Inherited Trauma & Family Constellations: What You Carry That Isn't Yours

The heaviness that seems too big for your own story may not have begun with you. A Dublin Family Constellation facilitator on inherited trauma, entanglement, Hellinger’s orders of love, and the freedom of giving back what was never yours.

By Abi Beri | Integrative Therapist & Family Constellation Facilitator · Dublin, Naas, Newbridge, Kildare & Online

TL;DR. There is a particular kind of heaviness that some people carry — a sadness, guilt, dread or repeating pattern that seems TOO BIG for anything in their actual life to explain. In the tradition of Family Constellations (developed by the German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger), and in the growing literature on intergenerational trauma (Mark Wolynn, Franz Ruppert, Rachel Yehuda), this is often understood as INHERITED — a burden carried out of unconscious loyalty to an ancestor whose grief, fate or exclusion was never metabolised in its own generation. The mechanism is systemic rather than mystical: what a family cannot digest, it excludes — and WHAT IS EXCLUDED DOES NOT LEAVE. It goes underground, and surfaces in a later member who has no idea they are carrying it. A grandmother’s ungrieved grief becomes a granddaughter’s unexplained depression. AND THE ENGINE UNDERNEATH IT IS NOT DYSFUNCTION. IT IS LOVE — a child’s boundless loyalty, which says: if someone in my family suffered and was never seen, I will carry it. But that loyalty helps no one. Your depression does not ease your grandmother’s grief. So the work is not to heal the burden as if it were yours. THE WORK IS TO RECOGNISE THAT IT ISN’T — AND TO GIVE IT BACK, with respect, to the one it belongs to, so that they can carry their own fate and you can be free to live yours. This article covers entanglement, the systemic mechanism, the epigenetic evidence, the ACTUAL HEALING SENTENCES used in the method, and how to bring the practice into your own body. It also answers the question a great many people arrive with: yes, this is the therapy from Netflix’s ‘Another Self’ — and here is what the series gets right and what it exaggerates.

Key facts at a glance

‘Inherited trauma’ and ‘intergenerational trauma’ describe patterns in which unresolved psychological burdens travel down family lines to descendants who did not experience the original event.
Rachel Yehuda’s research at Mount Sinai on Holocaust-survivor descendants demonstrated measurable epigenetic changes transmitted to the next generation.
In Family Constellations (Bert Hellinger, from the late 1980s onwards), this is called ENTANGLEMENT.
Mark Wolynn’s It Didn’t Start With You (2016) is the current bestselling English-language book on the territory.
The same phenomenon has several names: Boszormenyi-Nagy called it invisible loyalties; Schützenberger called it the ancestor syndrome.
The engine underneath entanglement is not dysfunction. It is a child’s loyalty to the family system.
The work is not to heal the burden as if it were yours — it is to recognise it is not, and give it back, using the method’s actual healing sentences.
Family Constellations is the method depicted in the Turkish Netflix series Another Self (Zeytin Ağacı).
It is not a medical treatment and does not treat or cure physical illness.
Available as a free 45-minute guided audio, and as guided Family Constellation groups in Dublin, with one-to-one work online globally.

The heaviness you cannot explain

Quick answer: In Family Constellations work a specific pattern shows up repeatedly: a person carries a heaviness — sadness, guilt, dread, self-sabotage — that seems too big to be explained by anything in their own biographical history. When the family field is worked with, the burden is often traced to an ancestor whose original experience was too big to be metabolised in its own time.

There is a particular kind of heaviness that some people carry, and can never quite explain. It does not seem to belong to your own life. You have a good life, or a good-enough one — and yet there is a sadness in you that seems too big for anything that has actually happened to you. Or a guilt you cannot trace to anything you did. Or a fear, a heaviness, a sense of doom, a pattern you keep repeating no matter how hard you try to break it.

People will tell you it is chemical. Or that you are overthinking. Or that you just need to work on yourself a little more, try a little harder, heal a little better. And you do try. And it does not fully shift. BECAUSE YOU ARE TRYING TO HEAL SOMETHING AS IF IT BEGAN WITH YOU.

But what if it did not begin with you?

If you have arrived here from the Netflix series Another Self, this is the work those characters are doing — and there is an honest account of what the programme gets right and what it exaggerates further down this page.

