Thinking in fields is a real eye-opener, and I probably won’t ever close my eyes again for this rarely explored dimension of human suffering. The biofield is a familiar concept nowadays, but that social, organizational and cultural phenomena can be considered as socioenergetic fields is new. When I googled the concept, nothing showed up, and my spell checker doesn’t know the word. I’ll explain what I mean.
Since the beginnings of Sigmund Freud’s work in psychoanalysis, more than a hundred years ago, psychology has made parents responsible for the negative experiences of their children. Similar ideas exist regarding other people in adult life – for partners and for bosses in the workplace. This belief system has become part of everyday Western culture in a way that it feels almost heretic to express doubts about it. In this article I’ll focus on parent-child relationships, but these are mirrored in relationships between adults.
Parents feel responsible, anxious, guilty or ashamed as soon their offspring is suffering, and many children seem to think that parents have the ultimate task to make them feel good, even as adults. The consumer society has jumped on this bandwagon by offering an endless array of products and services to make/keep children happy.
As a psychotherapist I’ve spent thousands of hours with clients identifying presumably destructive individual parental messages and trying to lift their consequences. Only in recent years I have discovered that the concept of individual parents’ responsibility for limiting their children’s development and causing their children’s discomfort is probably misleading, even false.
In reality, parents act within and from a field that exerts an extremely strong influence on their thoughts, emotions, behaviours and value: the socioenergetic field.
This new approach in Logosynthesis starts from the idea that parents do not really live a life of their own. They only have limited options to decide on, because they have to stay within the rules, laws, norms, values and patterns of their respective socioenergetic fields. These may look like somewhat abstract sociocultural phenomena, but their effects are deeply personal. If people don’t adapt to the rules, they risk being excluded from the family, the group, the tribe or the nation, and that’s life-threatening. That’s why they don’t even consider it.
People adapt to the socioenergetic field as children: They don’t have a choice. Once they’ve grown up, it’s the only world they know and once they become parents themselves they teach this interpretation of the world to their own children. Especially if the field is strong and homogeneous, generations of people will never become aware of it. They cannot reflect on the nature of the field as long as they stay within it, without options to compare it with other social systems.
Parents are messengers of the socioenergetic fields that raised them. The power of the memes of those fields pushes them to transfer those memes to the next generation, in the same way their genes determined the structure of their child’s body. Richard Dawkins has described this process in his book ‘The Selfish Meme.‘
To explore the socioenergetic field represented by the parents we conduct a long interview at the beginning of the session. The client is invited to describe each of their parents’ backgrounds whereby we do not pay much attention to individual characteristics, even when the client tends to put those into the foreground as the cause of their discomfort.
Such an interview has an interesting effect in itself. It challenges the client’s frame of reference, while it shifts the focus from what the parents did wrong on an individual level to the enormous power of the field that created the world the parents used to live in.
From there we explore different options to resolve the influence of the field. One approach thereby is to identify aspects of the field that limit the client on his life path, find a symbol or a representation of this aspect in the personal field of the client – I prefer this expression over ‘personal space’ nowadays. The we address and resolve this symbol or this representation directly with the Logosynthesis sentences.
It’s amazing how different a parent can be perceived after this intervention. When the influence of the socioenergetic field has been reduced, the client can see their parents in their real context in which they didn’t have much of a choice. The field becomes less dominant and the parents become real humans instead of puppets whose strings are pulled by the system.
Another approach uses the technique of the parent interview. If the focus of the client is frozen on the parent as an individual, I ask the client to find a spot in space for the representation of father or mother, to stand on that spot and to become the parent. Now the parent is interviewed in the same way as described above, with the emphasis on the decisions the socioenergetic field made for them. Often the imaginary parent shows a relief when invited to tell their story, but the technique becomes really effective when the field is addressed with the Logosynthesis sentences, on behalf of the parent.
A third strategy emerged when a trainee was confronted with a past life as a member of a group of rebellious farmers. In her current life she is married to a member of the nobility she fought against centuries ago. The nobility represented stability and tradition, staying in one place. In contrast to this field the trainee had developed a strategy in which she had become a traveller across cultures around the world, thus covering up her flight from stability.
The tension between her rebellious pattern and the stability represented by her marriage partner decreased significantly after she resolved the deepest cause of the necessity to flee. This was found in another traumatic past life in which she was stabbed after trying to escape the wrath of a powerful king for four years.
Interference between socioenergetic fields causes tension for all individuals involved, regardless of the content of the fields. In this Master Lab we’ve seen polarities between religions, nationalities, nobility vs. lower class, farmers vs. intellectuals, rich vs. poor.
Once the most limiting aspects of a socioenergetic field have been identified, we can apply the Logosynthesis sentences on those aspects in the same way as in the first approach. The effects of the sentences are usually fast and deep, because this ‘parent’ doesn’t really exist. In reality it is a complex energetic hologram, not a human being.
After a client has resolved the interference that surfaced in the hologram and entered their own position again, the change in the relationship to an actual parent is stunning. The parent, the partner or the boss can now be perceived as another human being who was doing the best they could in a socioenergetic field of overwhelming power.
After the application of Logosynthesis, the other person doesn’t represent the power of that field anymore, and the field itself can be perceived separately and clearly.
Then it becomes easy to forgive the parents. They did the best they could within the realm of options provided by the socioenergetic field.