:35] Is it different than at the beginning?

[00:23:40] And that gives you an idea about where you're at with your right size, and it's just an idea because obviously it's a very small piece of work and it's different than being in a constellation with a group of people and representatives. But if that hit something for you and you feel that you need more support with that, you can certainly look up family Constellation facilitators where you live.

[00:24:07] You can also email me and ask me if I know anyone where you live, cuz I actually know a lot of facilitators in the US and Europe. And I could point you towards somebody. And you can also book a session with me online to dive a little deeper into what you found out today.

[00:24:25] And so I will leave you with that, and if you have any questions or comments, don't hesitate to email me through my website or to leave a comment on one of the many social media accounts that I run. It's um, @moonlitpathchannel on Instagram or @laureporche on Instagram, and I think it's Moonlit Path on Facebook.

[00:24:47] It's not hard to get ahold of me . If you search for Laure Porché or Moonlit Path podcast, you'll find me. And if you have any questions or themes that you'd like me to talk about regarding constellations. Feel free to email me as well cuz I might use your questions or your requests for the next solo episode or maybe also even for my conversation with Tracy. So with this, I wish you a good couple of weeks. May you be well and may you stay in your right size.