This post is a departure for me. I’m going to step back from speaking generally about the world out there - cataloguing the macro-crises. Instead I’ll focus directly on what I feel are the roots of it all, our families, both our present one and our family of origin. I’ve been a student and a practitioner of Family Constellations for some years and am informed by them and my own family. However Family Constellations are not an orthodoxy and many of my views, which generally come from it, include my own expression and thinking from other fields. I’m deliberately not censoring myself to be politically correct as I think we’ll get further ahead by frank dialogue.
The foundation of so much is a deep and appreciative respect between women and men. This is true in society but it’s true with the mother and father in the individual family. I use the word respect rather than harmony because the masculine and the feminine are in a dynamic and creative tension. Two poles make it up and two poles there must be for energy to flow between. Vive la difference!
The children learn from lived experience that there are two energies, two poles. No one needs to tell them. The masculine and the feminine start to come alive in them. This twoness is the stable foundation of the psyche, a healthy openness to the masculine and the feminine. While it’s wonderful when there are two parents present, a mother and a father, the most important thing. in my opinion, is respect for the other parent. That means that if the father is not there, or the mother, that things go better when the missing parent has a respected place in the family, when they’re seen in a good light. If they’re not then the children’s access to the missing masculine or feminine energy will be troubled. If one parent denigrates the other, the kids will feel pressured to follow. But that will conflict with their natural love for the absent parent and cause a problem for them going forward.
There’s a great deal of fatherlessness in today’s world as we know and its often said that this is a root cause of social breakdown. Kids do better in every regard when the father is there. But when he’s not it helps if there’s an energetic “good place” for the missing dad anyway. The child’s need comes first, not the mothers. The mother’s personal feelings are not the business of the children.
In the western world over the last three generations especially, in that there’s been a tremendous loss of respect for men in the social sphere. “Men, once one of the world’s great sexes,” quipped Garrison Keillor, in a line that almost everyone laughs at - we recognize its essential truth. While this perception is associated with second-wave feminism it’s important to state clearly that women and men both essentially assented to it and bowed to it. The success of feminism owes much to men’s intense desire to please women at any cost, even at the cost of their self-respect.
And social creatures that we are, this perception created a pressure for both women and men to act out the female ascendancy. The battleground for this war took place, to a greater or larger extent, in almost every family. While many were able to hold women and men in high regard they did so in the midst of the storm trying to pull them apart. The unequivocal public defense of men is vanishingly rare.
As mentioned, this has been going on for at least three generations, since the 60s. The damage to the balance of respect between women and men has been enormous. The struggle to feel respected and cared for, safe in relationship, has been challenging for a long time. Kids form their own inner sense of masculine and feminine, man and woman from what they experience in the family. If that’s disturbed in generation one, and the social agreement reinforces the imbalance continually, generation two will be less clear on the good place of men and women. Generation three will be even more so. They will be less clear on what it means to be a man or a woman, less able to feel grounded in one or the other. They’ll be governed more by an ideology than an embodied sense of identity. And they won’t know what they don’t know.
These are very general observations. The particular observation that matters is the one that happens one person at a time, one reconstructed family, one respectful connection between women and men at a time.
More next week!
Andrew
ps Let me know if you’d like to consult in exploring your own family situation.
Respect Between Men and Women
I credit you with a great explanation of the need to honour our fellow human travellers.
Doing so in the best way possible, gets a responding reward for all the participants.
Imagine a call to value or create value in each one of us.
Thanks
a rather late addition to your comments— some of the earliest learnings about gender happen without words. It’s been documented that if a baby is stressed in a pink outfit “she “is held closer spoken to more softly etc. than if “he “is dressed in blue where he’s more likely to be tossed up in the air and spoken to in a louder more jovial manner perhaps… Research has been done; check it out!