You meet someone new, and at first it seems that this time everything is different. A few months later you recognise a familiar picture: the same emotional distance, the same feeling that you have to prove yourself, the same disappointment. The faces and names change, but the story stays the same.
If this happens to you, it is natural to wonder what is wrong with you, or why you always come across the "wrong" people. The systemic view offers a different question. It does not ask who is to blame, but what, in you and in your family system, is asking to be seen.
The starting point in the book Codes of Love is simple: when two people meet and begin a relationship, they are not just "I" and "you". Behind each of them stands a whole line of ancestors, parents, grandmothers and grandfathers, brothers and sisters, with all the events that shaped those families. This invisible line also has a say in whom you will choose.
The first love that shapes all those that follow
The first love each of us experiences is usually love for our mother. This fundamental emotional bond forms our first concept of love and lays the foundations for all our future emotional relationships.
Love for our mother is so deeply rooted in our being that we often unconsciously seek partners who in some way reflect the qualities of that first, fundamental love. (from the book Codes of Love)
This is why love at first sight can be seen as a longing to be reunited with an original sense of safety and belonging. This holds true even when the mother's relationship with the child was not tender, and even when it was destructive. That relationship is our first concept of love, and within it we feel "whole" again. This is why we are often drawn to what is familiar rather than to what truly does us good.
The same is true of the father. The book cites Hellinger's insight that love between partners requires us to renounce our first and most intimate attachment to our parents. As long as our energetic attachment to our mother or father remains unresolved, we cannot give ourselves fully to a partner.
The partner as a figure from the past
In a relationship, we are not always with the person who is physically beside us. On a deeper, unconscious level, we may react to our partner as though they were someone else from our system. Perhaps we ask our partner to fill an emotional void left by our parents. Perhaps we see in them the traits of someone we idealised or someone we feared.
The book Soul Codes adds another layer. The Swiss psychiatrist Leopold Szondi called this invisible force the familial unconscious, and Hellinger called it the Great Soul. The familial unconscious acts on our choice of partners, friends, ideals and profession. A choice we experience as entirely personal often carries a trace of family history.
What your choice repeats from your family
When we begin to engage more seriously with questions of love, we encounter several family conditionings, singled out by Hellinger, that shape our relationships:
- Repetition of family patterns: if previous generations knew unrequited love, infidelity or emotional distance, descendants may unconsciously seek love in the same, familiar way.
- Unconscious loyalties: we stay faithful to family rules even when they are harmful, for instance when loyalty is measured by the sacrifice of our own happiness.
- Unresolved family conflicts and traumas, such as lost loves or early deaths.
- Forbidden loves and secrets, which create an atmosphere of fear and shame.
- Excluded family members, whose fate can leave behind a fear of rejection.
This is why systemic intelligence asks: "Which aspects of my parents or other family members am I repeating in my relationships?" An honest answer often explains more than any analysis of former partners. In new relationships, excluded family members need to be symbolically reintegrated, so that we can live our own fate rather than theirs.
From the first love to the second
Repetition is not a punishment. Until we become aware of the basic model of relationship we formed with our parents, we will keep repeating identical situations in order to live through those relationships again and heal them. In this sense, the same type of partner is an invitation finally to see something old.
While the first love shapes our basic emotional contours, the second love, the one we choose as adults, offers a chance for maturity. It invites us to see and love the other person as they are, not as a figure from our earliest emotional images. Mature love asks us gradually to leave behind the blind love of childhood.
The way there leads through integrating our parents within ourselves, through forgiveness, and through becoming aware of our own reactions by means of focused attention. Systemic self-exploration and systemic constellations help to resolve entanglements and emotional blockages. When we reach inner unity, we create relationships not out of need, but out of the wish to share our fulfilled being.
The next time you feel that familiar, almost irresistible sense of recognition, pause for a moment. Ask yourself whether you are recognising a new person or an old story. That question alone opens a space in which the choice can truly become yours.