Disease as a family problem

The disease is usually seen as a personal phenomenon. Especially the so-called ‘incurable’ disease like cancer or a variety of mental disorders like schizophrenia.

Let’s say you have an autoimmune disease. You go to the doctor’s and he prescribes you some medications. Usually, you’d need to take them till the end of your life to stabilize the “dis-ease state” in your body and to be able to function more or less normally. No doctor ever asks about your family problems. He’s interested more in how you live, if you have lots of stress in your life, your eating and drinking habits. He can ask you about the diseases running in your family tree to check what the most probable disease for you to inherit is. This, usually, ends the doctor’s examination.

The disease has shrunk down to being your personal problem. It is you with whom something is not okay. You are sick. Houston, we have a problem. “Why me?” The infamous question follows straight after you have left your doctor’s office.

Disease – how is it a family issue?

Every person is part of a family system. If you like it, want it, or actually hate the idea. Every human being on earth has parents. It doesn’t matter if they are dead or if you were brought up by a single mother or father. We are like a seed, sprouting from the soil of our family. The mere fact that you inherit your appearance or personal traits proves that you can never fully separate yourself from your family. It is a very powerful genetic bond. Psychologists and psychiatrists know that. That is why they touch upon the relationships you have with your family of origin and search there to check for problems and recurring patterns in your life.

Your family system is very influential in your life.

As a person you can step out of an organization, a club of friends, or an association, but not from your biological family system. This bond will always remain. You can break contact with your family in daily life, but right then the so-called “systemic laws” will come forward. The more you try to escape something, the more it gets you. Remind yourself of a dream. What happened when you were afraid, and you were running away from a dangerous lion? The lion was chasing you even more fiercely. The bigger the fear or the emotion, the bigger the attraction.

The harder you deny where you come from, the harder the family system will attract you, and you will remember that you have something to look at. Your repeating patterns will often manifest themselves stronger.

Thanks to the method of family constellations disease can no longer be seen as a personal phenomenon, but a family dynamic. The suppressed emotions that our ancestors couldn’t properly address do not keep quiet but are shown in the body. Sometimes they enter in later generations as children or grandchildren and show up as symptoms.

Does this mean that we should blame our ancestors for our sicknesses? Or rather the doctor for not having asked the right questions?

Neither of the two. We are part of the whole, just like trees are part of the forest. That’s why, in my view, the disease is never fully a personal problem. It has multifactorial aspects. There is a family, emotional and spiritual component to it. We got our life at the cost of certain traumas from the past. Traumas, we are not even aware of, but which effects govern our lives in a hidden, subconscious way.

I wish that this knowledge could be taught in schools, so that younger generations are more aware of what happened in their families of origin and how this can manifest symptomatically in the body.

Aleksandra Bzdzikot