Suicide: Crossing the LINE Between the Living and the Dead 
by Maarten Wiegmans (The Netherlands)

Abstract: This article examines suicide and suicide bereavement from a systemic, transpersonal, and regression-therapy perspective. It distinguishes acute grief and trauma from deeper intergenerational burdens involving guilt, shame, identification, and unresolved family loyalties. Particular attention is given to the boundary between the living and the dead and to the ways in which this boundary may become blurred after suicide. Drawing on constellation work and regression therapy, the article presents a clinical case in which multiple suicides, unprocessed grief, and family guilt became linked across generations. The therapeutic process revealed how guilt and responsibility could become misallocated within the family system and how restoring differentiation allowed innocence, grief, and emotional ownership to return to more appropriate places. The article also proposes a complementary model of horizontal constellation work and vertical regression work, with personification space serving as a bridge between the two. It concludes that therapeutic work with suicide may require not only mourning the deceased but also disentangling the living from burdens, identifications, and loyalties that draw them towards the dead.

1. Introduction

Suicide, the Bereaved, and the Risk of Repetition

Suicide confronts those left behind with a rupture that extends far beyond the loss of a loved one. For family members, partners, and close friends, the death itself is often only the beginning of a complex process in which grief, shock, guilt, shame, anger, and unanswered questions become deeply intertwined. The bereaved are not only mourning the person who has died; they may also struggle with powerful inner movements toward the deceased. Research indicates that people bereaved by suicide are themselves at increased risk of suicidal ideation and behaviour (Latham & Prigerson, 2004). Likewise, studies have demonstrated familial clustering of suicide risk (Tidemalm, Runeson, Waern, et al., 2011), while therapeutic work may reveal more than one suicide—or even a chain of suicides—within the same family line.

From a systemic and regression-oriented perspective, suicide cannot be understood solely as an individual act or personal tragedy. It also unfolds within a transgenerational field, where unresolved emotions, loyalties, losses, and exclusions may have been present long before the final act occurred. Suicide can activate earlier layers of loss, trauma, and unprocessed grief within the family system, bringing them forcefully to the surface. For the bereaved, this can result in emotional burdens that feel intensely personal, yet may not fully belong to them.

In therapeutic practice, survivors of suicide may experience emotions that appear disproportionate, confusing, or contradictory: overwhelming guilt without a clear cause, deep and unexpressed shame, or anger that seems to have no adequate target. When combined with acute grief and shock, such experiences can make it difficult to distinguish what belongs to the immediate loss from what originates in a wider systemic context. When these distinctions remain unclear, mourning may become complicated or prolonged, while patterns of identification with the deceased may remain unresolved and the risk of repetition may increase.

Regression therapy and constellation work offer specific approaches for exploring these dynamics. Both recognise that emotional charges, loyalties, and identifications can extend across generations, and that descendants may unconsciously represent or carry unresolved experiences associated with earlier family members. Within this framework, guilt and responsibility are therefore not always understood as purely individual phenomena. As Bert Hellinger stated, “It is never a personal matter; there is always another field involved” (Hellinger, 2003). For regression therapists, the phenomenon of taken-over feelings—emotions experienced intensely by the client but originating with another family member or ancestor—is familiar territory, as is the therapeutic possibility of returning such feelings to those to whom they belong (ten Dam, 2014). This article will therefore examine how guilt and shame may become entangled with multiple suicides within a family line and explore therapeutic approaches for tracing, separating, and neutralising these emotional charges at their origins.

Another observation frequently encountered in regression and systemic work is that a person may not be fully present in life. In some cases, it appears as if a significant part of the soul is already oriented toward, or positioned beyond, the boundary between the living and the dead. This does not necessarily imply an explicit wish to die, but rather a partial withdrawal from life that can precede suicide or be observed in surviving family members who remain deeply entangled with the deceased.

In cases of suicide bereavement, the boundary between the living and the dead may become blurred or unconsciously crossed. Physically marking this line on the floor—using a strip of paper or similar material—can have a powerful therapeutic effect by restoring a distinction that has become unclear for the bereaved. Without assigning predetermined meaning or representation, the line allows clients to perceive where they—or parts of themselves—are oriented in relation to the boundary between life and death. This simple spatial intervention may reveal movements toward the deceased, identifications, and entanglements that had previously remained implicit.

This article focuses on suicide as a systemic and traumatic event that can bind the living and the dead in powerful ways. It distinguishes between acute emotional reactions following suicide and deeper, often transgenerational charges involving guilt, shame, unresolved anger, and identification. Drawing on clinical experience, we explore how different forms of trauma may converge in the aftermath of suicide and how these dynamics can contribute to complicated grief and intergenerational repetition.

Insights from regression therapy and constellation work are used to examine therapeutic interventions that can disentangle the bereaved from these systemic burdens. By addressing deeper layers—while carefully distinguishing between acute grief and inherited or taken-over emotional charges—we can not only support the bereaved in their mourning, but also help prevent suicide-related trauma, guilt, and identification from being passed on to future generations.

2. Some Statistics: The Scale of the Disappearance

Each year, the number of people who die by suicide worldwide is comparable to the disappearance of a large city. It is as if Amsterdam or Frankfurt were erased annually—streets emptied, houses left behind, voices silenced. Yet this occurs not through a visible catastrophe such as war or natural disaster, but quietly and dispersed across families, homes, and communities (WHO, 2025).

Suicide does not occur in isolation. It can cluster within families and social environments, and patterns of suicide may extend across generations. Research has repeatedly demonstrated an increased risk among people with a family history of suicide (Runeson & Åsberg, 2003). Looking through a systemic perspective, this risk acquires an additional dimension when grief, guilt, shame, and identification with the deceased remain unspoken or unresolved.

Within family systems, each suicide may leave an imprint that extends far beyond the immediate loss. Unmourned grief, displaced guilt, and broken loyalties do not necessarily remain confined to one individual. They may become embedded within the family system, covered by successive layers of guilt, shame, silence, and secrecy. Even when their origins are unknown to later generations, regression and systemic work suggest that such unresolved charges may reappear as depression, self-destructive behaviour, identification with the deceased, or a persistent pull toward the dead.

What disappears, therefore, is not only a life. A place within the family system is also left vacant—and may remain emotionally charged. Those who come later may find themselves unconsciously drawn towards that absence, sometimes without knowing the person who originally occupied it or even the circumstances of the death.

To understand suicide and its aftermath, we must therefore look beyond the individual towards the wider family and historical contexts in which such disappearances continue to echo.