How a burden travels: the systemic view

Quick answer: In systemic thinking, a family is not a collection of individuals — it is a living system with its own memory and dynamics. What is too big to be felt in one generation does not disappear; it goes underground, and often surfaces in a later descendant.

Every family carries things that were too big to be felt at the time. A child who died and was never grieved, because there was no room to grieve. A terrible loss in a war, a famine, a migration. A guilt nobody could bear to look at. Someone who was cast out — for who they loved, for what they did, for the shame they carried — and whose name was never spoken again.

When something is too painful to be faced, a family does what a person does: it pushes it down. It excludes it. It carries on. But here is the strange law that Constellations work reveals, again and again: WHAT IS EXCLUDED DOES NOT LEAVE. What cannot be felt does not disappear. It goes underground, and it waits, and it surfaces again — in a later member of the family who has no idea they are carrying it.

A grandmother’s ungrieved grief becomes a granddaughter’s unexplained depression. A great-grandfather’s guilt becomes a descendant’s sense of not deserving to exist. An excluded ancestor’s fate gets unconsciously re-lived by a child three generations later, who feels, without knowing why, that they don’t quite belong, that they should disappear, that life isn’t quite for them.

This has a name in the clinical literature. Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy called it INVISIBLE LOYALTIES. Anne Ancelin Schützenberger called it THE ANCESTOR SYNDROME. Hellinger called it ENTANGLEMENT. Wolynn calls it INHERITED FAMILY TRAUMA. Rachel Yehuda’s epigenetic research has put biological ground under the phenomenon. The vocabulary varies. The territory is the same.

The engine underneath: a child’s loyalty

Quick answer: The engine underneath entanglement is not dysfunction — it is love. A child’s boundless loyalty to their family system will say, unconsciously: if someone in my family suffered and was never seen, I will carry it. If someone was excluded, I will be loyal to them by suffering too.

You become entangled with the fate of someone who came before you — carrying their feeling, their burden, their unfinished business — out of a deep, blind and touching loyalty. A love so total that it will say: I WILL NOT HAVE IT BETTER THAN THE ONES WHO WERE FORGOTTEN.

It is one of the most moving things I know — that so much of what looks like personal dysfunction is, underneath, a child’s love. A loyalty to the system. An unconscious attempt to belong by sharing in a burden that was never theirs to carry.

But here is the thing. That loyalty, however loving, DOES NOT HELP THE ONE YOU ARE CARRYING IT FOR. Your depression does not ease your grandmother’s grief. Your guilt does not redeem your ancestor. Your suffering does not bring back the one who was excluded. You are carrying it for them — and it helps no one, and it costs you your life.

The giving back: the actual healing sentences

This is the heart of the practice. The sentences are the ones the method actually uses. Speak them inwardly, slowly, letting each one land.

Turn, in your imagination, toward the one whose burden you have carried. You do not need to know who they are; a sense, an impression, a direction behind you is enough. And say to them, inwardly, slowly:

The sentences. I SEE YOU NOW. I see that you suffered. I see that something happened to you that was too big, and was never held. And I see that I have been carrying it for you. Out of love. Out of loyalty. Without even knowing I was doing it. BUT THIS BURDEN WAS NEVER MINE. IT WAS YOURS. So now, with respect, and with love — I GIVE IT BACK TO YOU. It belongs to you, and to your fate, which I must let be yours. I AM NOT BIGGER THAN YOUR FATE. I cannot carry it for you, and it does not help you when I try. I give it back. And I ask you — if you can — to look on me kindly. To let me put it down. To bless me in living my own life, the life that came down to me through you. I am only your descendant. I am only a child of this line. LET ME TAKE MY OWN PLACE — AFTER YOU, NOT INSTEAD OF YOU. AND LET ME BE FREE.

Notice what it feels like to set something down that you have carried so long you had forgotten it wasn’t part of you. There may be relief. There may also be grief — because letting go of a burden you carried out of love can feel, at first, like a betrayal of the one you carried it for.

It isn’t. GIVING SOMEONE THEIR FATE BACK, WITH RESPECT, IS THE DEEPEST HONOURING THERE IS.

What the ancestors actually want

There is something Family Constellation facilitators see again and again, and it moves me every time. When the excluded one is finally acknowledged — when the forgotten are remembered, when the burden is given back, when the order is restored — WHAT COMES THROUGH THE LINE IS NOT MORE SUFFERING. IT IS BLESSING.

