When sick people come to me for advice, our first work together is to follow their symptoms inwardly. A striking number of symptoms take us back to the middle of the Second World War. They bring us into contact with the horrors experienced by our ancestors: flight, expulsion, rape, death and injury, killing and flight. These are war traumas that go back three or four generations and are clearly still active. Often something surprising happens: as soon as my clients realise this, the traumatic horror of the past begins to dissolve in the here and now. This brings them a deep and lasting relief.
Their illness seems to be directly linked to the war years of their ancestors. More than seventy years later, the basic emotions of many of my clients are still so closely linked to the horrors experienced by their ancestors, to life-threatening situations full of powerlessness, despair and unbearable pain, that they are often unable to feel anything, or only to a very limited extent. The feelings of helplessness and despair are alive in them, even though they, like me, belong to the post-war generation.
War makes people sick and ill, often only three generations later. Hardly anyone who survives a war comes out of it without severe trauma. Trauma is initially an effective form of protection. It triggers physical and psychological shock reactions that enable people to go on living after unbearable experiences and mortal danger. However, the full survival energy of these defence mechanisms remains stored in the body, the feelings associated with the danger to life are permanently repressed in the psyche, and a pain remains in the soul that time cannot heal. How does past trauma affect us today? Why do diseases develop as late symptoms of trauma only seventy years later?
The transfer of trauma between generations takes place unconsciously in the womb and during childhood. Children need to establish inner contact with their parents in the womb in order to survive and grow. They reach their mother and father where they are most intensely present: in the emotional place of their fears and traumas, which is sometimes the place of the dead. Children inevitably go to this place in their souls to be with their mother and father.
They do this in one of two ways: either they follow their mother or father into their fears and act them out in their own lives (‘I’ll follow you!’). Or they go one step further and try to take some of the fear away from their parents (‘Better me than you / I’ll do anything for you, no matter what it costs me!) Even in the womb, children go so far as to accept their own death without hesitation if it means they can serve their mother or father in an existential way. Seen in this light, miscarriage or childlessness is something other than a purely medical problem.
My work shows that with many illnesses it is helpful to follow the symptoms inward to where they want to go. This allows us to look at the pain of the past and acknowledge it. This allows it to come to rest, find its rightful place and heal. The pain of war had not yet recognised that peace had come. As we work together, my clients and I tell their pain: the war is over. Most of the time they believe us.
You can find out more in my articles about trauma and trauma relaxation.