3. Historical and Cultural Context

Suicide as a Collective, Cultural, and Systemic Phenomenon

Across cultures and throughout history, self-inflicted death has been embedded in collective meanings, moral frameworks, and social expectations. Whether condemned, glorified, ritualised, or silenced, suicide reflects more than personal despair. The myth of Ajax, who killed himself during the Trojan War, and the story of the Roman noblewoman Lucretia, whose suicide following her rape helped incite the rebellion that overthrew the Roman monarchy, are early examples.

Family, society, and culture have not always treated either those who died by suicide or the bereaved with compassion. In medieval Europe, those who took their own lives could be denied burial among their community or relatives, excluded from churchyards, and deprived of Christian funeral rites[1]. In Western history, particularly during the Middle Ages and early modern period, the souls of those who died by suicide were sometimes regarded as restless or malevolent. Their spirits could be feared as dangerous presences capable of disturbing or spreading despair among the living.

In European cultural history, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774) demonstrated how suicide could become an expression of existential conflict within a particular Zeitgeist. Werther’s death was presented not simply as madness, but as the tragic culmination of an inner conflict that could find no place within the social world surrounding him. The intense cultural response to the novel—and reports of imitative suicides associated with it—revealed how deeply this narrative resonated with a collective undercurrent. Suicide became a language for what could not otherwise be lived or spoken. The seeds were being sown for understanding suicide as a desperate expression of personal suffering, although at the time the romantic interpretation predominated.

Yet romanticising suicide carries an obvious danger: despair can become transformed into destiny, sacrifice, or even heroism. This tension becomes apparent in the life and work of Menno ter Braak, the Dutch critic and philosopher. Ter Braak rejected illusion, hero worship, and ideological surrender. His suicide in May 1940, following the German invasion of the Netherlands, cannot easily be reduced to private psychopathology. It occurred within an historical situation that had become morally and intellectually intolerable to him. His death confronts us with the limits of individual moral responsibility under overwhelming historical pressure.

A similar existential collapse can be recognised in the life of Stefan Zweig. In The World of Yesterday, Zweig described the destruction of Europe’s cultural and humanistic foundations through war, exile, persecution, and displacement (Zweig, 2013). His suicide in 1942 can therefore be viewed not merely as personal despair, but also as a withdrawal from a world that no longer offered continuity of meaning. Where Ter Braak chose refusal, Zweig chose departure; in both cases, the personal and historical became inseparable.

Outside the European context, self-inflicted death has also appeared as a culturally sanctioned, expected, or coerced act. The historical practice of sati in parts of India, in which a widow died on her husband’s funeral pyre, provides an extreme example. Although its meanings and practice varied historically, from a systemic perspective sati can be understood as an extreme form of bonding-system trauma. The widow’s individuality, grief, and continued survival became subordinated to collective notions of loyalty, honour, purity, and family order. Under conditions in which social or physical coercion was present, refusal could carry enormous consequences.

Similarly, the self-immolations of Tibetan monks and other Tibetans in recent decades cannot adequately be understood solely through an individual psychological model of suicide. They also constitute political, spiritual, and collective acts of protest. Within this context, the individual body becomes the site upon which collective suffering, resistance, sacrifice, and moral appeal are inscribed.

Suicide may therefore emerge when individuals are placed in seemingly impossible positions by their culture or history. Loyalty to values, beliefs, communities, or systems may demand a sacrifice that life itself can no longer sustain. Here, suicide appears less as an escape from individual suffering than as a response to an unlivable field. An extreme example can be found in Auschwitz, where Primo Levi described prisoners who deliberately approached the electrified fence to end suffering that was simultaneously physical, psychological, and moral (Levi, 1991). Such experiences also invite consideration of what is now described as moral injury: suffering produced when circumstances violate fundamental moral values, identities, or expectations (Borges et al., 2022).

The suicides of writers such as Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway may at first appear more readily understood as individual responses to unbearable psychological suffering. Yet even here, the individual cannot be completely separated from the wider field. Research has suggested elevated rates of certain mental-health difficulties and suicide among creative professions, although retrospective diagnosis of particular historical figures should be approached cautiously (Abrams, 2012). Family history, relationships, cultural expectations, war, illness, loss, and social circumstances remain part of the wider systems within which individual suffering develops.

From a systemic perspective, grief and uncarried helplessness do not simply vanish. They transform. Guilt may arise even where no objective responsibility exists because the pain of powerlessness cannot be borne. When such guilt is split off rather than processed, it may continue within the family system and become entangled with the lives of later generations (Ruppert, 2008).

In families shaped by traumatic historical circumstances, innocence may become fixed in the past. The child who died remains innocent, untouched by life’s later compromises. Those who survived may unconsciously feel that they themselves have lost access to that innocence. Children who were old enough to remember, but too young to understand, may carry a lifelong sense of having crossed some invisible boundary—without knowing precisely when or how.

When suicide occurs in later generations, it may reactivate these unresolved historical layers. The act can resonate with earlier losses, exclusions, cultural imperatives, loyalties, and unprocessed grief. What appears to be an entirely personal tragedy may therefore be embedded within a much older emotional and historical landscape.

Regression therapy and systemic work allow access to these layers without reducing them to either explanation or justification. They make it possible to encounter history not simply as something that is over, but as something that may still live within family systems. By acknowledging the historical origins of guilt, loss, loyalty, trauma, and innocence, therapeutic work can restore movement where history once came to a standstill.

4. Suicide, Trauma, and the Bereaved

Acute Charges, Trauma Layers, and Systemic Burdens

Suicide is not only a traumatic event; it is an event in which multiple forms of trauma may converge simultaneously, both for the person who dies and for those left behind. In therapeutic work with suicide bereavement, it is therefore essential to distinguish between acute emotional charges, specific forms of trauma, and deeper systemic burdens such as guilt and shame. When these layers are not differentiated, grief may become confused, stalled, or entangled with transgenerational dynamics.

Acute Emotional Charges after Suicide

In the immediate aftermath of suicide, the bereaved are confronted with intense acute emotional charges. These may include shock, panic, despair, rage, helplessness, disbelief, and a profound sense of existential disorientation. Such reactions are directly connected to the suddenness, finality, and often violent nature of the death. At this level, emotions are not symbolic or representative; they are immediate bodily and emotional responses that require containment, acknowledgement, and expression.

Confusion and shame may also emerge. The bereaved may find themselves uncertain whether they are more appalled by the death itself or by the act through which it occurred. The fact that death was chosen can complicate the normal mourning process. Anger may be particularly difficult to acknowledge: How could you leave us? How could you do this to us? At the same time, this anger may coexist with profound love, longing, and sorrow.