The ones who came before do not want their descendants to suffer for them. No grandmother wants her grief re-lived by her granddaughter. No ancestor wants their fate carried by a child generations later. What they want — what the whole line wants — is for life to flow forward. For the ones at the front to be free.

The deepest loyalty you can offer your family is not to suffer alongside them. It is to take the life they passed down — through all that struggle, all that survival, all that love — and to live it fully. TO BE HAPPY, IF YOU CAN. TO LET IT HAVE BEEN WORTH IT.

Is this the therapy from ‘Another Self’ on Netflix?

Quick answer: Yes. The method the three friends undertake in the Turkish Netflix series Another Self (Zeytin Ağacı) is Family Constellations, developed by Bert Hellinger, and it is practised widely across Europe including in Ireland. The series is a drama rather than a documentary, so it compresses the work heavily — real constellations are slower, quieter, considerably less cinematic, and produce RECOGNITION rather than resolution.

What the programme represents accurately is the central premise, which is exactly what this article describes: that a family carries what it could not digest, that what is excluded does not leave, and that it surfaces later in a descendant who has no idea they are holding it.

What the series gets right	What it compresses for television
Families carry what they could not digest.	The pace. The work is slow and undramatic.
What is excluded does not leave.	Single-session breakthroughs are rare.
Symptoms can belong to somebody else’s story.	Insight arrives as recognition, not revelation.
Representatives report real, specific sensations.	The clarity of what representatives report.
The work is spatial and largely wordless.	Weeping catharsis as the standard outcome.
Facilitation follows rather than leads.	The facilitator as a figure of mystical authority.
Something genuinely shifts for people.	That the shift resolves the presenting crisis.

⚠️ And the one thing the series should not be taken to imply. The story is built around a serious medical diagnosis, and viewers reasonably come away wondering whether this work heals illness. FAMILY CONSTELLATIONS IS NOT A MEDICAL TREATMENT. It does not treat, cure or replace treatment for cancer or any other physical condition, and anybody presenting it that way is doing something both unethical and dangerous. What it can genuinely do is change a person’s relationship to a burden they have been carrying — a real and sometimes profound thing, and an entirely different claim. Medical questions go to your doctor. This sits alongside that, never instead of it.

The clinical evidence: epigenetics and intergenerational trauma

For readers who want the ground under this work: Rachel Yehuda’s research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai on children of Holocaust survivors provided the first widely-accepted biological evidence for epigenetic transmission of trauma. The 2016 study in Biological Psychiatry demonstrated measurable changes in FKBP5 gene methylation in Holocaust-survivor descendants — changes not present in a comparison group and appearing to reflect the parents’ trauma history.

Follow-up research has extended the findings across a range of trauma types and populations, and the mechanism — epigenetic modification of gene expression, transmissible through both maternal and paternal lines — is now taken seriously in mainstream psychiatry.

I would be careful about overclaiming here, because it is frequently overclaimed. Epigenetic findings establish that a parent’s experience can measurably affect a descendant’s biology. THEY DO NOT VALIDATE THE CONSTELLATIONS METHOD, which is a separate question with a much thinner evidence base. What is fair to say is that the phenomenon the tradition has described experientially for decades now has independent biological support from a different direction — and that is worth something, without being proof.

Frequently asked questions

Is this the therapy from Another Self on Netflix? Yes. It is Family Constellations, developed by Bert Hellinger, practised widely across Europe including Ireland. The series compresses the pace and intensity considerably, but the premise is represented fairly. It is not a medical treatment and does not treat physical illness.

What is inherited trauma? A pattern in which unresolved trauma from previous generations affects descendants who did not directly experience the original event. Proposed mechanisms include epigenetic transmission, family-systemic dynamics, and behavioural transmission through parenting.

Is inherited trauma real? The transmission itself has strong support — Yehuda’s 2016 research on Holocaust-survivor descendants demonstrated measurable epigenetic changes passed to the next generation, and the systemic literature has described the phenomenon for decades. Whether Constellations is the right method for addressing it is a separate and less settled question.

What are Family Constellations? A systemic method developed by Bert Hellinger. In group work, participants represent members of a client’s family system in physical space, revealing dynamics that were previously invisible. It works with Hellinger’s ‘orders of love’ — patterns of belonging, exclusion and generational flow.

What is entanglement? Hellinger’s term for a descendant unconsciously carrying the unresolved fate of an ancestor — often someone excluded, forgotten or unmourned. The engine underneath is love: a child’s loyalty to the system, expressed as willingness to share a burden that was never theirs.

