Over the past week I have had a truly interesting experience that has caused me to wonder a lot about what the collective unconscious is, how it relates to morphic fields, and how both of them become observable in daily life. 

 During a session with a client, I found myself compelled to combine two techniques that I am specialized in – Family Constellations and Inner Child/Inner Family work. It was an intuition I had in the moment, where it seemed that the best way to help my client really feel what was going on in the issue they had presented was to help them see, contemporaneously, both the larger picture of the situation with the help of Family Constellations, and the internal aspects of those wounded parts that were connected to their early childhood experiences.

It was a powerful experience both for me, and my client, and I found myself pondering this in the days to come, feeling that I had reached a new level of understanding in my own personal journey and in how I can best help those that come to me for help in navigating the complexities of healing our woundedness, stepping into feeling more empowered in how we can create a truly fulifilling life, and in simply being human.

I then participated in a Family Constellations workshop, where there were also several other participants who are therapists of varying sorts. I found myself almost gasp out loud when first one, then another, and then a third shared about how they have recently been integrating Inner Child and Internal Family Systems work with Family Constellations!

What I found unusual was not so much that other people are finding this kind of integration useful, both for themselves and for their clients; that seems a rather natural progression of things, as the two approaches truly do complement each other in a variety of ways that I won’t go into here.

What surprised me was the fact that in terms of timing it all seemed to be happening in a rather contemporaneous way, in many of us, but scattered all throughout the globe.

I was very touched by this and I kind of tucked it away in my mind, to ponder over during the days and weeks to come, as I would begin to explore my own way of integrating things.

Then, that same evening, I received a newsletter from yet another Family Constellations practitioner, who lives in yet another far-flung country, announcing how she is also integrating Family Constellations work with Inner Child work!!

Now what seemed to be possibly a mere coincidence truly began to ring of something “spooky at a distance” happening.

I know that most physicists would cringe at my applying that expression, which refers to particles being entangled at a subatomic, or quantum, level, to connections between human minds and cultural trends. I am certainly not a physicist, and so although I have read numerous books on these topics and have been studying how they can correlate with human experience for years, I most certainly do not consider myself an expert on any of it.

But after over 35 years of focused and intentional personal exploration of how our various lenses for interpretation of reality – science, philosophy, art and religion – intertwine and interact with each other, while being distinct, I can’t help but wonder if these experiences aren’t examples of how we experience this dimension of reality.

We are rightly skeptical about drawing correlations when we are dealing with subjective, or personal, experience, and our scientific method has most certainly helped humanity become more capable of drawing objective conclusions about reality, which have allowed us to advance in ways we could have never imagined.

But subjective experience is also a fundamental aspect of our existence, and many thinkers, even within more purely scientific realms, are becoming more courageous about affirming the importance of recognizing how objective and subjective reality are deeply intertwined, and how they then express into human culture through new ideas and practices, which advance our understanding of ourselves and our world, and how we can live better within it.

I have also noticed a kind of synchronicity in how Antonio Mercurio, the founder of the therapeutic and anthropological approach that he began developing in the 1970s and that I specialized in Italy in the 1990s and early 2000s, began first sharing his ideas when working with others around the same time as Bert Hellinger, who was in Germany.

While their general ideas and approaches have many differences, there are also some fundamental similarities in how they saw the challenges that face people who are struggling with a variety of mental and emotional issues.

Their common experiences of having begun both as priests within the Catholic church, who then left the church to found their own schools of thought and practice with a phenomenological approach at their foundation, seems serendipitous, or, in the words of Carl Jung, synchronous.

There are many, many examples of this throughout history, way before there was the internet and our now instantaneous ability to access information of any type. I am sure you have noticed such coincidences within your own life as well.

I invite you to reflect on this and, if you have an example to share, please do so in the comments. It seems important to be able to notice how we are connected with each other in these mysterious, yet profound, ways.

As we become able to observe them with greater consciousness and appreciation, we can strengthen our positive, creative, life-enhancing bonds with others, wherever we may be.

If you’re interested in learning more about Jung’s Collective Unconscious and Rupert Sheldrake’s Morphic Fields, I’ve written a companion article comparing these two fascinating ideas:

Collective Unconscious or Morphic Fields? Two Ways of Understanding Human Connectedness

 Click here or on the title above to check it out.