Guilt is especially complex. On the one hand, survivors may feel that the deceased left us and acted irresponsibly. On the other, they may suffer enormously from the belief that we should have been able to prevent it: perhaps we should have recognised the signs, listened more carefully, been more available, or done something differently. A suicide note or final message may answer certain questions, but it rarely compensates for the trauma of loss or the rupture of the bond.

Shame and social disgrace can add another layer. After the funeral, families may gradually stop speaking about the deceased or avoid mentioning the cause of death. The person who died becomes excluded from the family narrative, while the suicide itself becomes a secret, a myth, or a carefully edited story. What cannot be spoken, however, is not necessarily resolved. In systemic and regression work, such exclusions may reappear in later generations as identification or entanglement with the deceased. In regression terminology, this may sometimes be experienced as a form of attachment.

Clinically, it is crucial not to confuse these different levels. Acute grief, shock, anger, and helplessness need space to unfold before they are interpreted as manifestations of deeper systemic or transgenerational processes. When acute reactions are prematurely given such meanings, clients may feel misunderstood or pushed away from their immediate lived experience. Only when these reactions have been sufficiently acknowledged and contained can deeper trauma layers be explored without unnecessarily overwhelming the client.

Ruppert’s Four Forms of Trauma in the Context of Suicide

Franz Ruppert distinguishes four fundamental forms of trauma, providing a useful framework for understanding the complex impact of suicide (Ruppert, 2008). These forms are not mutually exclusive. In suicide and suicide bereavement, several may be present simultaneously and reinforce one another.

Existential Trauma

Existential trauma arises when a person’s fundamental sense of safety in the world is shattered. It is closely connected with experiences of life threat, annihilation anxiety, and a collapse of trust in existence itself. Suicide confronts the bereaved with the disturbing reality that life can end abruptly and deliberately, undermining basic assumptions about continuity, safety, meaning, and order.

For some survivors, this confrontation may also awaken a deep fear of non-being. For others, particularly when strong identification with the deceased develops, it may produce the opposite movement: an unconscious attraction or pull towards death.

Trauma of Loss

Trauma of loss lies at the heart of suicide bereavement. The sudden and often unexpected loss of a loved one can overwhelm the psyche’s capacity to process separation. Unlike an anticipated death, suicide frequently leaves little or no opportunity for preparation or anticipatory mourning.

The bereaved are left with unfinished relationships, unresolved conflicts, words that were never spoken, and questions that may never be answered. When this trauma remains unresolved, grief may become complicated or frozen, and the relationship with the deceased may remain psychologically unfinished.

Bonding Trauma

Bonding trauma develops when fundamental attachment needs are violated, disrupted, or distorted. In suicide bereavement, the death may be experienced not only as loss but also as abandonment, rejection, or betrayal. The bond with the deceased consequently becomes charged with profound ambivalence: love and longing coexist with anger, accusation, guilt, and sometimes resentment.

The relationship does not simply end with physical death. The inner dialogue with the deceased continues—mentally, emotionally, and perhaps also physically. The bereaved may continue arguing with the deceased, asking questions, seeking explanations, expressing love, or waiting for an answer that never came while the person was alive.

Bonding-System Trauma

Bonding-system trauma affects the family system as a whole. It develops when traumatic bonding patterns, exclusions, secrets, losses, and unresolved conflicts become embedded within the family across generations. In such circumstances, innocence may be lost not only individually but systemically. Guilt associated with an earlier suicide, for example, may become split off and later carried or represented by another family member.

In families affected by suicide, bonding-system trauma may manifest through unspoken mandates, loyalty conflicts, exclusions, family secrets, and repeated patterns of self-destructive behaviour. Earlier losses that were never mourned or acknowledged may intensify the impact of a more recent suicide, creating a dense field of identification and entanglement.

Family secrets are particularly important. Tisseron (2011) has described how what is concealed in one generation can nevertheless leave traces in those that follow. Missing persons, unexplained absences, contradictions, and gaps or lies in family stories may become psychologically significant even when descendants do not consciously know what originally occurred. In systemic and regression work, such gaps may provide important clues when apparently inexplicable patterns repeat across generations.

Guilt, Innocence, and Taken-Over Feelings

Within this trauma framework, guilt and shame are not always purely personal emotions. They may also function as systemic phenomena. Guilt that cannot be consciously borne may be split off, while another member of the family may unconsciously attempt to restore balance or seek innocence on behalf of the system.

Regression therapists are familiar with taken-over feelings: guilt, sorrow, fear, shame, or rage that are experienced intensely by a client but appear, during therapeutic exploration, to originate with another member of the family system. Contemporary research into trauma and epigenetics provides a different but complementary perspective, demonstrating that the consequences of severe experiences can extend beyond the directly affected individual and may influence subsequent generations (Banushi, Collova, & Milroy, 2025). This does not establish the regression-therapy concept of taken-over feelings, but it reinforces the broader importance of investigating trauma beyond the individual biography.

In suicide bereavement, these dynamics can become particularly powerful. A survivor may carry guilt associated with the deceased; innocence may be unconsciously sought through suffering or self-sacrifice; and unresolved trauma may seek expression through identification with the dead. The survivor may even begin to move psychologically towards the deceased rather than continuing fully with the living.

It is precisely here that the distinction between acute charge, personal trauma, and systemic burden becomes therapeutically decisive. The therapist must first recognise what belongs to the immediate experience of loss, then identify what belongs to the client’s own trauma, and finally explore what may have been taken over from the wider family system. Without such differentiation, the different layers reinforce one another. With differentiation, they can begin to separate—and what has been unconsciously carried can eventually be returned to its proper place.

5. Acute, Complicated, and Integrated Grief

Where Mourning Stalls after Suicide

Grief is a natural and necessary response to loss (Zisook & De Vaul, 1985). Generally, mourning unfolds over time, allowing the bereaved gradually to integrate the reality of death into their lives. After suicide, however, this process may be profoundly disrupted. To understand where and why mourning becomes blocked, it is helpful to distinguish between acute grief, complicated grief, and integrated grief (Tal Young et al., 2012), and to examine how suicide-specific trauma and systemic dynamics may interfere with their natural progression (Golden & Dalgleish, 2010).

