Do You Express a Family Soul?
We’re down on collectives. Here in English speaking North America, our awareness is skewed very strongly in the direction of individualism. We are the explorers, the personal development pioneers, the immigrants who left stodgy ancestors and countries behind to strike out for freedom.
For a long time, that worked well for us. Great countries, great accomplishments. Now, however, in the US at least, fragmentation, factionalism, and isolation threaten to shake us apart. It’s high time to remember something. We are a mammalian species whose success always depended on deeply cooperative behavior.
The Social Empathy System - It’s Hard-Wired in Us
Starting with discovery of mirror neurons in the nineties, those cells that fire not just when we do something, but also every time we experience another person doing it—neurology has mapped a large, subconscious part of the human nervous system that supports and guides our cooperative, collective behaviors.
It kept us alive as a species before we ever developed language and thought. It’s still active now. And understanding it is the missing link in so many of our efforts to have better lives. We think conscious rationalism is the whole story, when it isn’t.
Subconscious, Distributed Collective Intelligence
Wow! That’s an intimidating pile of big words! Are you thinking maybe you’ll stop reading now? Well, at least look at this picture first—‘cause it’s dirt simple. This is a functioning city, built by African termites.
It has ventilation, drainage, farms, and nurseries. It fights wars, and adapts to changing conditions by moving and rebuilding. So, I ask you—where’s the brain that does this?
It’s not in the queen. In fact, every insect in the colony is, so to speak, a neuron in the brain. So there it is—very simple. It’s called a “distributed, collective intelligence.” In human’s, that’s still there, active beneath our awareness. It creates, among other things, what we in constellation work call the “family soul.”
And that has major implications for our health and happiness.
Highly Individual - Deeply Collective
Hey, you might say—it’s a long way from termites to us. Yes, I’ll reply, and here’s what that way looks like.
In families, organizations, in any group of humans, especially if survival or wellness related—there remains an underlying distributed, social intelligence that supports, or all too often thwarts whatever is trying to happen on the conscious, individual, rational level. We call this the group, or family soul.
And the subconscious part of you that has roles and functions in the family soul does not go away simply because you grow up or move to another region. It's still active, even in what may be your conscious rejection of that family. Getting a look at, and reshaping those roles is what constellation work is all about.
Some Characteristics of The Family Soul
Here are several bullet points that help you understand this.
The family soul is a guiding social intelligence distributed among hard-wired, largely subconscious behaviors of its members.
Its mission is to propagate life-with-love (not life alone) onward through succeeding generations. Even lab animals were shown to die when given everything but love.
It's primary strategy in so doing is to find the optimal balance between harmony, on the one hand, and inclusion on the other.
Faced with difficult challenges, it will at times favor the good of the group over the good of the individual.
The collective intelligence of the family soul is subject to trauma just like individual intelligences are. This is called “systemic” or “ancestral” trauma.
Unprocessed ancestral trauma behaves much like individual trauma except that it surfaces for healing in later generations, as opposed to later in an individual’s life.
A Missing Link In Many Healing Efforts
My experience is that many of our healing efforts go astray when we focus purely on individual experiences. Relatively often, we are resonating to unresolved experiences we did not have, but our ancestors did. It is fair to say, we remain an “expression of our family soul,” and dealing well with that makes all the difference.