The power of the soul to celebrate life even after tragedy is miraculous; therefore, even in cases of great harm, there is always hope.
Bert Hellinger
“Sexual offenses in juvenile delinquency are on a continuous, slight increase.”
— (Ricijaš et al., 2022)
Children entangled in adverse family dynamics are often not in control of the situation — and least of all the children themselves. In these circumstances, children have almost no chance to live their own lives as they were meant to or to experience the happiness, innocence, and freedom of a small child. Completely different forces are at work — powerful forces within the family system whose members are caught in systemic violations of wholeness, hierarchy, and balance of exchange (the ‘Orders of Love’ according to Bert Hellinger). These violations lead to collective family defeat, where the suffering of the family is repeated through the suffering of their children, and then passed from person to person, from generation to generation, endlessly.
What is happening in Croatian reality that I increasingly witness in my work are hidden incestuous dynamics — situations where the act has not yet occurred but the energy for its execution is very present; committed incest between members of both the immediate and extended family system; and acts carried out by those drawn into the family system who commit the harm instead of the family members themselves.
This perspective on human beings and their smallness in the face of forces that push us toward harmful behavior is a completely new and profound approach to working with people.
The power of the sexual act requires strong and powerful parents.
The foundation of the family is sexual attraction between a man and a woman— Bert Hellinger
Shyness about understanding the strength and power of the sexual act between partners drives us into impoverished and cheap imitations of love, as well as high-risk unconscious exposure of their children and others to dynamics that require the parents’ exchange of giving and receiving in every sense, most importantly in the sexual sense. Mutual definition and completion of each other as a couple leads to the SUCCESS of love that endures, to the SUCCESS of the FAMILY as a whole. By giving ourselves and taking the partner, we BECOME man or woman, we have a deep identification with ourselves as a man or woman in a real and true, not platonic or imagined, relationship. In sexual intimacy itself, we become a couple, enter full risk where wisdom, intelligence, and humanity are required, where we take each other, know each other deeply, and BELONG to each other in love.
Thus, the strength and power of the family, the strength and power of the parental couple, the identification of function and our role as sexual partners in the family, and belonging precisely to this and no other family system — all of this is PRESERVED by giving and receiving oneself in the sexual act, maintaining that DESIRE actively and fulfilling that desire. Sexuality serves and preserves the partner relationship.
Only fools can consider the power of sexual partnership as a degrading, humiliating, or unworthy act. Misunderstanding the decisive and determining role that sexuality plays in bonding partners exposes children, and other people who do not belong to the family system, to the risk of being drawn into incestuous dynamics, where a combination of blind childlike love and weak parents primarily attempts to correct the imbalance of giving and receiving in relationships.
Both parents participate in incest — the perpetrator, usually the father, is in the foreground, while the other parent, usually the mother, is in the background — and share responsibility!
Incest is, in many cases, a family problem and is only possible if both parents consent to it. Of course, whatever parents say, an experienced constellator cannot easily overlook the true systemic dynamics of the family, nor what truly occurred within it. It is crucial to emphasize that both mother and father share responsibility in the majority of cases.
Frequent imbalance in giving and receiving also develops outside of primary sexuality, when the man gives more and the woman receives more, e.g., in finances, support, sacrifice — especially when a woman with children marries or lives with a partner who has no children. Then the mother, in an attempt to balance what she has received and to avoid the risk of the man leaving, unconsciously (and sometimes consciously) offers her daughter as a substitute relationship. You see, cases of incest are rare where there is no pre-established dynamic for incest between partners.
Incest is a dynamic where the child is strongly drawn in to attempt to restore the system, which attempts to:
- prevent the collapse of the family system (dynamic: “I for you, dear mother” or “I for you, dear father”),
- prevent the parents or partners from separating without pain and guilt (dynamic: “I instead of you, dear mother” or “I instead of you, dear father”),
- prevent the entry of lovers into the system (dynamic: “I instead of you, dear mother” or “I instead of you, dear father”),
- the mother consciously or unconsciously gives the daughter to the father or partner for various reasons, sometimes because she does not want to look at him or does not respect him enough, and the daughter pays the price,
- the mother consciously or unconsciously gives the daughter to the father because her true partner is actually her father (dynamic: “Mother’s son – Father’s daughter”),
- avoiding the execution of incest by involving others in the family who commit the act of raping the child instead of the parents (dynamic: “I instead of your father” or “I instead of your mother”),
- the child’s attempt to prevent one parent from killing the other (dynamic: “I for you”),
- the child’s attempt to prevent a parent from killing themselves (dynamic: “I for you”),
- the child’s attempt to prevent a parent from killing them (the child),
- the feeling of an adult that they were raped as a child, but they were not (dynamic: “Mother’s son – Father’s daughter”, dynamic: “Identification”, victim of family violence),
- parents drawn into committing incest or allowing the rape of a child during war,
- parents drawn into committing incest due to strong identification with previous family members,
- the child drawn into incest due to strong identification with previous family members,
- parents drawn into incest because the parent themselves was raped or still has inappropriate relations with their own parent,
- and many other dynamics and solutions we have witnessed in systemic constellation workshops.
Of course, there is no absolute truth — incest is a complex problem and appears in many different forms, so caution is needed when generalizing. Sometimes violence and abuse are so harmful that incest becomes secondary, even though by nature it is primarily a sexual act. In that case, it is something entirely different. Solutions are always different for each child.
All examples in this text are based on experiences working with people and families, their stories, and real-life examples
Only a calm constellator can properly study the phenomenology until a good solution for the child is found. The strength lies in the child’s love, and in the restoration of the victim’s dignity and innocence. And guilt is shared among all perpetrators and those who agreed to it.
