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The fear of success and family history

It happened two years ago. In one week I had three clients with a quite similar request. All of them were planning to open or expand a business. All three were energetic and motivated people with a decent career. They were also quite open-minded – having no personal views which could limit their ability to reach those goals. Their complaints where almost the same as well. As soon as they started taking real steps toward their business development their mood would turn sour, they developed anxiety, and a desire to run away somewhere or just do another activity for a while. None of those people had any events in their personal history, which could provoke such an attitude. The next thing I asked about was family history, and to my surprise the told me three similar stories.

All three of my clients immigrated to USA from Russia or Ukraine. Around 1930 the communist regime declared collectivization in the Soviet Union. (http://russiapedia.rt.com/of-russian-origin/collectivization/). Farmers who had some land and wealth where repressed and in many cases killed or sent to prison. These tragedies happened to my client’s ancestors as well. Their gandparents’ families were stripped of their farms and wealth and sent to exile in Siberia. Only one grandmother/grandfather who was 3-4 years old at the time was hidden by neighbors /relatives and escaped this fate. All other family members disappeared, possibly everybody died. The small child grew up and become my client’s ancestor. They never gave a straight message to their kids or grandchildren, that it is dangerous to be rich, but a deep fear was stored somewhere in their family field. Such kind of family trauma may be transferred from generation to generation and control the fate of one or several descendants. How to work with such situations? I used a very effective method of Family Constellation. It could be done in a private session or in a group and allows the client to access hidden energies and patterns in their family history, bring them into the light and heal their trauma. Another metaphor for that – a person can receive their ancestor’s blessing to have his/her own path and build his own fate. Through acknowledging your ancestor’s fate and history a person get his/her own freedom. It may sound a little theoretical, but for six years and thousands of sessions of Family Constellations I’ve seen many cases of repeated generational family patterns and this method’s ability to clear and heal them. As for my three clients – one of them did expand his business and took it to the next level, another didn’t open her own business, instead she turned her career into a different direction and significantly increased her income. I don’t know about the third client’s story – we lost touch with each other. At the time this was happening, I was very intrigued by the synchronicity and asked myself why these three similar cases manifested in one week. Then I remembered that a similar story happened in my ex-husband’s family and may have influenced my daughter. I’ve seen many cases like this since that time and I was always grateful for a chance to help. I also witnessed many positive changes after constellation sessions. When I started to work with it six years ago, many considered this method unscientific, but I am really glad to see that Family Constellation theory received a lot of support from science research lately. http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/fear-can-be-inherited-through-sperm-1.2448914 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-25156510#story_continues_1

Dina Ostrovsky Family Constellation therapist

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