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| The following extracts are based on actual case studies. Names, pictures and circumstances have been changed. These brief summaries are intended to illustrate some of the common family entanglements many of us experience. Most of these cases were resolved in a single 90-minute session. What cannot be demonstrated here is the visceral response each client experienced that preceded his or her internal shift. |
Issue: Hypertensive with anxiety and an irregular heartbeat. Recently lost her husband, who was much older than she. She cannot pack up the house. She has always felt that she must leave something of hers behind whenever she moves.
Family History: Elena's parents divorced when she was young and she left with her mother. She left some of her belongings at her father's place so that she would have to 'go home' to get them.There was also a lack of respect for her father and he too had hypertension. After they moved she never again felt like she had a home and she was angry with him.
Resolution: Elena put pictures of her father and her mother in her room. She could tell him how much she'd missed home and how it had hurt when she'd had to leave him behind. She could say: "I too have hypertension and sometimes my heart beats a little faster, when I'm left behind. Just like you were. I keep looking every time I have to move and nowhere feels like home. My heart beats for you Daddy. I will create a home for my children and in this way I will honor what your legacy and create a happy home of my own. I will give you a place in my home. Now I have you and I have Mom. I am allowed to love you both".
Elena could finally pack up the last of her belongings from the house she and her husband had shared knowing that 'home' was no longer there but wherever she chose to create it.
Comments: Without clear access to her father, Elena found a way to get close to him through the hypertension and the things she would leave behind every time she moved. When her husband, an older man, 'left her behind' she found herself unable to finish packing up, leaving things so she could return home.Children who don't feel like they have permission to love a parent openly will find a subterranean way to do so sometimes 'taking on' an aspect of the parent they have rejected or left behind. Once Elena could take her father back into her heart and give those feelings 'a home' without guilt, the hypertension and anxiety could subside.
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