The goal is to help the child return the guilt to the parents and to restore the human dignity and innocence of the victim.
It is absolutely essential to help the child find the path to their own self-worth, and to the affirmation of love.
— Bert Hellinger
It is of crucial importance to have complete inner calm when working with children who are victims of incest.
We seek a phenomenological systemic solution and resist every temptation to go beyond that, or to take sides with the victim. The search for a culprit is replaced by a deep presence of our soul — observing people in their real situation. For each family member, the solutions are different, and each of them individually must be allowed to accept their part of responsibility and to preserve their dignity.
A systemic constellator helps the entire system. For us, there is no good or evil, no personal judgment of guilt or innocence — regardless of the situation. In our work, we distance ourselves from anything that limits the possibility of helping both victims and perpetrators — all are seen equally, and a solution is good only when it is good for everyone. The great soul of the constellator holds everything equally.
SOLUTION FOR THE CHILD
The solution for the child is to illuminate their childlike love and innocence in the gentlest possible way. During the process, you feel as if you are holding the child’s heart in the palm of your hand. Deep resonance with the child’s soul and heart — which goes beyond space and time — enables the constellator to find the one and best solution, often in just a few sentences. For every child, the solution is different.
Child to the mother: “Mom, I agree to do this for you.”
Therapist to the child: “You did everything out of love. You did the best you could, and now it would be right to return the problem to the adults. It’s their problem, and they can deal with it.”
Preserving the child’s innocence throughout the process is a delicate task. Because of the natural and frequent feelings of guilt that the victim carries inside, many sexually abused individuals later live as victims. This means that in almost every relationship and every system, they eventually become victims in some way — though rarely, some become aggressors. It all depends on the intensity and nature of the act (how long it lasted, who participated directly or indirectly).
It is important to note that there are also cases where incest did not actually occur, but the child feels sexually violated and guilty — especially when there is violence in the family between the child’s third and seventh year of life. During this period, if the natural resolution of sexuality in girls — the transition from the father’s sphere of influence to the mother’s — does not occur, the so-called phallic stage of development appears. In this stage, libido is centered in the genital area, and pleasure is experienced through touch and stimulation. If a person remains fixated in the phallic stage, in men it manifests as ambition, boastfulness, arrogance, and ruthlessness; in women, as flirtatiousness and seductiveness. However, in the presence of family violence, the child may experience this as if an actual sexual assault by a parent occurred.
I have observed this in several constellation sessions, and I guided the process of finding resolution as if the child sitting beside me had truly experienced incest — with gentle modifications at the end of the session.
Restoring innocence and dignity to victims of incest — returning the entire act, everything that happened (not only the guilt), to the parents — and helping the victim gather the courage to acknowledge the involvement of both parents in the act (when that is the case), while illuminating their love for all family members, helps victims not only to live without turning back to the past but also to transform the structure of their personality and their overall sense of self — the question of “Who am I?”
Although personality encompasses relatively stable psychological traits and mechanisms, that does not mean it cannot change.
Responsibility for everything, and especially for incest, lies with the parents — but it is the child who pays the price. That is how the family system functions.
— B. Hellinger
The Increase in Sexual Offenses Among Youth as an Indication of Incestuous Family Dynamics in Both Victims and Perpetrators
Systemic constellations offer a framework within which we can explore probabilities and choices. These choices and probabilities can relate to any question — for example, which of several apartments is best for me, or which job to choose. Likewise, we can explore specific probabilities within a given context.
This work was inspired by the research of Neven Ricijaš et al. (2022), which highlighted that criminal acts of sexual abuse and exploitation of children make up an average of 8% of total juvenile crime, which is eight times higher than expected, and represents a phenomenological specificity of juvenile delinquency. While other forms of juvenile crime are decreasing, sexual offenses are increasing. Why is that?
In the constellation field, I set up three separate sessions (works).
First session
Two questions were asked:
-
What is the most common cause of sexual offenses committed by juveniles — in both perpetrators and victims?
I introduced several positions, and both questions focused on the same position:
➡️ Incestuous dynamics within the families of both the perpetrator and the victim.
Second session
Again, two questions:
What is the cause of the incestuous dynamics within the families of both the perpetrator and the victim?
Both questions looked at four positions:
- The father beats the mother — in both the victim’s and the perpetrator’s families.
- The mother’s incestuous impulse toward her son (the perpetrator).
- The mother’s incestuous impulse toward her daughter (the victim).
- The father’s incestuous impulse toward his daughter (the victim).
Third session
Again, two questions:
What is the cause of the mother’s incestuous dynamics within the families of both the perpetrator and the victim?
Two positions were chosen:
- The mother feels an incestuous impulse coming from her own mother, or from both parents together (or there is a feeling within the soul that it truly happened).
Of course, this does not point to an absolute truth, but rather to the probable systemic dynamics underlying these acts.
To conclude, I will quote Bert Hellinger from his book The Hidden Laws of Love (2015, p. 150):
Question:
“In a systemic problem, there exists a circle of causes and effects, yet you still choose to begin with the mother as the starting point. It seems that you are not particularly interested in what the man has done to cause the woman to act as she does.”
Hellinger:
“That’s correct — I often proceed in that way, and there are several reasons for it. One of the reasons is to avoid prejudice at the very beginning. Remember that in systemic work, we do not morally judge people. We look for ways to help the family find balance so that the children — the victims — can once again live healthy, fulfilling lives, and so that they do not one day do to others what was once done to them. Systemic balance can only be achieved when we determine everyone’s role within the family. Since the perpetrator is usually a man, his guilt is already established and clearly visible. What is often unclear, however, is the woman’s role in all of it. Therefore, I often begin by searching for the woman’s role. I do not blame her, but in order to understand the family as a whole, I must learn what was happening in the background.”