Acute Grief

Acute grief is the immediate response to loss. It is characterised by shock, disbelief, intense sorrow, emotional pain, confusion, and disorientation. The bereaved may feel overwhelmed by waves of anguish, yearning, anger, or despair. Bodily reactions such as exhaustion, agitation, dissociation, or numbness are also common. At this stage, grief is not yet primarily reflective or meaning-oriented; it is an immediate emotional and embodied experience.

After suicide, acute grief is often intensified by the suddenness of the death, its potentially violent or shocking circumstances, and the absence of an adequate explanation. The unanswered why? can dominate the inner landscape of the bereaved. Acute grief may simultaneously become intertwined with traumatic reactions, particularly when existential trauma and trauma of loss are activated together (Ruppert, 2002).

Therapeutically, it is essential to allow acute grief to be expressed. Tears, anger, despair, confusion, and even contradictory feelings towards the deceased are not obstacles to healing; they are part of the mourning process. When acute grief is suppressed—because of fear of losing control, social stigma, family silence, or premature interpretation in systemic terms—the mourning process risks becoming frozen. Especially after suicide, there can be a temptation to move too quickly towards meaning, responsibility, forgiveness, or resolution, thereby bypassing the raw pain of loss.

Integrated Grief

Integrated grief develops when the bereaved find a way to live with the loss without remaining dominated by it. The deceased can be remembered with sadness, love, and longing, but also with an increasing sense of inner balance. Life begins to move again: relationships, work, pleasure, creativity, and orientation towards the future gradually return. The bond with the deceased is not erased, nor does it need to be. Rather, it finds a different place within the life of the survivor and no longer demands exclusive loyalty.

In non-traumatic bereavement, this integration may develop gradually with time. After suicide, however, the movement from acute towards integrated grief may take considerably longer or become blocked. Guilt, shame, unresolved anger, unanswered questions, or identification with the deceased can interfere with the movement back towards life. The bereaved may remain inwardly oriented towards the deceased, sometimes without consciously recognising it—as if a part of them were still standing on the other side of the line between the living and the dead.

From a systemic perspective, integrated grief becomes possible when responsibility, guilt, and emotional ownership are restored to their appropriate places. As long as survivors remain identified with burdens that do not belong to them—such as the guilt of the deceased, the unresolved grief of previous generations, or a loyalty that demands continued suffering—the movement towards life remains restricted.

Integration therefore does not mean letting go of the deceased. It means letting go of what prevents the living from continuing to live. Love and connection may remain, while guilt, identification, and the obligation to follow the deceased can be released.

 Complicated Grief

Complicated grief arises when acute grief does not sufficiently develop towards integrated grief but remains intense, persistent, and immobilising. The bereaved may feel trapped within mourning even as time passes. Longing for the deceased remains overwhelming, while life loses vitality, meaning, and direction. Intrusive images, avoidance of reminders, emotional numbness, social withdrawal, or chronic despair may dominate everyday life (Monk, Houck, & Shear, 2006).

Following suicide, the risk of complicated grief is particularly significant. Several factors may contribute: the traumatic nature of the death, unanswered questions, collapse of meaning, social stigma, guilt and blame, and the activation of bonding trauma and bonding-system trauma. Survivors may become caught between loyalty to the deceased and the necessity of continuing to live.

In some cases, complicated grief is accompanied by a wish to join the deceased. This should, of course, always be taken seriously when assessing suicide risk. Yet therapeutically it may also reveal something more complex than an explicit desire for self-destruction. It may express a longing for reunion, peace, belonging, reconciliation, or restored innocence. The distinction is clinically important: wanting to be with the dead is not necessarily identical to wanting to die, although the two may overlap and must never be assumed to be harmless.

Suicide, Grief, and Systemic Entanglement

Suicide can intensify the tendency for grief to become systemically entangled. Earlier losses, unmourned deaths, exclusions, secrets, or acts of injustice within the family line may resonate with the present loss, drawing the bereaved into a wider field of suffering. Children and siblings may be particularly vulnerable to identification and loyalty dynamics, especially when the family is unable to speak openly about what has happened. Traumatic grief itself has also been associated with increased suicidal ideation among bereaved young adults (Prigerson et al., 1999).

From a regression-therapy perspective, the question is therefore not only “Have you mourned this person?” but also: “What are you still carrying for this person?” The first question concerns grief; the second opens the possibility of attachment, identification, guilt, loyalty, and taken-over feelings.

Distinguishing between acute, complicated, and integrated grief therefore provides an important therapeutic framework. Acute grief requires containment and expression. Complicated grief requires exploration of what prevents mourning from moving forward. Integrated grief becomes possible when love can remain while inappropriate responsibility, guilt, identification, and systemic burdens are released.

Regression therapy and constellation work offer specific ways of supporting this process. By differentiating what belongs to the present loss from what belongs to the wider family system, and by restoring the boundary between the living and the dead, these approaches can help the bereaved turn back towards life—without denying their love or connection to those who have died.

6. Dialogues between the Dead

6.1 Guilt, Innocence, and the Maternal Line

In some family systems affected by suicide, therapeutic progress cannot be achieved by working solely with the living. In such cases, the decisive movements seem to take place elsewhere: between those who have died. What I began to observe in my work was that when unresolved guilt and innocence remain entangled among the dead, the living may continue to carry their weight—often at great cost.

The following case illustrates this process and the therapeutic movement that emerged through constellation work. The client was a sixty-one-year-old woman whose younger sister had died by suicide in 2011. She had two daughters, aged twenty-five and twenty-one, both born with mutations in the CFTR gene associated with cystic fibrosis. In her own words, she had “fought like hell” with doctors on behalf of her daughters throughout their lives.

Her characteristic fighting mode had developed much earlier. At seventeen, she had effectively fled from her own mother and gradually developed what she described as a harness of survival. Years later, both of her daughters reproached her for precisely what she herself had reproached her own mother: that she gave them too little room to become themselves and did not truly see them or recognise their needs.

She first came to my practice in 2023 to work on her relationship with her eldest daughter, who had broken off contact with her approximately one year earlier. After two sessions, this daughter—who had begun building an independent life in a large city—died by suicide, leaving behind an intensely angry suicide note addressed to her mother.

A considerable amount of therapeutic work followed.[2] Acute grief had to be addressed first. One of the most important later interventions, however, was a constellation undertaken approximately one month after the death, when the client was attempting to return to work and regain some basic orientation towards life.

Central to the pattern of guilt within this family was a much earlier death. At the end of the Second World War, the client’s mother had lost her younger sister because of inadequate nutrition and lack of medication. The child was only three months old. What followed, however, was not an adequate process of mourning. According to the family history available to the client, her grandparents did not openly grieve the child, and she gradually disappeared from the family narrative. She was no longer spoken of.

