When Longing Becomes a Love Language
In transpersonal therapy, we view people not as isolated individuals, but as part of larger living systems - families, lineages, and ancestral fields. Just like stars in a galaxy or elements in a natural ecosystem, no one exists in isolation, and the disappearance of even one part can disrupt the whole system. Everyone influences and is influenced by others. Personal suffering cannot be fully understood in isolation; it often belongs to a much older story.
In Systemic Family Therapy, also known as Family Constellations, trauma that is unacknowledged or unresolved tends to repeat across generations. What is excluded seeks reentry. What remains ungrieved finds expression in the body, behaviour, or fate of descendants, until someone sees it.
The method was developed by Bert Hellinger, a German priest-turned-therapist who spent 16 years as a Catholic missionary in South Africa. There, he was profoundly influenced by Zulu cosmology and their understanding of family and ancestral dynamics. He later integrated this with insights from Gestalt Therapy and the works of Virginia Satir, Eric Berne, and Iván Böszörményi-Nagy.
Zulu Teachings That Shaped the Method:
Ancestors are alive in the field of the living.
Unresolved ancestral issues can disturb the present.
Healing comes through acknowledging what was excluded and restoring balance.
Every member of the system has a place and must be seen.
Through constellation work, hidden dynamics come to light. In a session, participants or symbolic objects represent family members, tapping into what is called the knowing field. What was forgotten, silenced, or lost begins to surface, and healing can begin by giving voice, place, and meaning to what was once invisible.
Key Concepts:
Orders of Love. Family systems are guided by natural laws:
Belonging: Everyone has a right to belong.
Order: Parents come before children.
Balance: Giving and receiving must be in harmony.
Entanglements. When someone is excluded or a traumatic event is unacknowledged, descendants may unconsciously take on emotions, behaviours, or even fates that don’t belong to them.
Representational Perception. In constellation work, individuals stand in for family members and embody their essence or burden, revealing the field’s deep truths.
Systemic Losses and Empty Spaces
In family constellations, loss is more than death; it includes any rupture, absence, or exclusion in the family system that was not fully acknowledged or grieved. These create invisible “empty spaces” that later generations may unconsciously try to fill.
Common forms of systemic loss:
Deaths (especially unacknowledged ones: miscarriages, stillbirths, suicides, disappearances)
Emotional absence (depression, addiction, unavailable parents)
Exclusions (disowned family members, adoptions, institutionalised children)
Trauma (war, migration, abuse, loss of homeland or dignity)
Guilt or shame (hidden abortions, affairs, crimes, family secrets)
Unlived lives (sacrificed dreams, talents, childlessness)
These unresolved losses often echo through generations as emotional patterns, relationship struggles, or identity confusion - until they are seen, acknowledged, and given a place.
The goal is not to assign BLAME, but to restore ORDER by making the unconscious conscious, acknowledging pain, and returning burdens to their rightful place.
Generation 1: The Disappeared and the One Who Stays
A young woman stands at the threshold of adulthood. Amid the upheaval of war, her father dies early of illness. Soon after, her beloved brother, vibrant, youthful, and full of promise, disappears without a trace. No body. No closure. Only a prolonged state of suspended grief: hope, dread, searching, and silence.
He, like the father, symbolised protection, direction, and grounded masculine energy.
Their absence destabilises the family’s emotional architecture.
The young woman never fully grieves, not because she lacks love, but because grief has no place.
No funeral, no ritual, no witness. The pain becomes frozen and internalised.
In response, she compensates for the absence of masculine energy by becoming highly responsible, functioning in overdrive and disappearing in her own way: into work.
Beneath the surface, she carries a quiet guilt of survival and a deep fear of abandonment.
She later marries a man who unconsciously fits the system’s unspoken script:
A man who also occasionally disappears, not through death, but through alcohol and unpredictability. “If I couldn’t save my brother, maybe I can save this man.”
