These are the characteristics of the family in question: entanglement, overprotectiveness, rigidity, avoidance of conflict. But let’s see what Art therapy and Bach Flowers says:
“I am the keeper of the forest. My smooth leaves, welded around the stem, create stages or shelves where the dew settles. The life is stationed on the leaves, which tend to block the growth of the stem and the flowers appear at the base of the stem. From here they open to the night, making room for the future day. The stem takes strength to disengage from that plane and explore a next one. But what an effort to proceed, to look beyond, how much easier it is to stay in the past. But we must look forward my friend, make a sudden leap from one floor to another. What have you got to lose? After all, “you never know”, this is the magic phrase “.
The key word for this remedy is family.
But what is a family? “A group of crazy people with whom you are obliged to share your whole life. An exclusive club whose membership cannot be canceled. Even if your mother is out of her mind and had a husband who didn’t know how to love her as she deserved or if your father is a bastard you haven’t seen for twenty years, you will always be a member of that club no matter what. And you won’t know what it means to be part of it until one of its members leaves, leaving a void forever. ” From Welcome to the Family TV series on Netflix.
The Bach flower, Honeysuckle also represents “The old man alone in the family” but as old he means that element of the family that “feels alone”; it can also be a child who wants to become a newborn again because he felt loved more; a teenager who wants to go back to elementary school; a menopausal woman who does not want to age; a retired man with no more mission or goal to reach. However, subjects who have so much nostalgia for the past that is no longer there and who indulge in memories, even if not pleasant, of the time, as if they were chained to them, that they can no longer live in the present. And last but not least, those who are unable to break away from a broken love and those who are unable to mourn.
Dr. Edward Bach describes these people as: “… those who linger long in the past with their thoughts, regret a happy time, abandon themselves to the memory of a lost friend or to old dreams never realized. They have no hope of still experiencing happy moments, if not in the past ”.
The magic of this remedy is to bring back to live in the present and break the chains of memories and the past. Indeed, Honeysuckle manages to overcome the blocking state of the past, bringing us back on our personal journey towards self-realization. The moods on which Honeysuckle acts: regrets, regret with nostalgia, nostalgia for things or situations that are left behind, lack of concentration because you think about the past, trapped in the past, melancholy for memories.
They idealize an experience that concerns themselves and the family. The family is therefore the place where physical and mental pain arises, especially when there is a tendency towards idealization. But it is also the place where healing can take place, as long as it is possible to think and act the change. In order to work in this sense, the therapist with his history, his experiences, his emotions and his resonances poses himself as the auxiliary self of communication, of the expression of emotions, in support of parenting, destabilizing roles and functions, towards a new possible balance. In psychological jargon it is called “reparenting”, a new parent who gives a second chance.
ch great happiness again, then you need to take Bach flowers that only valid therapeutic advice can optimize.
Often in therapy I listen to talks about the family: you want to go back to the family but you can’t do it old grudges and old memories prevent us and yet we would like to go back … or on the contrary you have never left, especially emotionally and you tend to search “Family” in every partner we meet without understanding if it is the right family for us. The link of regret even for “non-positive” memories does not make us integrate the past to live the present fully.
So it is neither a question of disavowing or fully accepting the “family”, but it is a question of entering into a relationship with the Self: because of the past, to avoid that the personality remains crystallized in a moment that is not the present, preventing listening of the messages coming from the higher Self which instead leads to evolution.
Or the pain generated by the past has opened up a dissociated fantasy world that is lived in place of the past itself. Many people, stuck at an age in which they were extremely happy, and perhaps with the connivance of some trauma, have stopped their journey at that specific moment and return to it incessantly with their mind and emotions, preventing the present from manifesting itself in their own. Beauty and Wisdom.
In order for the present to be seen in color, a work of reconnection is important, in some way: it is necessary to let go, to greet, to dismiss, the memory that does not let us live, that haunts us. A conscious re-elaboration work, combined with a work on the body, is certainly useful for returning to the here and now. And we are talking about functional psychotherapy.
By nature, the Honeysuckle type is endowed with a remarkable mnemonic capacity. We can say that Memory is its innate resource. This faculty, however, originates from an inability to feel fulfilled in the current life that can lead the Honeysuckle type to flee into the reminiscence of more pleasant past times or of loved ones in the past now lost from sight. The characteristic of family functioning that can induce psychosomatic pathologies in the Honeysuckle type are the following: entanglement, overprotectivity, rigidity, avoidance of conflict.
Psychosomatic families are entangled families in which there is an ineffable differentiation between members. All family members intrude on the thoughts and feelings of others causing the individual member to lack privacy and psychological space. The borders are inconsistent, the change in a member, in fact, is inexorably reflected on the whole system. Furthermore, psychosomatic families are overprotective groups.
Each family member is interested in the well-being of others with high levels of sensitivity and therefore overprotectiveness induces a lack of autonomy in the children who, in turn, feel the responsibility to protect the family and the parents themselves. Responsibility leads to a lack of release in children who are unable to build their own independent life because they are trapped in the dynamics of their family of origin. Another trend is the avoidance of conflict.
Any discussion or element of crisis “is silent” for fear that the breaking of ties may occur. They deny the existence of any problem, see no grounds for disagreement and know they enjoy consensus and perennial harmony. At the other end, we find families openly in disagreement, with continuous interruptions and changes of subject that confuse every problem and find no solution.
This continuous “noise” can induce the development of a psychosomatic symptom constituted by the involvement of the children in the parental conflict. The children of these families will become subjects of the Honeysuckle type because they are linked to the family of origin, traditions, beliefs because that is the only known type of love.
The Honeysuckle type is incapable of being happy, joking and carefree, has a monotonous attachment to old habits, is indecisive, helpless, lazy, remains in his loneliness, reserved, cold, blocked from all initiatives, closed to the pleasures of life.
It is the attitude of those who go through all the phases of their life, with a pessimistic, discouraged, disheartened attitude. It has a retro taste, for the cemetery, for the ruins and love for all that is sad. She is a rather apathetic and grumpy person, taking no interest in food and sex, despising herself and others. She will never resign herself to separations, losses, remaining tied to the affections “of the past”.
It is the remedy indicated for people who suffer from regrets for missed possibilities, unfulfilled hopes, or who in any case live in nostalgia and memory. Honeysuckle helps to make a break with the past that despite what we think it was not so idyllic. It is the flower for lovers, of past romantic stories, of the affective nostalgia of people who are “fixed” in the past: in fact they have obsessions, they go on vacation to the same place where they had been with their boyfriend, they use the same perfume as the first love, they renounce the present life. They have an adaptation disorder with depressed mood, due to the end of a love, work difficulties, marital problems, stressful events.
For those who are a slave to the past, they miss the past. The flower helps to concentrate in the present, for those who are unable to detach themselves from the things they no longer need and helps to accept changes. We must learn not to regret the ties that have ended, everything is needed at the right time and it is always time to make room for the new: we rework past situations, with detachment, we have the ability to face the present, with a positive transformation by seeing the past as a moment of evolution. Above all it helps to “look” at one’s family with “love”, the real one, made up of empathy, autonomy and independence.