From a systemic perspective, such an absence is not neutral. When grief is not felt, it does not necessarily disappear—it waits.

The surviving sister, who was six years old when the baby died, lost not only her younger sister but, in a symbolic sense, also her position as an innocent child. The dead infant remained forever young and innocent, untouched by later life and its compromises. The surviving child, however, continued living and became entangled with the grief, helplessness, and guilt that her parents were unable to process.

In the constellation described here, the central dynamics unfolded primarily along the client’s maternal line. Suicide was also present in her husband’s family: he too had a sister who had died by suicide in adulthood. Yet the constellation suggested that the line of guilt and destructive behaviour was more strongly charged in the client’s own family system. This difference was also reflected in the parents’ reactions following the death of their daughter. The husband appeared comparatively distant and absent, while the client was intensely emotionally involved. Her sadness was profound, but it appeared to be covered by a blanket of guilt.

Over generations, this unresolved constellation appeared to develop into a long line of guilt and forgotten original innocence. As an adult, the client’s mother displayed severe bonding trauma towards her own daughters, repeatedly crossing emotional and physical boundaries. From a systemic perspective, this behaviour could not be understood solely as individual pathology. It also appeared to express a deeper imbalance within the family system. Guilt originating in an earlier generation had never found a place, and the search for innocence that had become frozen with the death of the infant continued into subsequent generations.

A further and highly significant layer emerged in the client’s own history. Between the births of her two daughters, she had lost a male foetus during pregnancy. She carried intense guilt towards this unborn son because prenatal testing had been performed to determine whether he carried the CFTR mutation. The result showed that he did not. Nevertheless, when the pregnancy ended, the client became convinced emotionally that the diagnostic procedure had contributed to his death.[3]

For her, the event acquired a symbolic meaning far beyond its medical circumstances. The boy was free of the CFTR mutation, while both surviving daughters carried it. In the client’s inner world, the gene itself had become intertwined with themes of guilt, survival, loss, and innocence. The unborn son consequently occupied another powerful place among the innocent dead of the family system.

The pattern now extended across several generations. The client’s mother had lost her infant sister. The client herself had lost an unborn son. Her younger sister died by suicide in 2011. Years later, the client’s eldest daughter also died by suicide at the age of twenty-five.

The daughter had never known her aunt because of the rupture in family relationships. On the surface, therefore, the two suicides appeared to be entirely separate events. Yet within the constellation—and within the longer therapeutic trajectory that became possible only after the initial period of acute grief—they appeared connected through a much older field of loss, guilt, exclusion, and the search for innocence.

The therapeutic question was therefore no longer simply why two women in different generations had died by suicide. A deeper question emerged:

Who was carrying whose guilt—and with whom did innocence originally belong?

It was this question that opened the possibility of a dialogue not only between the living and the dead, but eventually between the dead themselves.

6.2 Summary of the Constellation

At the beginning of the constellation, a clear line was marked across the middle of the room to separate the living from the dead.

On the side of the living stood the client, her husband, and Daughter 2, the surviving younger daughter. On the other side of the line stood Daughter 1, who had recently died by suicide, and the client’s deceased younger sister. Daughter 1 stood close to the boundary, facing the living. The client’s deceased sister stood somewhat farther away and to the left. Both deceased women were oriented towards the living.

Daughter 2 stood directly in front of the line, almost at its centre, looking with fascination at her deceased sister. The husband stood beside the client but farther to the left, close to the wall. He appeared only partially involved and looked towards the constellation from a distance.

Place anchors were positioned for each family member so that both the client and I, as therapist, could step into the different positions and explore the feelings and impulses associated with each place. At this stage, the client’s mother, who was still alive, had not yet been included.

The order of placement proved significant. We began with the living: the bereaved client, her husband, and her surviving twenty-one-year-old daughter. Yet once the deceased daughter and sister were placed, the client immediately began to feel smaller and less prominent. Her deceased daughter became so present in her absence that almost nothing else seemed to exist.

Figure 1. Constellation Beginning.

The initial configuration. The living and the dead are physically separated by the boundary, yet Daughter 2 remains strongly oriented towards her deceased sister, while the client begins to experience herself as less prominent.

I first invited the client to stand on the place anchor of her surviving daughter. There she suddenly experienced strong anger. It reminded her of the anger she herself had felt as a young girl towards her own mother, who had severely mistreated her.

From the position of Daughter 2, a thought emerged:

I am now in the front line.

Once the dead had been included in the constellation, however, something began to change. The surviving daughter could increasingly feel her own emotions rather than carrying the anger associated with her deceased sister. The two daughters now occupied the centre of the constellation, each on her own side of the boundary, facing one another.

I then invited the client to move into the position of her deceased eldest daughter and therefore physically cross the line between the living and the dead. At first, she experienced neutrality. Gradually, however, an unexpected interest arose towards the client’s deceased sister.

Standing in her daughter’s place, the client said:

When I become completely absorbed in thinking about my eldest daughter, I sometimes exchange her with my sister. They even looked alike.

Her sister had rarely been spoken about within the family. The client had first learned of her death indirectly, through a newspaper. Only much later did it become clear to her that her sister had died by suicide. Very few people had been invited to the funeral, which had been arranged almost entirely by the client’s mother. The circumstances suggested that shame surrounding the suicide had contributed to the family silence.

The client then crossed the boundary again and entered the position of Daughter 2. Here she began to experience her own sorrow. This led her naturally back towards her own position in the constellation.

A deep period of grieving followed. After the sorrow had been expressed, the silence that emerged no longer felt empty. It felt restful. After approximately five minutes, the client looked towards her deceased sister and sensed that something had changed: her sister now seemed to become involved.

I therefore invited the client once again to take the position of Daughter 1. There she experienced a new quality: involvement, together with the feeling that something was beginning to move.

This was significant because involvement was precisely what Daughter 1 had experienced as lacking during her life.

The client now recognised that her lifelong struggle to secure the survival of her daughters with cystic fibrosis had also interfered with her capacity simply to see them as their mother. Her harness of survival had developed when, at seventeen, she fled from her own traumatised mother, leaving her younger sister behind. Years later, this same survival mechanism found a new purpose in the relentless struggle to protect two daughters who had inherited CFTR mutations from both parents.

Standing in the position of her deceased daughter, the client now experienced regret, but also increasing inner peace. There was no longer anger and no overwhelming sorrow.

