This section of the website is devoted to the human attachment system, to the experience of being a child, and to the experience of being a parent. All readers will fall into at least one of these categories.

Making a map of a person’s family history is a common practice in the early months of doing therapy. A genogram is a particular kind of family tree – it starts as a family tree, usually going back to the grandparents or great-grandparents of the client. But once the branches have been completed, the details that are added to the client’s ancestors and peers relate to the themes of her/his therapy. For example, instances of mental illness, suicides, divorces, miscarriages, known cases of sexual abuse or other childhood abuse, happy/unhappy marriages, deaths and at what age, education levels and careers. Anything that feels like it might be significant is added, and then client and therapist peruse the map, looking at the ancestral patterns that flow through that family’s history. For some clients, this can be quite an eye-opener, and can help them realize that their problems are part of a larger picture, that their problems may be the external manifestation of family baggage over which they have had little control.

Whatever the modality of therapy a person chooses, its aim will be to expose these patterns and help the client to become aware of the way their mind, feelings and body have adapted to life’s circumstances. With awareness, and only with awareness, comes the choice to change those patterns. I use the word ‘choice’ rather than ‘opportunity’. Opportunity is not the end of the chain of contributing factors to healing – it is Choice. That is why earlier in the website I stated that it takes courage to do the healing journey. Choosing, and continuing with the choice, is an act of courage.

If the healing journey has a linear narrative, one event following another, it also has an underlying foundation – a ‘bottom line’. What this is, will differ amongst different humans. My bottom line is simple. It is encapsulated in one phrase “THE BUCK STOPS HERE”.

Having identified a dysfunctional and destructive family pattern, I have to decide: am I going to pass this pattern down to my children, and their children? My answer is No. As a loving parent, it is my duty to do whatever is necessary to stop this intergenerational illness. That means that the process of therapy will involve the ‘time travel’ that our human brains are wired for. To look back at the past and understand what happened, to look at the present and identify where the past is being repeated and reenacted, and to look forward to the future to see what I have to do for my children to interrupt this pattern of behaviour. How, as their mother (or father), I must do things better. If all I accomplish in this lifetime is to free my children’s kharma and see them making new, loving and non-traumatic family patterns, that will be more than enough.

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