Digesting the Family Loaf: A systemic reflection on transgenerational patterning
Over years of working systemically with family constellations as part of my holistic counselling practice, I have sat with many people who experience profound challenges across the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual realms.
Often in the work, a client might say something like:
“I don’t understand why this is still with me.”
It might be anxiety or depression. It might be a repeated illness. It might be a familiar relational pattern, a sense of stuckness, or a feeling that life keeps circling around the same territory.
When I hear this, I often find myself sharing a particular metaphor – the family loaf of bread.
The Family Loaf
Imagine a family, a traditional Eastern cultural context, sitting together on the floor in a circle around a simple meal, the centre of which is a round loaf of unleavened flatbread. There is no individual portion, each person tears off pieces from the same loaf.
What matters here is not the bread itself, but the shared nourishment.
Systemically, imagine that each of the people around that circle is consciously and unconsciously being nourished by (and challenged by) the same family loaf – made up of many ingredients: lived experiences, losses, adaptations, beliefs, traumas, strengths, cultural contexts, and unspoken loyalties.
Together, these ingredients inform what in systemic work is sometimes called the ‘knowing field.’ In Jon Freeman’s latest book, ‘What Makes you, YOU[i]’, he takes this further in what he terms the ‘information field’.
When the people in that family tear off a piece of that loaf, they are not only engaging with their own life experiences, digesting and making sense of them. They are also responding to information in the wider family story. Here’s an excerpt from Jon’s book about the Information Field:
‘Where is that information held? Is it your personal property, something that your soul has custody of? Apparently not, since the agreements are made with others and are present in the universe in a way that is ongoing. It didn’t merely shape where, how and to whom you were born; it is woven into the unfolding of your life and potentially influences who you will meet tomorrow.’
For me, whether or not you believe in the concept of a soul that chooses its next life and the family into which it’s born to learn, what Jon is proposing has relevance. As I understand it, the many-layered patterns and blueprints held in the information field (the family loaf being perhaps only one part of that wider Field) isn’t a static thing – far from it.
As we metaphorically chew on the material of our Family Loaf, we are actively working with it, being both influenced by and influencing the field.
As my clients ‘chew on’ their family material, they are are co-creating what comes next in their own lives, as well as for the generations to come. I also believe that the Information Field sits outside of linear time. I have had a Dream recently where family patterning that I have been working with, has both influenced my children, as well as the generation of my Grandparents.
What We Are Chewing On
Research into epigenetics has shown us that our DNA is not a fixed blueprint. It is responsive. Encoded within it are both the imprints of trauma and the strategies that enabled our ancestors to survive those traumas. In other words, what we inherit is not only suffering, but also resilience, intelligence, and creative adaptation.
So when someone finds themselves chewing on anxiety, illness, or a persistent inner struggle, we might ask: “What are they really digesting?”
From this perspective, part of what we are working with belongs to our own biography, and part belongs to the intergenerational material held within that family loaf. Most of us are chewing on this blend at the same time.
This is why, when clients ask me in counselling, “Why is this still with me?” I sometimes gently offer a different way of looking at it…
Why wouldn’t it be?
If you accept for a moment that we come into this life to learn, grow, and transform as embodied beings in our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual realms, then why wouldn’t we encounter the very material that most needs integration?
Why wouldn’t we be invited to digest what was once too much, too early, or too overwhelming for those who came before us? I believe what many indigenous cultures say that what we do now, influences the seven generations to come and our Ancestors standing behind us.
A Hopeful Orientation
This way of seeing is not fatalistic. Quite the opposite.
I have witnessed people work with both their personal histories and their transgenerational patterns and find more easeful, life-affirming ways of integrating that material.
As what was once unconscious becomes visible, named, and met with compassion, something begins to shift.
The loaf does not disappear. Nor does suffering and pain, and grief and all that a human life entails.
And yet, somehow, the chewing and self-narratives change. People often become less entangled in invisible loyalties, less harsh with themselves, and less driven by old adaptations that once made sense but no longer serve. Choice becomes more available. Vitality returns.
An Invitation
The invitation here is a gentle one.
The next time you notice you’re judging yourself for not having “moved on,” for still struggling with a familiar pattern, habit, or emotional state, just pause.
I invite you to look with loving kindness not only at yourself, but also at the wider family system you belong to: imagine the many people, known and perhaps unknown, who are or have been consciously and unconsciously chewing on the same family material.
Each person, in their own way and in their own time, striving even through difficulty or dysfunction to become a fuller expression of who they are.
Even there, something meaningful is unfolding.
[i] Jon Freeman, ‘What makes you YOU?’ Page, 31