The same peace could gradually be felt when she returned to her own position among the living. From there she experienced something new: her deceased daughter appeared to be seeing her—not only through pain, guilt, and sorrow, but once again as her mother.

Then, from the position of the deceased daughter, an unexpected thought emerged:

I had to do this.

These words were not experienced as an instruction or justification for suicide. Rather, they appeared to express a movement towards ownership and responsibility. The deceased daughter seemed able to recognise the act as belonging to her own life, her own choices, and—within the spiritual understanding emerging in the constellation—her own karmic learning process.[4]

At this point the client remembered something she had felt during pregnancy with her eldest daughter:

I am going to lose this child.

Previously, this memory had immediately activated guilt. Now she was able simply to allow the old feeling to emerge and move through her. The guilt, which had long been protected by anger and by the harness of survival, began gradually to dissolve. In the silence that followed, the harness itself seemed to soften.

A deep sense of connection developed between mother and daughter across the line.

Figure 2. After Involvement.

The constellation after the first major movement. Recognition and involvement have replaced some of the earlier fixation, allowing a different connection between mother and deceased daughter to emerge across the boundary.

This created room for another movement: from the deceased daughter towards the client’s deceased sister.

Daughter 1 turned towards her aunt. The deceased sister responded by turning towards her. A genuine dialogue between the dead could now begin—first through orientation, recognition, and eye contact, and only afterwards through words.

Interestingly, the husband also began to move at this stage. Until then he had remained relatively distant. Now he turned towards what was taking place beyond the line.

The two deceased women were allowed to become known to one another.

Separate from anger, sorrow, and guilt, a sense of peaceful connection became perceptible.

The deceased sister said:

If you see me, I become stronger.

The deceased daughter experienced deep inner peace and responded:

I didn’t know about you. But now I do.

The deceased sister then turned towards Daughter 2 on the side of the living. I invited the client to enter the younger daughter’s position once again. Some unrest was still present there, but looking towards the deceased aunt now felt encouraging rather than threatening.

After some time, Daughter 1 was able to turn fully towards her surviving sister and reach across the boundary.

She said:

You no longer need me there. Let me stay here.

The two sisters remained for a long time with their hands joined across the line, looking at one another.

Eventually, both the deceased daughter and the deceased sister moved closer to the boundary and addressed the living:

We see you. We see your pain. You may stay there. You live, so you may breathe. We see you. All this was necessary. But you may stay.

At the final stage of the constellation, two additional deceased family members were given a place: the infant sister of the client’s mother, who had died at three months of age after the Second World War, and the client’s unborn son.

Their inclusion brought the theme of original innocence fully into the constellation.

Neither of these children carried responsibility for what had happened to them. Their presence made it possible to distinguish innocence from guilt more clearly. Guilt no longer needed to remain harnessed to the living, hidden beneath anger, helplessness, or survival.

Only then did the client’s mother begin to become more fully involved in the constellation.

The constellation had now reached a fundamentally different configuration: the dead were increasingly oriented towards one another, while guilt and innocence could begin to separate from the living.

Figure 3. Dissolution of Guilt.

The later configuration. As the dead become differentiated and recognised within their own relationships, guilt and innocence can return towards their appropriate places, reducing the need for the living to carry or represent them.

A central pattern now became visible. Both the deceased sister and the deceased daughter appeared to be entangled not only with members of the living family but also with each other. Both had, in different ways, become involved with guilt that the client’s mother had been unable or unwilling to carry, particularly in relation to the severe physical and emotional mistreatment of her daughters.

After the suicide of her eldest daughter, the client had taken an enormous amount of this guilt upon herself, as if responsibility for the entire family tragedy belonged to her. This guilt became amplified by the profound sorrow naturally associated with the death of a child. Gradually, it began to shape her identity at precisely the time when her original survival mechanism—her harness—was beginning to break down.

The constellation did not complete the therapeutic work. Considerable work remained afterwards. What changed, however, was fundamental: the line of guilt and the consequent search for innocence had been interrupted. Guilt and innocence could begin to return to their appropriate places.

This shift made a substantial difference in later regression sessions, where unresolved aspects of loss, grief, and family relationships could be addressed more directly, including through personification work involving earlier generations.

What proved decisive in this constellation was allowing a dialogue to emerge between two deceased family members.

When they were given room to encounter one another, something unexpected occurred. They recognised each other as separate and autonomous. Neither needed to carry the other’s burden. Neither needed to follow, compensate for, or represent the other.

This recognition was not primarily cognitive. It was immediate and experiential.

Only after this recognition did guilt begin to move.

The guilt associated with abusive and destructive behaviour no longer needed to be carried by the deceased daughter or the deceased sister. Responsibility could be returned—without accusation—to the client’s mother, where it belonged. This was not an act of condemnation, but of differentiation. Responsibility was restored to its proper place, and with it a different relationship to innocence became possible.

At the same time, the infant who had died at the end of the war—the younger sister of the client’s mother—could once again be acknowledged simply as innocent. She no longer needed to function as an idealised or forgotten figure within the family system. She could simply be seen.

In this recognition, innocence could return to where it had become frozen.

The effects of these movements did not remain confined to the dead. The surviving daughter, who had previously expressed a strong wish to follow her deceased sister, could increasingly be experienced as turning back towards life. Her anger towards her mother also began to diminish. From a systemic perspective, this anger had never been entirely personal; it had carried the weight of earlier generations. As guilt and responsibility became differentiated, the need to carry that anger also diminished.

What struck me most was how little interpretation became necessary once the relevant relational movements had taken place. When guilt was returned and innocence restored, life seemed able to resume its own movement.

The dialogue between the dead did not sever the bond between the living and those who had died. It transformed that bond.

Following was no longer necessary. Loyalty no longer required self-destruction.

This constellation suggests that suicide cannot always be understood—or therapeutically approached—without considering deeper dynamics of guilt, innocence, responsibility, and identification within the family system. Where these remain unresolved among the dead, the living may continue to carry their consequences. When the dead are differentiated from one another, responsibility is restored and the boundary between the living and the dead becomes clear again. Movement towards life can then become possible.

7. Therapeutic Implications and Working Tools

Horizontal and Vertical Pathways towards Resolution

The work described in this article rests on the integration of two complementary therapeutic approaches: constellation work and regression therapy. Although they differ in structure and movement, both offer important tools for addressing suicide-related trauma, guilt, and intergenerational entanglement. Understanding their respective strengths—and how they can be combined—broadens the therapeutic field and allows greater precision in clinical practice.

