Barry Krost

“The point is not that you must have a traditional family in order to be happy, but if you want love to flourish, you must identify the Orders of Love that constrain and support love in your particular life situation, and you must follow them with love.”

Bert Hellinger with Gunthard Weber and Hunter Beaumont, Love's Hidden Symmetry: What Makes Love Work in Relationships (1998), Preface by Hunter Beaumont, p. xvi

“What I’ve learned from my own experience, training and clinical practice is that the answer may not lie in our own story as much as the stories of our parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. The lastest scientific research, now making headlines, also tells us that the effects of trauma can pass from one generation to the next. The ‘bequest’ is what is known as inherited family trauma, and emerging evidence suggest that it is a very real phenomenon."

Mark Wolynn, It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle (2016), p. 1

"The symptoms and problems that clients complain of, their inappropriate behavior, and the puzzling emotions that cause such a disturbance, can all be regarded as meaningful symbols. They are 'right' and in the right context it is understandable why a person behaves or feels this way. We see the negative, as in a bronze casting of a relief, and extrapolate what the positive must have looked like. In this sense, the symptoms are the key to the missing data.

Ursula Franke-Bryson, In My Mind's Eye: Family Constellations in Individual Therapy and Counseling (2003), p. 43