Today I'll explain more about non-judgment and extracting yourself from family trigger systems.  These are the 3rd and 4th points in Five Star Family Healing as applied to your holiday experience.  3 other related blogs and the audio recording of our first session in the free Transforming Holiday Family Heartaches teleseminar are immediately below on this page.  Enjoy and--go for the opportunity this holiday presents to change your experience of family.

Star Three:  begin stepping out of family trigger systems. So, in looking at the shape your your particular family soul, I suggested you look between individuals and become aware of the patterns of emotional interaction.  What kinds of feelings are regularly exchanged or else suppressed?  Trigger systems are knee-jerk, mildly or seriously hurtful, often repetitive emotional exchanges.  For example, Mom and Dad always bicker about the same things.  Or your siblings regularly put you down for being too "different," and it makes you angry.

There are two kinds of "stepping out" I mean here.  The more extreme form, sometimes necessary, is to simply curtail your communication.  Sometimes, we just have to go away for a while and take our own space.  While we are "away," we can still follow the other "stars" in this approach--especially connecting ourselves with positive ancestral figures in what is our own psychically active, cross-generational family soul.

Otherwise, if you can manage it, a great way to "step out" is to stay present but non-reactive to what you experience family members doing.  It means being able to hold your space, remaining aware of your own feelings but not always acting on them.  This can be a challenge--but it is profoundly transformative for both you and the family members who don't have you to "play" with anymore.  To get good at this, one of the most helpful practices is coming up right now!

Star Four:  cultivate non-judgment and compassion. Now we come to a subtle but important point.  The constellation work perspective is entirely non-judgmental, but at the same time recognizes the guilt of perpetrators.  On their side, their strength lies in acknowledging the damage they've caused.  But on your side, holding on to a blaming attitude stunts your own and your family's growth.  Whether you can forgive or not, blaming keeps you in victim mode.

To be focused on all the bad things done by the very people who gave you life is to lock in the damage to your own root system.  Nobody does all bad.  Whatever else, certain people gave you the gift of life.  If you survived childhood to be here still now--then some things must have been done right for you.  Gratitude for them will start juices flowing that can repair the whole system. 

Again, less attention to individuals and more to what's going on between them and across generations shifts your perspective on blame.  Dad was a problem, yes, but his dad was orphaned and then subjected to a terrible stepfather, because his real father had been worked to death as a prisoner of war.  So Dad's father was just nearly all mean.  Maybe Dad did pretty well considering. 

When you see the patterns of trauma reverberating down across the generations--it becomes a lot easier to stop judging and have some compassion for people caught up in a self-propagating system.  Yet the family soul is always struggling to restore its balance in life and love.  Practice compassion and you wil become a profound catylist in achieving that.

This is my 3rd blog on Transforming Holiday Family Heartaches.   In the 2nd, I outlined the principles of Five Star Family Healing, and then spoke about these in our first teleseminar session.  Both of these are just below this text on the page.   Today I'll explain the first two stars.

Star One:  Explore the nature of human family souls.  So what are they anyway?  Just like a sports team, while made up of individuals, has its own characteristic identity and wholeness--the same is true of the human family unit.  In each one, the members have different skils and jobs that contribute to success.  But there are two big differences.  

First, most of the roles in the sports team involve conscious choices.  A tall guy might or might not decide to play center in basketball.  But since it is tens of thousands of years old, and essential to the survival of our species--many of the human family's roles are built-in to our nervous system.  They happen without our ever thinking about them.  And the live on in our unconscious reactions.

Second, the sports team exists pretty much only in the present.  Retired players don't affect the point totals.  In workshop experiences all over the world, however, it has become clear that the human family actively includes ancestors 2 and 3 generations back--even if they are deceased.  They can actively influence, and be influenced by, the passing on of life and love among the living. 

So the human family soul is a partly unconscious, transgenerational, pyschically active organism.  The main thing it does is try to preserve (or else restore) harmonius inclusion.  All the members have a right to belong.  Of course, you yourself belong to one of these.  You grew from it as a branch does from a tree, and while you have plenty of scope as an individual--your particular family soul remains a major part of your psychic root system forever.

Star Two:  Look for the shape of your unique family soul.  So the question becomes then:  what condition is your root system in?  This depends somewhat on what has happened in the past.  But breaks or clogs in your root system are created primarily by important events that the family was unable or unwilling to feel, process, and accept. These echo down through the generations and can affect your life in powerful ways.  Often you can spot these kinds of events by looking for what everyone knows, but no one is supposed to talk about. 

Because you will find similar patterns of suppression or exclusion repeating, you can start looking for the shape of your own family soul in any generation--your own, your parent's, your children's, your grandparent's, or your grandchildren's.  The trick is to start looking BETWEEN individual family members, and then across generations.  It's all about emotion and it's in the patterns through which these are exchanged (or suppressed).  As your focus comes off of individuals and into the emotional interactions between them--you will start seeing how your family system works.

Deep in the heart of your family, you can find not only insight, but healing.

Here is the recording of the first session of Transforming Holiday Family Heartaches

Download	Date and Topic	Play	Length
	FiveStarFamilyHealing_1 Michael Reddy Ph.D.		66:48 min