The client insisted that we work on her ongoing family conflicts to bring harmony to everyone. She kept saying the sentence “I want harmony in my family.”

So I decided to place this sentence in the field and see what comes to light. What we saw unfold was that the client was carrying this sentence for her mother as well as for her inner child. And another important truth that came up was that harmony resides within oneself, only if you are ready to see it internally rather than searching for it externally. Let us look at these different layers of the session.

First, the sentence “I want harmony in my family” originated with the client’s mother and got passed down to the client. In case of her mother, this sentence represented a part of the mother’s story. The want of harmony in family was something that her mother wanted in her own family of origin and did not get. And subconsciously, out of blind love and loyalty, the client also carried this “want” for her mother. Also, because of whatever had happened in her family, the mother wasn’t able to be emotionally present for her daughter, the client, and this led to a break in the bond between the mother and the daughter.

The break in the bond with the mother led to the client feeling angry towards her mother and still wanting her mother’s love but not being able to express her wants out loud. As a child, the client’s energy was fragmented between feeling angry at her mother as well as wanting her mother’s love, both at the same time. Her wants were not fulfilled, and she concluded that “I could never have wants, only responsibility. Even if I want something, I will never get it.” This is what the representative of the client(the inner child) said in the session and it completely resonated with the adult client. And therefore the client’s want of harmony in her family also represented her inner child’s want of her mother’s love. It also represented her suppressed wants.

Because we want love, attention and acceptance form our parents, we do whatever it takes to get it. In this case, the client’s inner child refused to speak her want of her mother’s love out loud because she learned growing up that being vulnerable is useless and does not help. So instead the adult focused on harmony in her family as a way to express her want in some way as well as in the unconscious hope that having harmony in her family might birng her mother closer to her.

And lastly, the element of harmony turned out to be the clients’ adult self, revealing that harmony resides within the client and she does not have to look for it outside. She has to let her mother and the other members of her family find their own harmonious state and she cannot take responsibility for harmony in their lives. Also, the adult self of the client could not connect with the inner child at the beginning of the session and was irritated by her because the child was showing vulnerability which the adult did not want to accept. However, towards the end of the session, as the mother received support from her family, she opened up to her daughter(the client). The daughter could complete her movement towards her mother and receive whatever her mother could give her. And this led to the adult and the inner child of the client connect with each other, harmoniously.

One of the results of this work has been that a few weeks after the session the client shared with me that she feels much less angry at her mother now. And the rest will fall in place in its own time, I am sure.