A View from the Stars: Suffering & Freedom, Seen through the Family Constellations Lens

What is suffering? Something happens. Ideally, we have an in-the-moment experience of that thing that happens. Perhaps this is a “feel-good” thing and we have an in-the-moment experience of joy or pleasure. Or a “feel-bad” thing and we have an in-the-moment experience of hurt or anger.

This is called the primary experience of an event.

Then, our narratives kick in, the stories that we hold about what is “good” and what is “bad”. And then (often within the matter of a milli-second) we have an experience of the experience of the event. The joy or pleasure (or hurt or anger!) gets slammed down under a fist of shame, or elevated to a pedestal of superiority.  Primary emotions can easily be amplified, so that what was a little hit of anger suddenly becomes the front edge of the giant freight train that is all the anger we’ve ever felt.
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This is called the secondary experience. A secondary experience comes from the mind, not from the actual event itself.

​A secondary experience is also an experience that we have for someone else’s sake. In family constellations we talk about unresolved inherited ancestral trauma. We can come into the world carrying this on behalf of an ancestor and so it very much feels like “ours”. In this way you may either be looking at an experience through your own eyes (and having the possibility of a primary experience), or through the eyes of one of your parents or ancestors (never will you find the possibility of a primary experience here).

In Buddhism, the teachings of “The Four Noble Truths” concern the human experience of suffering. The First Noble Truth basically says that suffering is inevitable as a part of being alive. The Second Noble Truth speaks to the cause of suffering. And guess what…it isn’t actually what happens that causes suffering (although we cannot deny that pain is very real, but that is different to suffering) it is our experience of what happens through the stories of our minds (aka the secondary experience) that causes suffering.

What is freedom? Freedom is being disentangled enough from the fates of your ancestors, and individuated enough to be operating as an adult rather than a child, to be available to have a primary experience in the first place.  Then it is the ability to choose to have experiences, to keep putting one foot in front of the other, understanding that there will be consequences in doing so (in the shaping of reality and in the emotions that you experience in doing so). Freedom comes with the agreement that you are adult enough to bear the consequences of the choices that you make.

To be free enough to choose present moment experiences means sometimes enduring the vulnerability of great pain at sustaining whatever a primary experience presents you with – the grief of insurmountable loss for example. Or speaking your truth in a moment even when you know you risk provoking your own secondary experience of extreme shame. It means having the capacity to hold all parts of yourself through an experience, without defaulting to doing whatever ego-protective defensive measures the voice of the secondary experience is asking you to (usually some version of “stop”, “turn back”, “blame them”, etc…).

In this way freedom does NOT always feel “good”, and this is where we can get really mixed up! We can feel incredibly guilty when we are free because it means not bringing in to every decision all the stories that we carry about who we are supposed to be and how we are supposed to feel. Freedom can feel like big responsibility. The teachings of family constellations say that we often choose the seemingly much less painful route of continuing to suffer than the one of risking taking action in the direction of our destiny.

In choosing to endure suffering we can feel like a very good little boy or girl. The man that founded the work of Family Constellations, Bert Hellinger, famously said “There is no growth without guilt.” Guilt can be a great indicator that we are following the dictates of our freedom-seeking souls and not the stories of our ego-serving mind.

Our souls came here to experience being a human. If they have any preferences, I do believe that it must be to be as fully alive in the present moment as possible. Pain and all.