Are you living your own life or that of an ancestor?

Have you ever felt a deep sadness that doesn't seem to have a real cause in your current life? Do you feel that your romantic or professional decisions are on "autopilot", or do you experience a chronic fatigue that doctors can't seem to explain?

We often believe that our emotional blocks arise from recent traumas, but Biodecoding and Humanist Clinical Psychosomatics invite us to look much further back. According to these disciplines, a large part of our personality, our fears, and our choices were programmed before we could speak our first word.

The Gestational Sense Project: your first "life contract"

Dr. Dr. Salomon Sellam, one of the leading international figures in psychosomatics, popularized a revealing concept known as the "Gestational Sense Project". This concept explains that no human being arrives in the world by chance or as a blank canvas.

Our existence is strongly influenced by a critical period spanning from the 9 months prior to our conception, continuing through the entire gestation in the maternal womb, and culminating around our first 3 years of life. During this time, the deep longings, unspeakable fears, financial stress, and relationship conflicts of our parents are "discharged" biologically and emotionally into our neural network.

If a child is conceived unconsciously in an attempt to save a marriage on the verge of collapse, their "Sense Project" will be to act as the family's glue. In their adult life, this person will likely develop a "savior" pattern.

Knowing this story is the first step toward freeing ourselves from it and beginning to build our own.

The Lying Figure Syndrome: when you carry a family "ghost"

Even more striking is the Automatic Transgenerational Repair Dynamic, which Dr. Sellam named the "Lying Figure Syndrome".

In every family there are tragedies: premature deaths, inexplicable accidents, children who left too soon, or women who lost their lives in childbirth. When the pain of that loss is so overwhelming that the family system cannot bear it, the grief is not processed correctly and it "freezes". The unconscious of the family clan panics in the face of that void.

To compensate, the system "chooses" a child born in later generations to carry the memory of that deceased ancestor. It is an unconscious attempt to resurrect the one who is gone.

Unmistakable Signs of the Yaciente

• Vital collapse: they feel as though they are living life halfway, as if they were in an eternal waiting room or "dead among the living".
• Color and cold: an almost hypnotic attraction to constantly wearing black, and they tend to feel extremely cold.
• Synchronicities: they often carry the same name as the family member who died tragically, or their conception and birth dates coincide mathematically with the ancestor's date of death.

Invisible Loyalties: the Family's "Grand Ledger"

All of this happens because we operate under what psychiatrist Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy defined as "Invisible Loyalties". The family system keeps a kind of unconscious accounting book where injustices, sacrifices, and debts are recorded. Out of blind love for our tribe, we sabotage our own success, our health, or our happiness in order to repay that emotional debt.

How to Cut the Thread and Be Reborn

Freeing ourselves from these mandates does not mean stopping loving our family — quite the opposite: it means loving them from a place of consciousness and adulthood.

Family Constellations propose a practice of energetic separation. It requires the person to look inwardly at that tragic ancestor, or at their parents, and through healing phrases return the weight they carried for them:

"Now I see that out of blind love I carried this burden for you. I ask for your forgiveness, and out of respect for you and your story, I return it to you with love."

Returning the deceased to their rightful place in the family story and allowing parents to own their own destiny is the only path that finally allows us to begin breathing our own air and truly live our own life.