I’ve read a few articles lately discussing young people choosing to have ‘no contact’ relationships with parents and family members. I thought I would share some reflections I have on this through the lens of Family Constellations and ancestral healing.

Whereas it’s possible to stop communicating with your parents on the physical dimension while they are alive, it’s impossible to break the energetic connections we have with those through whom life came to us. We might turn our backs on our family and move halfway around the Earth and start a new life, but the unresolved issues we have with our parents will move right along with us and have a strong influence on the relationships we make in our ‘new’ lives. The energetic cord connections we have with our parents may be the most durable and important that we’ll have in this lifetime. 

Just as our parents have these connections with their parents, and so on all the way back to the divine source of life, it serves us to honor the very channel through which life passed on its way to us. Regardless of the nature of the relationship we have with family on the level of the personality, our life came to us through hundreds of generations of ancestors who all lived through challenges to both stay alive and to pass on life to another generation. By cutting ourselves off from this energetic flow of ancestral life force, we risk losing awareness of the hundreds of sources of strength, creativity, love, resilience and wisdom that are in the thousands of people who came before us.

There is another important consideration to weigh when making a decision to end contact.  When we attempt to cut ourselves off from our parents, we model the same behavior for our own children to enact in their relationships with us.  In a place deeper than our conscious awareness are found the energetic dynamics into which we are born.  These patterns include the ways they felt about each other and about their own parents when we came into life through our father and mother.  These earliest imprints are some of the first things that influence us in our journey from the dimension of pure spirit to incarnation on Earth.  If we are using our energies to separate from our parents and our ancestral lineage, it takes away a bit of our adult strength to do so, and our children will feel this as part of their first experiences and may unconsciously accept it as a potential part of the life they have come here to have. 

None of this is to condone harmful actions a parent perpetrated upon a child.  I agree that there may be circumstances of abuse in a family that motivate a person to create needed boundaries with their family, and sometimes that may include a time of separation for healing, understanding and new growth.  However, it’s vitally important to hold, as best as one is able, a larger picture of the family soul patterns into which we are born, and into which our *soul* chose to bring us.  We never have to heal anyone else in the family; that’s not our job, and it’s an impossible task anyway.  Sometimes the harm is so great that a facilitator who has walked their own path of healing is needed to help navigate these pathways.  

After working with hundreds of clients I have come to see how the original, pure and innocent love we carry as newborns remains ever alive inside of us and can be re-collected as part of our life force.  While understandably idealized, that innocent love is limited, and usually retains a child’s wish that things had been different.  When added to an adult understanding that our parents are also wounded humans who were able to do what they could for their own healing, we may be able to leave the things they are responsible for with them without judgment, continue to be in relationship with them in new ways, and be free to more fully live the only life for which we are fully responsible- our own.