How to rebuild the emotional nucleus of a family
Photo by Simon Hurry on Unsplash
Some years ago, in a blog called How to reintegrate disconnected ancestors into your family, I described a process for energetically reintegrating ancestors who’d somehow left the nucleus of the family—by design or, more often, by accident—through physical or emotional exclusion, cancellation, exile, or early death.
Yet it can also happen that the nucleus of a family is destroyed and everyone ends up disconnected and scattered. This may happen through a major tragedy such as multiple members dying in a car crash, or perhaps a serious crime that literally blackens a family name. It can also happen over time, when a succession of setbacks weakens the family structure and some final blow renders it untenable.
I recently discovered that this happened in my great-grandfather’s generation. The family subsided over a couple of decades then suffered two sudden deaths in two days, physically and emotionally scattering the survivors. The entire nucleus of the family was destroyed.
How do we recover, reconnect and restore that fractured nucleus in our own time?
Family Constellations
The concept of Family Constellations helps us to visualise a family as entities orbiting an invisible nucleus over generations.
Family Constellations is a systemic approach developed by German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger. Drawing on his observations of many families, Hellinger identified three governing principles—which he called ‘Orders of Love’—determining whether love flows freely within a family or becomes blocked or dispersed across generations:
- Everyone in a family system has an equal right to belong, regardless of their actions or fate.
- When belonging is denied—through exclusion, abandonment, or shame—the family system will unconsciously attempt to restore balance, usually by a later descendant repeating the unresolved pattern.
- Those who came earlier in the system take precedence—have more influence—over those who came later.
When these orders are disrupted, descendants may unconsciously carry burdens that don’t belong to them, causing emotional distress, repeating patterns, or relationship difficulties whose origins lie not in their own lives but in generations past.
Wikipedia considers Family Constellations to be ‘pseudotherapy’. That’s because it reaches emotional depths that defy neat empirical categorisation—and which make rigidly intellectual, emotionally unavailable people squirm with discomfort.
Nucleus failure
Here’s my own situation as a living example of nucleus failure. I describe it in more detail in The day my mother’s family died.
The 1901 United Kingdom Census lists my great-grandfather Arthur George Lister as living in Wandsworth, south London, with his wife Charlotte and three young children—Violet (my grandmother), Arthur Henry, and Eric Alfred Gordon. In 1904, aged eight, Arthur Henry died of measles.
By 1911, the marriage may be over. Arthur is shown as married and living with five children: two of the previous three, and three new children (Thelma, Leslie, and John). Charlotte appears at a separate address, listed as a ‘Visitor’. The address, in Streatham, is only two miles from Wandsworth—but nearly 50 miles from Arthur’s new address in Hove on the south coast. Whether Charlotte has left the family, abandoning her five children, is uncertain.
By 1921 the rupture is clear. I cannot find a census record for Charlotte. Arthur’s shows him as living with a new wife, Helen, with Charlotte’s three youngest children and a new child with Helen. Worse was soon to follow.
Downfall
Arthur, a publican (‘licensed victualler’), was investigated for £46,000 in tax fraud (equivalent to £2.3m today) with six other men. The trial occurred in 1922. Arthur was found guilty and sentenced to six months in prison. Of the five found guilty, he received the shortest sentence, suggesting he was more accomplice than ringleader.
The trial was widely reported across the British Isles. As a publican, he would’ve been a well-known figure in south London and would’ve suffered the 1920s equivalent of social media cancellation. Whether Arthur’s relationship with Helen survived his time in prison is unknown, but his health and financial prospects declined.
On 10 April 1925 Arthur’s eldest living son, Eric Alfred Gordon, contracted acute pneumonia. It seems this was too much for Arthur. While Eric wasted away at the Beaumont Hotel in Bayswater, on the 12th Arthur had a heart attack some eight miles east in Hackney. Eric died the following day, leaving a young widow.
Within two months of the double death, Leslie—Eric’s younger brother—emigrated to New Zealand. John followed in 1929; my own family in 1973. The drivers for this sudden migration to the other end of the world remained hidden for another half century.
Pattern repetition
It’s difficult to imagine the impact of the combined sudden deaths of father and son, but tragedy had already spilled down to the younger generation.
In April 1921, while the tax investigation rumbled on, Violet married my grandfather, Wing Commander Harold Blackburn, a pioneering pilot and war hero. It, too, was a doomed marriage. Their first child died prematurely. Violet eventually had an affair and was ejected from the family—repeating her mother’s pattern of abandonment.
The nucleus of Arthur’s family failed and, a generation later, so did Violet’s.
My parents stayed together—in genogram terms they were ‘fused’—yet there was no emotional nucleus, no solid core of nurturing to draw upon. That lack of nurturing surfaced in my life, and it has been my humbling task to uncover and restore it.
Restoring the nucleus
We restore the nucleus by working back through the three Orders of Love, but in reverse sequence. We begin with the third Order—those who came before us take precedence. In other words, whatever was unbearable in their lives remains unprocessed in ours. In all situations there is shame, grief, and loss to be worked through.
This brings us to the second Order—where belonging was denied, we carry that lack of belonging and its attempt to restore balance. We acknowledge its source, as well as our responsibility for balancing it—a responsibility our ancestors were unable to discharge.
Finally, the first Order—everyone in the family has an equal right to belong, regardless of their actions or fate. This includes Arthur George, epicentre of the meltdown, as well as Charlotte—who may have abandoned her children for unknown reasons—and Violet, who had an affair which precipitated collapse in her generation.
There is no moral high ground here—only stressed individuals trying to do their best to survive, including Arthur George and his calamitous involvement in tax fraud.
Much like reconnecting singular disconnected ancestors, I hold them together in my heart and acknowledge the first Order of Family Constellations work—the right to be loved and to belong. The difference is I’m holding multiple generations in my awareness at once, all circling each other, like a 3D model of the solar system, shifting over time.
Three, two, one… we count down through the Orders until the nucleus is restored—and, with it, the free flow of love. I don’t use the word in a gooey, sentimental sense, but in the sense of a universal medium who presence brings wholeness and whose absence requires trauma-informed genealogy to restore its bountiful flow.
Next steps
For further resources on generational trauma, both free and paid, please click on this image.
Image: ChatGPT