Firbromyalgia and a Missing Child

Fibromyalgia and a Missing Child

Fibromyalgia is a mysterious diagnosis based on the embodied pattern of pain. No one knows its cause and there is no cure.
In my experience as both a Hellinger Constellation facilitator and a Feldenkrais® Practitioner I have discovered a possible link betwee
Fibromyalgia and a lost, dead or missing child in a family system. n The Feldenkrais Method® is essentially movement education. There are two forms, the individual lesson called FI or Functional Integration® and the group form, Awareness Through Movement (ATM)®. Through the gentle touch of a practitioner in Functional Integration, a client is guided to acknowledge and undo self limiting habits of tension and action. During an Awareness Through Movement lesson, a client follows a system of easy movements that also relax embodied habits. n In practice since 1998, I attained a level of competency and reputation working with “difficult cases”, i.e., people with Firbromyalgia, Traumatic Brain Injury and other neurological diagnoses. As reputable as I was, I knew something else needed to happen.
For personal reasons I won’t go into here, I was introduced to Bert Hellinger’s method of family constellations. Hellinger’s work and those trained in his techniques have uncovered some relationships between certain diagnoses and family events that may cross generations. For example, there appears to be a tendency for those diagnosed with schizophrenia to have a murder somewhere in their family system back as many as four or even five generations. The connection might be either as a victim or perpetrator. Thinking along these systemic lines I questioned gently my current clients with Fibromyalgia about past losses and missing people.
One of the hallmarks of family constellations is the discovery of a missing person who belongs in the system. Missing means given up for adoption, an untimely or tragic death, being institutionalized and other factual events. It can also mean not being counted as a member of a family or other group.
As I continued questioning a pattern began to emerge; Fibromyalgia may be linked to a missing or dead child somewhere in the family system.
Two cases reveal the similarities and also striking differences in experience.
A teacher who is her husband’s second wife comes to me for Feldenkrais to help her reduce her Fibromyalgia pain and learn better motion strategies to lessen strain. Little by little as trust, confidence and regard build in our relationship I obtain her permission to take a systemic history of her family. Her husband’s and his first wife’s first born, a girl, died in infancy. There are no other systemic events that can be recalled. Working verbally and somatically, my client can feel the delicate and important changes in her body as she imagines counting that child as the first child in the couple’s system compared to omitting her from being counted.
A corporate accountant wanting to learn to reduce her discomfort due to Fibromyalgia and increase her range of motion from the perceived limits of painful actions begins the journey of relearning how to move. Despite the “two steps forward, one step backward” we both sense frustration building in the slowness of her progress. Again, after mutual nurturing of our relationship I ask to take a systemic inventory of her family. It takes some weeks for her to ask living family members the questions about who is counted, who might be missing. When the answer comes, though, it comes as a shock for her to learn she has a great uncle who drowned in a boating accident when he was very young. She had never even heard his name mentioned prior to this. This also eventually leads to reconciliation with her mother after many difficult years.
There are no cures here, only healing. The first person I have lost track of over time and the other person is still involved with her journey that now includes other modalities.
There are many ways of being missed besides death: adoption, giving a child to foster care or other out-of-family caregivers, including institutions, long-term or chronic illness, life-threatening accidents or injuries. The development of the whole person depends on many factors, not the least of which is the wholeness of the family. Fibromyalgia is a systemic disease with possible family system implications.