Forgiving our Parents & Family of Origin: Is this The Path To Healing?

I am a Trauma Therapist, Somatic Therapist and Family Constellation Therapist and today I am taking the lense of a Family Constellation Therapist to answer this question briefly.

In my 15 years as a therapist, it is evident that the path to healing involves reconciling what has occurred to us in childhood or what we call early life (traumatic stories included); specifically the many ways in which the love and benevolence of our parents and family of origin feels inadequate which has led us to develop many difficulties emotionally and mentally that keeps us away from a healthy and full life.

This understandably comes with a lot of grief, anger and disappointment in our family of origin. The pathway of therapy is often to reconcile the losses and then become our own advocate to care for ourselves going forward. We find recovery through deep Self-Love, Healing our Inner Child and giving permission to the parts of us that has been subjected to suppression and pain to release pent up emotions and feelings. We become an individual with a sense of agency to care for ourselves overtime.

In the religious and faith-based community including in some Mindfulness-based therapy that has come out of Zen Buddhism teachings, the therapist and pastoral care often invites clients to go further: that is to reconcile their inner peace with their parents. Many clients I have worked with who come from faith-based systems often have internalised that they need to strife to ‘Forgive’ their parents for their shortcomings. The claim is that, it is insufficient to practice self-love for long-term joy and recovery, we also need to find inner peace with our origins. There is surely some ancient wisdom there.

Now on to Family Constellation therapy and healing founded by a German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger. In his years as a missionary, he spent time with the Zulu tribe in Africa and discovered something that spoke to him deeply. He saw that the tribe sought healing for an ill member as a community and they tapped into the ancestral wisdom like a child seeking benevolence from those who gave them life, where they came from. This formed the basis on which he rolled out Family Constellation Therapy. In this form of therapy, Hellinger invites the client to have their family members represented by participants in the workshop and facilitates a process of bringing harmony and allowing necessary movement where there wasn’t. In an individual session, this can be done with figurines, visualisations and family tree drawing.

This pathway to healing too involved the wisdom for inner reconciliation with our family of origin. It is encouraged as the primary way to find peace with our path and feel robust in our lives. However, the difference is something I found deeply humbling and transformative when I practice it personally and when I invite my clients to do the same if it feels right for them. In this path, we are not seeking to ‘Forgive’ because forgiving puts us in a superior position of bestowing grace on someone. This has been an invention of mostly monotheistic faith where the figure of God forgives those below him for their transgressions.

Here, we are invited to acknowledge not our greatness as an individual but our smallness where we are indeed the child from a long lineage of people who has survived, thrived or even failed before us. We accept in gratitude all they were able to give and we offer Inclusion and grace to those who couldn’t give us all that we needed and in fact transmitted pain into the soul of the family. In theory, this looks difficult for many people especially those with enormously challenging relationship with their family of origin and I fully respect that it indeed is. In practice, I have had the privilege of witnessing the relief, the benevolence, the compassion and love felt even for the most hardened heart when they allow the powerful energy of their own family to support their recovery in this way.

So, from this framework, the invitation for each one seeking to find your place and peace in this world is to receive all the good things that has been passed down and to open wide our hearts for the pain and trauma that has been passed down by the members of our family who weren’t able to alchemize it in their own lifetime. We accept our part in the lineage to heal not from the superior position of forgiving, but a much more humble position of Acceptance that they are our elders, they had their own wisdom and path to complete. We even are moved to allow ourselves to transform pain through our lives and make something good of it in our lifetime.

How does this feel for you? Was it difficult to accept?
Do you feel an inner warming up to this or a rejection towards it? Whatever they may be I invite you to allow different feelings to emerge because this work indeed requires a readiness of heart and what I would even call soul.

If you are keen to do a Full Family Constellation session with me (As an individual/couple/family) then you can click below:

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I will be running Group Workshops between Singapore, Indonesia and Online in 2024 on Family Constellation Healing. You can follow the Facebook page for updates: