Systemic Underpinnings of Youth Suicide
An Interview with Hunter Beaumont

The following is an interview with Hunter Beaumont exploring some of the systemic underpinnings which can lead to youth suicide.

Hunter Beaumont is a psychotherapist and psychotherapy teacher who has worked internationally for over 20 years. He is the co-author with Bert Hellinger and Gunthard Weber of Love's Hidden Symmetry, the first book in English to present these ideas, and has been instrumental in making this work available in the English speaking world.

Chohan Neale, the interviewer, is a writer and therapist living in the Northern Rivers area of NSW

Q: In Australia suicide is now the leading cause of death among young people under the age of 30. From a systemic point of view what have you discovered which can bring light to the understanding and the healing of this very painful problem?

HB: The systemic perspective sees things in a larger context, so we're interested in looking at the tragedies of youth suicide, depression, alcoholism, drug abuse within the context of family dynamics and cultural dynamics and history.

In Germany, as we started working with similar issues in a systemic, family therapy way, we made some surprising observations. Using the method of family constellations as developed by Bert Hellinger, it turned out in family after family that the families of depressed and suicidal young people were living with secrets and it began to look as if the young people were in some way recruited by the larger family system to compensate for hidden guilt and denials. That's the bad news is that the children were suffering the consequences of and atoning for, things done long before they were born. The good news is that, in many cases, helping the larger family deal with its' past often has an amazingly freeing effect on the troubled person.

Let me give one example of a family I worked with to illustrate what I mean. A single mother came into a group concerned about her suicidal and depressed 14 year old son. In talking with her, the usual psychological causes for depression just didn't seem to apply, so we did a family constellation. She chose other members of the group to represent members of her family and placed them in the room in spatial relation to one another. As often happens, the representatives began to feel in their own bodies the effects of the hidden family dynamics. In this case, the man representing her father said that he felt a strange deafness in his right ear. This reminded the woman that her father is in fact deaf in one ear, she thought from a war injury. Fortunately, he was still alive, and she left the group to call him. When she returned, she told his story. He had been a German soldier in Russia. His tank had been "killed" 13 times, and he had been the only survivor eleven of those times. And he told her that he and his comrades had "killed" over 100 Russian tanks. Towards the end of the war, he saw a German SS officer mistreating a Russian man and his son, and he landed in German military prison for attacking the officer to defend the Russians. He was a true soldier.

We then set up the constellation again, adding representatives for the father's comrades who were killed, for the Russian soldiers he had killed, and for the innocent civilians who died. The father's representative spontaneously stood behind his grandson, and the dynamic was clear: The grandfather couldn't face the reality of his past fully, and his grandson had unconsciously taken on that burden. We did a very moving ritual in which the grandfather was supported to face the dead of his past, and with the help of the representatives, the grandfather took back his past and freed up the boy to live his own life. When we met with the woman several months later, she reported that her son was doing much better, but that her father was worse. I told her that I thought her father, the soldier, would prefer it so, and she agreed.

So, that's one story, and I've got hundreds. From what I've seen in the constellations over the past ten years, I no longer doubt that the sins of the fathers are visited on the children, but I don't know for sure for how many generations.

Q: You mention the issue of families having secrets contributing to the movement towards suicide. Can you give other examples which might also contribute.

HB: In our new video, "Holding Love", there is an example of a man who has had depression, suicidal impulses and a life-threatening auto-immune disease. It turns out that his brother had a serious accident while they were playing together, lost a leg and nearly died. He tells on the tape that he remembers making a pact with God to spare his brother's life. I've been interested in children's prayers for years, how the things children pray for strangely get fulfilled, sometimes years later. "Dear God, please give my mother's trouble/depression to me and let me carry it." Things like that. Many children who have handicapped siblings feel guilty when their own lives turn out good.

Most anorexic women we have worked with have a parent who is being drawn out of the system and the anorexia seems to be a way of saying, "I'll disappear in your place."

Sometimes, when a parent has lost a loved one, a parent, sibling, lover, and got stuck in the grief, then a child also feels suicidal, as if the child's soul were saying, "Mummy, I feel how much you love the dead, so I'll make me dead too, so you'll love me like that."

Those are all dynamics we commonly see. The point is that, from a systemic perspective, our individual freedom is strongly inter-twined with the fate and fortunes of the other members our system.

Q: Can you tell us something about how you set the forces of healing in motion, once the issues have been identified?

HB: Bert Hellinger has seen that love, like all other natural phenomena, follows certain regularities which we call natural law. With respect to the smaller relationship systems like couples and families, Hellinger described two fundamental laws which love obeys:

1) All members of the system have an equal right to belong;

2) There is a hierarchy according to time, earlier members come first.

