You live by the “almost” formula. You were almost lucky enough to do well at school, but you missed out by one point and didn’t get in where you wanted. You almost got a good grade in your exams, but you didn’t learn one question. A little more and you would have got the job you wanted, but your colleague took it. But you’re not complaining. But in your personal life, you’ve lost your way: you almost believed that the guy you’d chosen would be yours. But now he’s living with your girlfriend. You’re broke, and you’ve got business problems.
And here’s a more difficult case. When you were a little girl, you threw a boiling pot on yourself. You are often ill, you are always in pain. You finish school anyway, but your health is a problem, and you have frequent accidents and all sorts of misfortunes. One more fracture in your arm and what happens? You ask yourself.
What is supposed to happen happens. Your fate is marked by the word “almost” or, in more severe cases, by “a bag of disasters”. What has made you have such a destiny?
The psychic you visited discovered that your karma had been corrupted by some half-forgotten dead relative, born out of wedlock and raised in exile. He had committed some misdemeanour by taking a mistress other than his wife. You, of course, do not believe in psychics and have gone to a psychotherapist.
Some of them will understand you perfectly. For example, the followers of the German psychotherapist B. Hellinger, who use the so-called “family constellation method”. Just like psychics and karma believers, they also recognise that there is such a thing as fate. And they know that the past can unexpectedly “pop up” today and ruin your life. That’s what they, those psychotherapists, would tell you.
This is the fate you have created for yourself in collaboration with those around you. The younger you were, the less you contributed to this fate. And the older you got, the more you created it yourself. But both sides, those around you and you, were always involved in creating this destiny.
What was it up to those around you?
Firstly, you were not only living your own life, but also the life of your family. If someone in your family has been unlucky, unfortunate or has transgressed, your family has usually tried to push them into oblivion. But according to the brilliant saying of the philosopher Nietzsche and Dr Freud, “everything that is displaced is doomed to come back”. Therefore, the unfortunate forgotten in your family can come back – through you! The conscience of the tribe simply prevents him from disappearing, and he can appear in your life with his misfortunes. You don’t even know it. That’s because “tribal conscience” sees to it that in the tribe:
No one is forgotten;
There is a balance between receiving and giving;
Everything goes in a certain order, say the older ones go first, then the younger ones.
And because your relative forgot the unfortunate exile, the conscience of the relative could not bear this and returned the misfortune, restored the balance, and now you do not “get” a spouse for the relative who did not “take” his. In this way, conscience has fulfilled both the first point – “the unfortunate has returned to the tribe” – and the second point – “every transgression will be paid for”. Conscience does not care that it is not you, but he, the relative, who has broken the balance. You restored it. Unconsciously, of course.
Secondly, what is not up to you is the expectations of your family. After all, when you were a child, you could not choose your role. And those “almosts” or serious disasters were already “programmed” by your parents from an early age. They expected them from you. Let’s say, for example, that your parents said to your sister “well, you won’t be a problem” and to you “you’ll see, you’ll grow up to be a loser”. When you did well, your parents would yawn. When you didn’t do well, they’d cheer up and say: “Well, didn’t we tell you?” So, you learnt your role from an early age – that of the person who “almost” succeeds or fails. And in order to remain a member of your family, you had to be unlucky!
Well, what is up to you? When you start to get lucky, you “almost” get to the feeling of happiness. But at the very last moment, quite unconsciously, you rebalance and ruin everything! You prevent yourself from experiencing success, and you also prevent yourself from feeling happy, because if you feel completely successful or completely happy, you are like a criminal! Yes, you feel dishonest if:
You start to feel happier than others in an unhappy family;
You take more out of life than you feel you deserve;
You are younger than your siblings and suddenly get richer or have a more successful partner.
What should you do?
Psychotherapists, especially those working with psychoanalytic methods or the principles of “family constellation”, can help you deal with your conscience. They would create a model of your tribe out of strangers, and the “unfortunate” one would be brought back into the tribe and honoured. You would be relieved. With a conventional, non-constellation psychotherapist you can free yourself from the roles imposed on you by your family.
And then there is your work on yourself. Of course, you can simply accept your destiny. But it is your own destiny, not that of your family, and not that of your family. You can learn to be yourself. And that means opening yourself to happiness and success. You can let them in with gratitude. And they will come.
