POSTMORTAL CONSTELLATION
| Brain and Organ Level: The corresponding brain relays are the control centers of the cervix uteri/coronary veins (left temporal lobe) and coronary arteries (right temporal lobe), located opposite each other in the cerebral cortex.
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| First Conflict
| Second Conflict
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NHS = Normal hormone status LTS = Low testosterone status LES = Low estrogen status
*With left-handers the conflict is transferred to the other brain hemisphere
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The Postmortal Constellation manifests itself as compulsive thinking about death. People in this constellation are preoccupied with thoughts about what will happen after they die; hence, the term “postmortal”. They engage in images around their funeral, who will attend, what will be said, who will read the eulogy, what will happen to their belongings, or how their family and friends will mourn their death (“I rehearsed my own funeral over and over, adding careful details each time”). The purpose of the constellation is to allow the individual to retreat into the “realm of death” until life provides better circumstances. Coming out of the constellation is like a rebirth.
| Example of a recurring Postmortal Constellation: A 46 year-old right-handed male suffered a territorial loss conflict through the unexpected death of his mother, resulting in a depression (primary depression). Whenever he is conflict-active with a sexual conflict (his second conflict), he becomes immediately manic-depressive. Since the loss of his mother outweighs his sexual conflicts, he is predominantly depressed. During periods when he is in constellation, he continuously ruminates about his death. With a primary depression, that is, when he is out of constellation, he doesn't have these compulsive thoughts.
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The constellation could also present as idiosyncrasies such as an obsession with obituaries, an excessive attraction to graves and cemeteries (“When her kids are at school she goes to local cemeteries, taking hundreds of pictures of gravestones”), or an exaggerated fascination with funerals (“Our son loves funerals. He's really fascinated by the entire affair of death and burial; it's an obsession”). In extreme cases, a person develops a funeral addiction with a compulsion to attend as many funerals as possible (“What set me off was my father's death in 1983. The first thing I do every morning is to turn on the radio to find out if anyone has died. If I don't hear it on the radio, I call the hospitals and the local funeral home”). In others, the constellation might kindle the desire to work in a hospice and care for the dying or to become a grief counselor.
| Queen Victoria, who ruled England from 1837 to 1901, was obsessed with death after her beloved husband Prince Albert died unexpectedly at the young age of 42. Over the next 40 years, the queen performed lengthy rituals of mourning. Each morning, servants had to set out Albert's clothes, bring hot water for his shaving cup, and change his bed linens.
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| Patrick V. Ebenhöh (Germany), a follower of the Goth culture, has been sleeping in a casket for over ten years. The Goth lifestyle certainly attracts folks that are in a Postmortal Constellation.
Click on the image to watch the video (in German)
Click here for the transcript of the English translation.
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A moderate Postmortal Constellation creates a strong intellectual, artistic, or spiritual interest in death. Due to the constellation, the person is irresistibly drawn to read literature or watch documentaries about death and the afterlife. During the period of a Postmortal Constellation, a writer is compelled to write fictional work about death, a composer to compose a requiem or songs about death, a painter to paint images of and around death. A researcher might become passionately committed to the study of death and dying. With a continuing constellation such a passion lasts over a lifetime.
| Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004)
Kübler-Ross suffered under a strict father, who opposed her wish to be a doctor and demanded she become a secretary in his business. She defied her father’s plans and, at the age of 16, left home. Was this the territorial loss conflict (her second conflict – see conflict sequence) that established the Postmortal Constellation?
According to an article in the NYT, “in the 1970's, she became embroiled in a scandal after it was discovered that a psychic at her California retreat center was having sex with bereaved widows who thought they were embracing their departed husbands in the dark” (New York Times, December 26, 2004). This sex scandal might have reinforced a sexual conflict (her first conflict), she must have experienced already at a younger age. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was right-handed. Note her male facial features.
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| J.K. Rowling, writer of the Harry Potter fantasy novels admits: “My books are largely about death.” She attributes her obsession with death to the trauma of losing her mother who died at the age of 45. “Barely a day goes by when I do not think of her” (The Telegraph, January 10, 2006).
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| The American movie Harold and Maude tells the story of Harold, a young man, who is obsessed with death. His hobby is to attend the funeral of strangers. At one such occasion, he meets Maude, a 79 year-old eccentric, who shares Harold’s “mania”… A true constellation adventure!
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An intense Postmortal Constellation causes compulsive thoughts about committing suicide (in GNM, we therefore call this constellation also the Suicide Constellation). The suicidal thoughts circle continuously around where, when, and how to take one’s life. The envisioned suicide is, typically, a “gentle death” such as taking an overdose of sleeping pills, poisoning, inhaling toxic gases, or drowning (compare suicidal ideation with an Aggressive Constellation or with a Flying Constellation). The suicide notes are extensive and dramatic in style and content. Here we also find the “heroic death”, where the person is convinced that his death serves the greater good, as well as the “martyr death”, where the suicide stages his own death with the intention to go down in history. Combined with a Megalomania Constellation, the suicide is driven by gaining sympathy and admiration for sacrificing his life.
As long as the depressed mood is accentuated, the person only contemplates or talks about committing suicide. The suicidal act is, however, carried out when the mania-related conflict is suddenly reactivated through setting on a conflict track (a certain situation, a certain subject, the encounter with a certain person) or through a conflict relapse. This shift can happen in a split second.
NOTE: Suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts, and suicides only occur in a manic-depressive state, never with a primary depression or primary mania. The pursuit of suicide is motivated by feeling instinctively that left without a territory and without a sexual mate one’s existence is, strictly biologically speaking, “superfluous”.
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It has been clinically observed that people who suffer from depression usually commit suicide at a time when they come out of the depression (“Suicidal urges are particularly high after a depressed patient first enters therapy. It is particularly tragic, when a patient has gone through therapy and the depression substantially lifted, that they then kill themselves”, Understanding Thoughts of Suicide, January 10, 2022). This also explains why antidepressants increase the risk of suicide.
| “The FDA requires ‘black box warnings’ on all SSRIs stating explicitly that they double the suicide rates from two per 1,000 to four per 1,000 in children and adolescents” (Big Pharma, Antidepressants and Suicide, June 10, 2018).
Antidepressants known as SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) raise the levels of serotonin in the brain by stopping the absorption through the brain’s various receptors (see chemical imbalance theory).
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If someone is suicidal before starting to take an antidepressant, the drug lifts the depression and enhances the manic mood. Hence, the medication does not create the suicidal thoughts but rather facilitates putting the suicidal plan into action (see also antidepressants and violent behaviors ). Dr. Hamer: “The symptoms cannot be cured by chemicals but only through considering the conflicts.”
The GNM approach is to
| keep the client in the depressed mood by focusing on the depression-related conflict in order to prevent suicide
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| downgrade the depression-related conflict and NOT resolve it because of the involvement of the coronary arteries relay relay. If an intense territorial loss conflict or sexual conflict were to be resolved, the person would suffer a heart attack during the Epileptoid Crisis (see organ level). Downgrading the conflicts reduces the intensity of the conflicts and the suicidal thoughts stop. Hence, the objective of the GNM approach is to turn an intense constellation into a moderate constellation with which a person can live comfortably.
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