Do you know how a legend is born?
From a true story.
The dynamics are similar to those of the well-known children’s game ‘telephone’.
And the same thing happens with family stories.
Someone recounts an event that happened in their life or in the life of a family member, emphasising one part and hiding another.
As in the game of “telephone”, where you whisper something in someone else’s ear, in families some things are whispered, facts are exchanged between half-truths and half-lies.
So we create myths (legends), which can be integrative or disintegrative.
Integrative or symbolic myths (which unite, which connect) are healthy. For something difficult to understand, a story is created to facilitate the integration of the fact into the reality of that moment. For example, the death of a grandfather can be told to his grandson as the moment when his beloved grandfather became a little star in the sky.
The sacred myths of all cultures seek to integrate Heaven and Earth, the unknown with the known, the incomprehensible with the comprehensible. Just as our unconscious uses symbolic language to bring together our two worlds: external and internal, appearance and essence.
But depending on culture, religion, social status, degree of perfection and vanity, the opposite can happen in our families: painful or shameful events are hidden, creating unmentionable secrets, where a diabolical myth is established. Diabolical because it divides, gives a double message, excluding something that is part of the system, of the REAL, of the WHOLE. This is where madness and tragedy appear, as if they were ghosts that appear and haunt us from time to time.
Having spent longer periods of time in Italy, I had the opportunity to visit medieval towns and castles. Castles are home to many legends and also many ghosts!
And who are ghosts?
The etymology of the word ghost derives from the Greek ‘phantázein’, meaning ‘that which appears’, also derived from ‘phainein’ – to show. This word and its meaning are linked to the word for light, ‘phos’, because its presence shows us what there is to see.
A ghost is anything or anyone who, for some reason, has been mistakenly excluded from the system’s field of vision, whether out of shame, pain, suffering, trauma, or being disintegrated by EVERYTHING.
The point is that what has been unduly excluded from your system will ‘appear’ as a ‘phantom limb’, which will then haunt you through symptoms, madness, repetitions of tragedies or materialise in a new member in subsequent generations.
It is as if the phantom (the excluded) occasionally seems to say to its system:
– You erased me, but I’m here!!! I’m here!!
This “phenomenon” can occur in various circumstances, such as when we lose a limb in an accident and continue to feel it. Even when we exclude a feeling that “appears” to us in the form of a symptom, or a traumatic situation that “appears” to us in nightmares.
Ghosts haunt us because we do not want to see them and integrate them into our lives!
They are our shadows that we insist on hiding, excluding.
And while we hide something that has traumatised or embarrassed us, we create a beautiful and perfect appearance, beyond any suspicion.
And then, visiting the castle of Montebello in Emilia Romagna, I encountered a little more about a very famous ghost here: Azzurrina….
she had sky-coloured eyes and light hair with blue highlights…
Azzurrina descended from a very wealthy family, the Malatestas. They owned many lands and kingdoms, where marriages were arranged by the church and the state to unite noble families, increase power and even appease wars.
Legend has it that Azzurrina, the protagonist of a sad story, was an 8-year-old albino girl with blue eyes.
But in medieval times, albino women were considered witches and believed to have supernatural and demonic powers, so they were not well regarded.
This story, told for three centuries, is full of fantastic elements that remain fascinating to this day.
Legend has it that Azzurrina was born an albino, and difference has always frightened human beings, sometimes leading them to believe that the best remedy is to eliminate what is different.
So, to defend (or hide) their daughter, her parents dyed her hair with ink, turning it blue.
For this reason, her father decided to keep her under the watchful eye of two guards, Romenico and Ruggero, and did not allow her to leave the house to protect her from prejudice and what people would say about her.
It is said that in December 1383, while her father was away at battle, Azzurrina, watched over by the two guards, was playing with a cloth ball in Montebello Castle while a violent storm raged outside.
According to legend, her ball fell downstairs and Azzurrina went after it. The girl’s guards followed her, but she fell from the top of the stairs into the castle, where there was a large pile of snow (ice house). The guards heard a horrible scream, but when they arrived, they found nothing.
It is said that Azzurrina’s body was never found…
And legend has it that Azzurrina’s ghost is still in the castle and appears every five years, coinciding with the summer solstice.
To this day, many scholars go to Montebello Castle to study the supernatural phenomena that take place there. There are also recordings of a child calling “mummy”, stories of objects changing places, and so many cases of ghosts living in this castle, in addition to the ghost of the little girl.
Some historians have studied the legend of Azzurrina more closely and found other answers to the facts, arriving at another narrative:
The lord of Montebello Castle was married to the daughter of the then powerful Malatesta family. But he was ugly, dull, older and lame. The marriage was proposed to unite the possessions and powers of the two families.
But his beautiful young wife had always betrayed him.
She became pregnant and her husband expected them to have a son. But a girl was born, named Adelina. The point is that Adelina was very different physically, because she was born extremely blonde with blue eyes, which revealed the betrayal.
So the suspicion here is that this betrayed husband, out of shame, gave the baby, the fruit of his wife’s adultery, a way to ‘disappear’.
Whether history or legend, the point is that ghosts are unduly excluded from their system of belonging!
The suggestion is to pay close attention to our ghosts!
And when they appear, we can say:
_ All right! I see you! You are here, yes!
_ You exist and you have the right to exist!
_ You are an important member of my story, yes!
And we can ask questions:
_”But who are you?”
_ What do you need?
_ Who excluded you?
_ How can I include you and give you a place of honour in my story?
We can also broaden this idea and see this phenomenon socially and even globally.
When we “see” (not wanting to see) the socially excluded or any other form of exclusion, instead of being frightened by “ghosts”, we must consider them as unduly excluded parts of our SYSTEM.
Author – Jaqueline Cássia de Oliveira
Systemic Family Psychotherapist – Brazil and Italy
SYSTEMIC PSYCHOGENEALOGY APPLIED
Psychogenealogy is a relatively new subject, and psychologist and psychotherapist Jaqueline Cássia de Oliveira is one of the pioneers of these studies and works in Brazil.
On this subject, she has developed the following educational materials: Systemic Psychogenealogy – The family novel told by the genogram©
(with over 1,000 readers) and Who are my ancestors?©
(2018), published by Interação Sistêmica Edições.
She translated and presented the book: Jung, Psicogenealogia e Costellazioni Familiari© (Jung, Psychogenealogy and Family Constellations) by Maura Saita Ravizza, for Interação Sistêmica Edições.
She presented the book Psicogenealogia: Um novo olhar sobre a transmissão da memória familiar (Psychogenealogy: A new look at the transmission of family memory), by her colleague Monica da Silva Justino.
From 2011 to 2016, with Interação Sistêmica®, she organised and held courses and seminars on the theme of systemic psychogenealogy and transgenerationality, bringing together more than 1,000 participants.
From 2011 to 2016, with Interação Sistêmica®, she organised and held courses and seminars on the theme of systemic psychogenealogy and transgenerationality, bringing together more than 700 professionals, including psychologists, systemic psychotherapists and family constellation therapists from various regions of Brazil.
She has named her studies and work on transgenerationality (within the vision of Psychogenealogy, Systemic Family Therapy and Archetypal and Imaginative Psychology) as Applied Systemic Psychogenealogy.
She trained in psychogenealogy through courses and studies of her genossociogram in Italy and Argentina with leading professors and theorists.
She lives between Brazil and Italy and works as a systemic psychotherapist and psychogenealogist online (Skype/Zoom).
WhatsApp (55) 31 99941 4532