What is It Didn’t Start With You about? Mark Wolynn’s 2016 book, the leading English-language treatment of inherited family trauma. It bridges the Constellations tradition with contemporary epigenetic research and offers structured exercises for identifying inherited patterns.

Can I do this work alone? A full constellation needs a group, a room and a facilitator. But the giving-back practice above, and journaling exercises of the kind in Wolynn’s book, can be done individually and are legitimate parts of the wider work. For deep work, group facilitation is where the method comes fully alive.

Does Family Constellations cure illness? No. It is not a medical treatment and does not treat or cure physical disease. It sits alongside medical care, never instead of it.

How is this different from other therapies? Where most Western therapies focus on the individual, Constellations works with the individual as embedded in a family system across generations, and uses spatial representation to reveal dynamics that talking methods often cannot see. It is complementary to individual therapy, not a replacement for it.

Do you offer Family Constellations in Dublin? Yes — I facilitate Family Constellation groups in Dublin, and one-to-one constellation work online globally, alongside in-person somatic therapy across Dublin, Naas, Newbridge and Kildare. Schedule and booking at somatictherapyireland.com.

Working with Inherited Trauma — Family Constellations in Dublin & Online

If this practice moved you, or you feel drawn to Family Constellations work more deeply, you are welcome to bring it to the group or the one-to-one space. I facilitate Family Constellation groups in Dublin, and offer one-to-one integrative work with Constellations elements online globally. I also see clients for in-person somatic therapy across Dublin, Naas, Newbridge and Kildare.

The work moves at its own pace and does not require you to know the family history in advance — in group work, the field reveals what needs to be seen.

Sessions are 60 minutes for one-to-one work. Family Constellation groups run periodically; subscribe at somatictherapyireland.com for dates. Free 20-minute intro call before any commitment, with no expectation.

About the author

Abi Beri is an Integrative Therapist, Family Constellation Facilitator and Nervous System Specialist based in Dublin, Ireland. He is trained in somatic methods, family constellations, polyvagal-informed practice and inner child work. He is IPHM-accredited. He sees clients in person from a practice base across Dublin, Naas, Newbridge and the wider Kildare area, and online globally. More at somatictherapyireland.com and blissfulevolution.com.

Authoritative resources (external links)

Bert Hellinger Institute — hellinger.com · Bert Hellinger, founder of Family Constellations — the tradition this practice comes from.
Mark Wolynn — It Didn’t Start With You — markwolynn.com · leading English-language teacher of inherited family trauma; the current bestselling book on this territory.
International Systemic Constellations Association — isca-network.org · the international professional body for Family Constellations work.
Franz Ruppert — Identity-Oriented Psychotrauma Theory — franz-ruppert.de · leading contemporary trauma theorist working with intergenerational trauma.
Prof Rachel Yehuda — epigenetics of intergenerational trauma — icahn.mssm.edu · the neuroscientist whose research on Holocaust-survivor descendants demonstrated epigenetic transmission.
Thomas Hübl — collective trauma work — thomashuebl.com · leading contemporary teacher of collective and ancestral trauma healing.
Wikipedia — Family Constellations — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Constellations · plain-English explainer of Hellinger’s method, including the criticisms, which are worth reading.
Wikipedia — Another Self (Zeytin Ağacı) — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Self · the Netflix series built around this method.
Wikipedia — Transgenerational trauma — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_trauma · the wider clinical concept.
Somatic Experiencing International (Peter Levine) — traumahealing.org · the global home of Somatic Experiencing.
IICP College Dublin — iicp.ie · the integrative counselling and psychotherapy college in Dublin where I trained.
IPHM (International Practitioners of Holistic Medicine) — iphm.co.uk · my accrediting body.

If deep feeling stirred — Irish mental health resources

Samaritans Ireland — samaritans.org/ireland · free, 24/7 emotional support · call 116 123 (referenced in the talk).
Pieta House (Ireland) — pieta.ie · free crisis support · 1800 247 247 or text HELP to 51444.
Aware Ireland — aware.ie · depression and anxiety support · 1800 80 48 48.
HSE Mental Health (Ireland) — hse.ie/mental-health · the Irish national health service mental health gateway.

Inherited Trauma & Family Constellations: What You Carry That Was Never Yours