This is a classic example of a repetitive systemic loyalty loop - constantly replaying the pattern of disappearance in hopes of changing the ending.
Generation 2: The Children of the Disappeared
In time, she becomes a mother. Though never directly told, her children inherit a field shaped by unresolved grief, anxiety of abandonment, and the silent burden of unfinished mourning.
They carry this differently:
– One child steps into a masculine role: protective, capable, emotionally guarded. A doer. A fixer.
– The other becomes softer, withdrawn, and emotionally numb. Coping through passivity and retreat.
Though their expressions diverge, both follow the same pattern: Each is drawn to disappearing themselves, or to partners who disappear - emotionally unavailable, unpredictable, or physically absent. Each suffers in the hope of fixing, rescuing, or redeeming the original wound: Trying to make a partner stay who, like the lost brother or father, keeps slipping away.
This is systemic love in its blind form: Suffering becomes a way to stay loyal to those who were lost.
“If I can bring him back, maybe the pain ends.”
“If I keep loving him, maybe someone finally stays.”
It’s not personal failure in relationships. It’s the system trying to resolve what was never grieved by sending someone to relive it again, until it is finally noticed and seen.
Generation 3: The Echo and the Replacement Attempt
Family systems often attempt to heal trauma symbolically. Sometimes, a boy might be born into the maternal line, a silent attempt to restore lost masculine energy. If the boy dies young, especially if unacknowledged or unritualized, his soul may carry the symbolic task of “returning” the missing masculine thread. His brief life is not a punishment. It becomes a message:
“Let’s try again to hold a boy.”
“Let us grieve this time. Let us give him a place.”
If this is not done, descendants may unconsciously:
– Limit their joy, success, or voice
– Carry somatic grief
– Inhibit their presence, as if taking up space would be a betrayal
– Remain loyal to the one who did not stay
Systemic Loyalty in Choice Patterns and how it might show up in the Body.
When someone is unconsciously identified with a lost or excluded family member, the body often reveals it before the mind understands. The field speaks somatically.
Fear of repeating the cycle and avoidance of relationships - “What if I choose a partner who leaves or becomes unavailable?”
Avoidance of motherhood - from fear of not being emotionally available or repeating trauma.
Hyper-control or over-parenting tendencies: trying to "fix" the past by being perfect and clinging to partners or children.
Delayed or complicated fertility: the unconscious body holding grief, guilt, or loyalty.
Subconscious loyalty to suffering ancestors, expressed through remaining childless, as if saying, 'I won’t be happier than you were.
Common somatic manifestations of inherited grief:
Shallow breathing – not fully taking in life.
Collapsed posture – protecting the heart.
Low energy or chronic fatigue – life force restricted.
Freezing/dissociation – presence feels dangerous.
Food rejection or disordered eating – symbolic rejection of nourishment.
Tight jaw/neck – unspoken grief, blocked expression.
Feeling too much / not enough – inner conflict about occupying space.
Autoimmune issues - as a form of self-attack, an internalised systemic conflict
These are not personal flaws - they are embodied echoes of ancestral entanglement.
The Love Language of Longing
“My Love language is longing.”
In a systemic field shaped by loss, disappearance, and unspoken grief, this makes profound sense.
Longing becomes safer than love. Longing doesn’t require presence, so it can’t be ripped away.
Longing becomes a love story wrapped in mourning.
When grief is unprocessed, longing becomes the only form of love that feels safe.
In such lineages:
Love may be withheld for fear of losing it.
Intimacy may be avoided to prevent pain.
Absence may feel more familiar than presence.
Healing the Lineage
In Family Constellations, healing doesn’t come from solving the past, but from seeing it.
We restore the system not by erasing what happened, but by acknowledging what was unseen.
We say:
“You belong.”
“Your fate is yours - I no longer carry it.”
“I give you a place in my heart, and I take mine.”
By restoring Order, Belonging, and Balance, the river of love can flow again - not as longing, but as presence.
Artwork “Sacrificed” by Julia Soboleva.