Horizontal Movement: Constellation Work

Constellation work, as developed by Bert Hellinger and further elaborated by many practitioners, operates primarily through horizontal, time-independent movements in space. Family members, inner parts, or abstract elements such as guilt, innocence, responsibility, or fate are positioned in relation to one another, allowing systemic dynamics to become visible and experientially accessible.

Time is not experienced as strictly linear within this work. Past and present may coexist within the constellation field, while relationships between people from different generations can become immediately perceptible (Hellinger & Weber, 1998).

This timeless quality makes constellation work particularly suited to revealing transgenerational dynamics, loyalties, exclusions, and unresolved relationships. In cases involving suicide, the client and therapist may perceive how earlier deaths or unresolved burdens continue to influence those who are alive. Movements towards order—such as acknowledging the dead as dead, restoring responsibility, recognising innocence, and differentiating one family member from another—can occur without reconstructing every historical event in detail.

At the same time, the intensity of constellation work requires careful containment, particularly when the client is still in acute grief. The systemic field may evoke powerful material very rapidly. When the trauma is still raw, such work can overwhelm rather than integrate. For this reason, constellation work may need to be preceded by, or combined with, therapeutic work that first addresses acute grief and stabilisation.

Vertical Movement: Regression Therapy

Regression therapy follows a different trajectory. Its movement is primarily vertical: through time and through layers of experience.

The client is guided towards earlier experiences, unresolved events, and frozen emotional charges. Past situations may be encountered as lived realities, allowing emotions that were once overwhelming, suppressed, or unfinished to be experienced, expressed, understood, and integrated.

Regression may lead into childhood experiences, prenatal material, previous incarnations, or encounters with earlier personalities and entanglements connected with the origin of the client’s present burden. Therapeutically, I sometimes describe this process as placing a drilling tower at a particular emotional point in the body and drilling vertically downwards until the original layer is reached.

The aim is not simply to remember. It is to locate and transform the emotional charge and the conclusions or postulates that continue to influence the present (ten Dam, 2014).

An important variation of this vertical work—and one that has proved particularly useful in suicide bereavement—is the use of a personification space.

The Personification Space as an Imaginal Working Field

In a personification space, the client works from their present adult consciousness, usually within an imagined place experienced as sufficiently safe and stable.

From this position, the client may invite into the here and now important figures, inner parts, causes of emotional charges, or earlier personality states—whether belonging to themselves or to others. These may include deceased family members, ancestors, inner children, earlier personalities, or parts carrying trauma, guilt, fear, shame, or unresolved grief.

The work remains partly vertical because it addresses earlier experiences and frozen emotional material. Yet it simultaneously develops within an imaginal and relational horizontal field. It is therefore particularly useful as a bridge between regression therapy and constellation work. Often it is introduced after an earlier regression, towards the end of a session, although in some cases it can also provide the starting point (ten Dam, 2014).

This approach has several advantages. The client remains anchored in present adult consciousness and retains a greater degree of orientation and agency, which can be especially important when working with overwhelming material such as suicide, abuse, guilt, or attachment. At the same time, personification allows systemic and regression perspectives to operate within the same therapeutic space.

In another case, for example, a young male client presented with severe problems of self-esteem and powerful convictions such as:

I have no permission to live.

and:

I cannot live.

Within the personification space, I invited him to bring in the part of his soul that was still lingering with the dead.

Suicide was strongly represented in both sides of his family. On his father’s side, an uncle and a niece had died by suicide; on his mother’s side, a brother of his grandmother had also died by suicide. The client additionally suffered from strong separation anxiety and self-rejection and had grown up with a perfectionistic father.

The deceased uncle emerged particularly strongly in the session. Using established regression techniques for working with attachments, the client was gradually differentiated from him (Komianos, 2023).

Yet important guilt remained. It appeared in convictions such as:

I could not save him; therefore, I have no right to live.

This material required further work. In later constellation work, both sides of the family were represented, allowing the remaining guilt, loyalty, and responsibility to be explored systemically rather than only through the individual regression process.[5]

The Boundary between the Living and the Dead

Crucially, the clear boundary between the living and the dead can also be introduced within the personification space.

As in physical constellation work, the boundary can be marked explicitly and consciously. Deceased figures are approached as deceased. Living persons and living parts are invited to remain oriented towards life.

This distinction may have a profound effect when the boundary has become blurred following suicide—particularly when the client experiences parts of the self as remaining with, following, or belonging to the dead.

The line does not deny connection. It creates differentiation.

A client may remain connected with a deceased parent, sibling, child, or ancestor while at the same time recognising:

You are there, and I am here.

This simple distinction can become one of the most important movements in the therapeutic process.

Integrating the Two Approaches

In practice, the most effective therapeutic work often emerges from a combination of horizontal and vertical movements.

Constellation work may reveal where guilt, innocence, loyalty, and responsibility have become entangled within the system. Regression therapy can then explore how these dynamics became emotionally charged within the client and can address the experiences, attachments, postulates, and unfinished material that continue to maintain them.

Conversely, regression may first uncover an attachment, an earlier experience, or an apparently inexplicable emotional charge. Constellation work may then place that material within the wider family field and reveal relationships that were not visible within the individual regression alone.[6]

The personification space occupies an important position between the two. It permits vertical material to be encountered within a horizontal relational field and allows figures from different times, generations, or levels of experience to meet within the client’s present consciousness.

Both approaches share several fundamental principles: presence, restraint, differentiation, and respect for what belongs to whom.

Neither seeks to eliminate pain or erase bonds. The aim is to restore order where relationships, responsibility, and emotional ownership have become confused.

When guilt returns to its rightful place, when innocence is recognised where it was lost, and when the dead are allowed to remain among the dead, movement towards life becomes possible again.

For therapists working with suicide bereavement, this integrated approach offers a way of addressing not only the visible suffering of the present but also invisible burdens carried across generations.

It allows mourning without collapse, loyalty without self-destruction, and connection without confusion between life and death.

8. Practical Therapeutic Recommendations

Working with Suicide, Guilt, and Intergenerational Entanglement

The therapeutic work described in this article is not a protocol and cannot be reduced to a fixed sequence of techniques. It represents a therapeutic position.

Working with suicide, suicide bereavement, and intergenerational trauma requires the therapist to tolerate intensity, ambiguity, grief, guilt, and emotional gravity while remaining firmly oriented towards differentiation: what belongs to whom, who carries responsibility, and where the boundary lies between the living and the dead.

Based on my clinical experience, the following principles have proved particularly important.

