Taking on suffering on behalf of others

Taking on Suffering on Behalf of Others

Over the years, I’ve studied systemic and family constellations with a variety of teachers, as well as explored shamanic, spiritual, and coaching schools. What I found most useful, I’ve integrated into my work to support clients in healing from suffering. My approach focuses on uncovering what influences their ability to move beyond suffering and embrace life’s fullest potential.

Common Issues:

Clients come to me with challenges like:

  • Suffering from loneliness.
  • Feeling lost in life’s direction.
  • Pain from watching their children struggle with their own lives.

These experiences share a root in two key factors that directly impact the process of healing and accessing life’s deepest resources:

  1. The nature of the reason that motivates someone to take on suffering.
  2. The ability to be conscious of the fact that the one who need help and he himself are two different people, each leading separate lives..

The nature of the reason that motivates someone to take on suffering

Here, I noticed two patterns of invisible loyalty to suffering that needs to be revealed and cleared during a session with a client.

Suffering as Escape someone doesn’t have enough strength to look at the suffering of someone his loves. He perceives his own health or happiness as a burden.

Suffering as Identification someone who takes on suffering actually identifies with the position of the one who needs help, and in a strange way, claims the other’s sufferings as his own. Having such hidden identification, someone is not able to live his own fate and cannot complete sufferings because it didn’t start with him.

A Real-Life Example:

I once worked with a woman whose daughter struggled to maintain long-term relationships and experienced profound loneliness. The mother wanted to help her daughter escape a lonely life—something she herself had endured but never fully resolved.

During the systemic constellation, the mother confronted her own loneliness for the first time. Consciously the mother excluded this part of her life, couldn’t find a peace with it and a place into her heart, but unconsciously her inner attention and energy was drown there.

In turn, her daughter unconsciously, took the mother’s loneliness, because only there she felt she could be closed and seen by her mother.

This is a pattern of unconscious and destructive shared suffering.

The ability to be conscious of the fact that the one who need help and he himself are two different people, each leading separate lives.

Taking on suffering on behalf of someone else is unhealthy only when it happens as a result of

  • unconscious loyalties
  • lack of ability to lead separate lives.

However, when it is done with awareness and in a clear context, it may truly be of great help and give strength to both.

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