Now, phrased like that, it sounds pretty dry, but the actual implications in people's lives is incredible. For example, we have observed hundreds of families in which a black sheep was shunned and excluded and denied his or her rightful place in the family, and a later member of the family came under unconscious systemic pressure to repeat that person's fate and also left the system via disease or tragedy. We feel whole and at peace when everyone who belongs to our system has his or her rightful place, and when we don't feel inner peace, one very good hypothesis is that someone is being excluded, even when we don't know them. An example of injury to the second principle are the families in which parents treat their children as if the children were the parents and the parents were children. A lot of incest, for example, has this dynamic. The perpetrator is treating the child as if the child were adult and the adult were the child whose needs needed to be met. The child gives, the adult takes. That's the order of love reversed. Love works best when those in the system first, the parents, give and the later ones, the children, take. To balance that out, the adults have certain rights and privileges that the children don't have. And we all know families in which the children act as if they had the same rights as the adults, to their own detriment.

In terms of healing, the systemic work has a very simple prescription: Do what is in your power to bring yourself into alignment with the natural laws love follows so that the regularities of love can carry you as a wave carries the swimmer wise enough not to fight the current. Hellinger's work gives us valuable insight into what those laws are, how to recognize them, and how to recognize when we have gone against them.

Q: Do you have anything to say from the systemic perspective about why this is this happening on such a large scale to young people and why now and why Australia?

HB: I don't know, really. Perhaps we will have an opportunity to work with some of these young people when we come next year and we'll be able to see more about what's going on, and hopefully, open up some alternatives. There is something so futile about teenage suicide.

Probably there are lots of reasons that have nothing to do with the systemic dynamics, but let's hope that systemic dynamics are playing a huge part of it, because that's something we can do something about. I can mention some things we've seen in our work elsewhere. In Germany, the systemic entanglements following the murders of the Nazi period often skipped a generation, as if the survival needs in the period immediately after the war had a priority, and now that there's general prosperity, they surface. Or maybe the trauma of the first and second generations is so great that the children of the third generation are the first who are free enough to deal with it.

Systemic entanglements typically enlist those least able to defend themselves, and that's usually the young. Again, Germany has been a great teacher. I want to say something delicate, and I hope I get it right so that people can understand what I mean. In hundreds of cases, it has become very clear that the grand children of the Nazi murderers and the grandchildren of the Holocaust victims have the same symptoms. When I first encountered the suffering of the perpetrators' grandchildren in therapy, I felt a strange relief. What we do has consequences, if not for us, then for our grandchildren. The systemic conscience keeps no secrets, accepts no excuses. Can you imagine what would change in the world if this were to become common knowledge? That my children and grandchildren really will atone for my injury to the orders of love. I know this sounds like religious fundamentalism, but after working with so many cases, I can't ignore the observations.

Now, America and Australia both are countries born out of a kind of genocide. Of course, we don't like to call it that, but if you read the newspapers of the times, the racial hatred can't be denied. So maybe there is a connection between those murders and the young people murdering themselves now. If that turns out to be the case, then we will need the aborigines and the native Americans to help us save our children, and if we really need them, I suppose they will come.

Just in case I haven't said anything controversial enough, let me go out on a limb. In the constellations, we sometimes ask people to represent victims and the dead. Sometimes the representatives of the dead are angry and want revenge, but as soon as they are heard, seen and honoured, given their rightful place, maybe helped to finish up their business, then they feel peace and they ALWAYS are gentle and supporting of the living, especially the children. The dead, once they are at peace, gain nothing from the sacrifice of the living, but sometimes, the dead need the help of the living to find peaceful rest. Obviously, I don't know how it really is with the dead, but the reactions of the representatives in the constellations are so consistent and so convincing, that I've come to believe that the constellations just might give us a helpful glimpse into the world beyond.

Q: Does suicide 'solve' something for the system or does it go on?

HB: Suicide continues injustice, and puts pressure on a younger member to repeat that fate. How to put this without getting too complicated? The Old Testament "Eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth" turns out to be a pretty good description of the dynamics we see operating in family systems. But this is a blind justice which perpetuates injustice, especially when it starts leap-frogging generations and children and grandchildren wind up paying with their lives for what grandmother did. This is where Hellinger's work is so radical. He's seen that love follows a different set of regularities, and that we sometimes have a possibility to align ourselves with the orders of love rather than to blindly follow the archaic law. Isn't that a beautiful perspective for human endeavour, to help lift love out of the mire of blind retribution and to strip Justice of her blindfold?

top