1. Begin with Acute Grief — Do Not Bypass It

After suicide, acute grief and shock must be given sufficient space before deeper systemic or regression work is undertaken. Despair, rage, confusion, helplessness, disbelief, and profound sorrow are not pathological reactions. They are understandable responses to an existential rupture.

Attempting to interpret, explain, spiritualise, or systemically reframe the experience too early may bypass the client’s immediate reality, reinforce dissociation, and undermine trust in the therapeutic process.

The first task is therefore not to discover hidden systemic meanings. It is to allow the bereaved to grieve.

Only when acute grief has been sufficiently expressed and contained can deeper layers be approached without unnecessarily overwhelming the client.

1. Follow the Guilt — Do Not Explain It Away

Guilt is one of the most persistent forces in suicide bereavement. It should not automatically be reassured away, cognitively corrected, or prematurely explained.

Instead, guilt must be followed.

The decisive therapeutic question is not initially:

Is this guilt justified?

but:

Where does this guilt belong?

Survivors frequently experience thoughts such as:

I should have known.

I should have stopped it.

I was not there when I was needed.

If only I had done something differently.

Some of this guilt belongs directly to the relationship with the deceased. Some may belong to earlier events. Some may have been taken over from others within the family system.

The therapist therefore follows the emotional charge rather than deciding prematurely what it means.

When guilt and responsibility have become separated, family members may attempt unconsciously to restore balance by carrying responsibility that is not theirs.

Therapeutic work aims to return guilt to its place of origin—not in order to accuse or condemn, but to restore differentiation and order.

1. Restore Guilt before Innocence Can Return

In families affected by suicide, innocence cannot always be restored directly.

Attempts simply to tell a client, “…you are innocent” may fail because the deeper guilt structure remains untouched. In such cases the therapeutic movement follows another sequence:

First, guilt must return to where it belongs. Only then can innocence return to where it belongs.

Guilt frequently develops within concrete historical circumstances. In the case described earlier, the death of an infant at the end of the Second World War occurred under conditions of deprivation and lack of adequate medication. No individual family member was necessarily responsible for the child’s death.

Nevertheless, profound helplessness, grief, and perhaps unspoken self-blame remained.

When these experiences could not be mourned, the emotional charge persisted. Within the systemic field it eventually became intertwined with guilt, innocence, survival, and later destructive family relationships.

When guilt cannot be carried by those who first encounter it, later generations may begin to represent it.

Children and grandchildren may then experience guilt that does not appear to belong to their own biographies, expressing it through self-blame, compulsive responsibility, destructive behaviour, identification, or attraction towards the dead.

Restoring guilt therefore does not mean assigning blame.

It means restoring emotional ownership.

Only when the burden is no longer carried by the wrong person can innocence cease to be sought through suffering, sacrifice, or self-destruction.

9. Conclusion

The therapeutic task is therefore not to break the bond between the living and the dead, nor to persuade the bereaved to forget those they have lost. It is to restore a boundary that trauma, guilt, identification, and loyalty may have blurred. The dead can remain loved without being followed. The living can remember without carrying what does not belong to them. When guilt returns to its appropriate place and innocence no longer needs to be sought through suffering, the line between the living and the dead can once again become a boundary rather than an invitation to cross it.

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Biography:  Maarten Wiegmans, born in 1961, studied political science, philosophy and German before he found his home in transpersonal regression therapy. From 2009-2012 he studied at the Tasso Institute Netherlands in regression therapy and transpersonal regression therapy. He was a German teacher for 10 years and since 2012 has had a flourishing practice as a regression therapist, with a special focus on psychopathological problems. On top of that, he is a spiritual regression therapist and karma coach. In addition to transpersonal regression therapy, his work also includes approaches to Carl Gustav Jung and dream interpretations. Maarten is a professional member of EARTh, the European Association of Regression Therapists, as well as the NVRT, the Dutch Association of Regression and Reincarnation Therapists, of which he is currently the chairman.

 Maarten Wiegmans is also a certified Soul Regression Therapist and has the certificate Medical and Psychosocial. He also completed workshops in family constellations with Bert Hellinger and Stephan Hausner, Voice Dialogue with Karin Brugman, Nonviolent Communication with Marshall Rosenberg, and Ericksonian Hypnosis with Trance Art. Both in Assen and in Hoogeveen, in the Drenthe Center for Welfare and Health, he helps many clients from the Netherlands and abroad in their process of transformation and personal growth. He is, apart from teacher for Tasso International and Tasso Netherlands in Amersfoort, also teacher and supervisor at the Tasso training course for transpersonal regression therapy in Bremen, Germany.

[1] Historically, Christian attitudes towards suicide were strongly condemnatory. Suicide was regarded as a violation of the commandment against killing and was frequently described as self-murder. This moral position continued into modern Catholic teaching; Evangelium Vitae (1995), for example, discusses suicide in relation to the moral prohibition against taking human life. Contemporary terminology has increasingly moved away from expressions such as self-murder towards more neutral language.

[2] Acute grief had to be addressed before deeper layers of mourning could be explored. Only later did it become possible to work with the larger guilt dynamics that appeared to cover and complicate the client’s grief.

[3] The client associated the pregnancy loss with the prenatal diagnostic procedure. This was her subjective conviction and an important element of the therapeutic material; it should not be understood as establishing medical causation. Amniocentesis carries a small procedure-related risk of pregnancy loss (Salomon LJ, Sotiriadis A, Wulff CB, Odibo A, Akolekar R. Risk of miscarriage following amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling: systematic review of literature and updated meta-analysis. Ultrasound Obstet Gynecol. 2019 Oct;54(4):442-451. doi: 10.1002/uog.20353. Epub 2019 Sep 6. PMID: 31124209.)

[4] Bert Hellinger described constellation work primarily as “a horizontal movement in space and not a vertical movement in time.” In this constellation, however, another dimension appeared to emerge. Alongside the horizontal, timeless systemic field, the position of the deceased daughter seemed to open onto a more personal and vertical dimension concerning her individual development and what was experienced within the constellation as her karmic learning process.

[5] In this case, both family lines were subsequently included in constellation work.

[6] In regression terminology, for example, a deceased family member may initially be experienced as attached to the client. In constellation work, I have repeatedly observed that such attachments can reorganise once deceased family members are recognised, differentiated, and given their own place within the field. Taken-over charges may then be exchanged or neutralised. This differs from work with pseudo-obsessions or former-life personalities, because each incarnated being is approached as deserving an autonomous place within the field. The personification space makes it possible to combine aspects of both horizontal and vertical work.