Lockdown and online work

My students have repeatedly urged me to write down the last years of my work. In fact, I have focused a lot on practical work, training, and online education. There are no written works of mine anymore.

What exactly should I write? What has been added over the years since the writing of my first book in 2016 to today?
In fact, even back then, there were already enough elements to reshape the practical work with Classical Family Constellations, observed and integrated with intrauterine experiences and the Twin System.

However, at the time, I didn’t yet have enough numbers, numerical cases, that could unequivocally support my observations, intuitions, and statements. I therefore felt it was appropriate not to include them in my first book.

Five years later, practical work has proven its validity, allowing me to refine my methodology. It was, however, the lockdown period and online work through the Zoom platform that offered me the chance to refine the theoretical-structural aspect of my work as well.
I retrace here the various stages, sincerely thanking all of you who made all of this possible.

Bert Hellinger used to say that in working with clients, one receives much more than what the constellation facilitator is able to give. This was one of his teachings, one of the most valuable for me.

The Lockdown
I have always had many contacts abroad and I regularly follow the foreign press in English, German, and French. So, I read about the mysterious virus that had struck China in October 2019, although authorities claimed everything was already under control. In Germany, the first cases were reported in November 2019. There was talk of strange, persistent pneumonia due to a viral infection with unusually high hospitalization rates compared to the seasonal average.
I was amazed by the lack of alarm in Italy. I therefore decided to avoid airports as a precaution and travel by car. My husband necessarily accompanied me on these trips: 57 days between early January and the end of February, traveling around Rome, Milan, Bad Reichenhall, Ferrara, Faenza, Modena, and Cava de’ Tirreni. The pandemic followed us from city to city, and we returned just in time before the first complete lockdown.

Shortly after our arrival in Sicily, my father had a crisis due to a rather compromised clinical condition. During my long absence, he had stopped eating. His condition required hospitalization. My brother and sister arrived from Germany, but after a few days, the first lockdown was imposed. Every day, we knocked on the ward door. The doctors and restrictive measures were relentless. Eventually, they no longer allowed us to enter the hospital.

After a few weeks, my sister returned to Germany, and my brother followed her shortly after.
I stayed, glad that, unable to travel for work, at least I could be by my mother’s side during these difficult weeks.

My father does not use, and has always refused to learn to use, the cell phone. I felt like I was losing my mind; the medical staff didn’t respond to our calls or always responded with someone who wasn’t treating my father. A bed neighbor gave us the opportunity to hear from him when he was able to speak. In one of our brief conversations, I told him how painful it was for me to know he was there alone. He replied that his father had died alone in the war at the age of 24 in a foreign land, and that he often wondered what his father had lived through, what he had thought when he was about to die in that prison camp in Russia, there in the snow, alone. He told me that he felt lucky to have us, even though we didn’t visit him in the hospital, perhaps because he had been a bad father and didn’t deserve our visits.
My heart ached. However, these few words connected me to my grandfather, to the bond of love, to the sacred bond between my father and his father, whom he had never known except through photos and letters my grandfather wrote from the front, which my father kept as his most precious possession. The figure of my grandfather with his destiny grew within me, it gave me peace, I felt my father so strongly connected to his father, to his father’s fate, I felt so small before their destinies, before their love, before my will, wanting so much for my father, as if he were mine. I entrusted my father to his father, withdrew with great peace and trust in the course of life that connected my father exactly to his place, to his destiny within the history of his family, and took a step back.

Only later did I reflect on the fact that it was my father’s generation, the children, siblings of those who died during World War II, who were dying from Covid.

Gradually, my father overcame the crisis, and he was stable enough to return home – the doctor had told us it was to die in peace. I cared for him for two months. I was grateful. The lockdown had given me the opportunity to be by his side, to care for him, and to take care of my mother, who couldn’t have managed this emergency alone. I considered these weeks a gift, perhaps the last with him.
Finally, my father regained more and more vitality and quality of life.
And I slowly began to resume my usual activities. And only now did I begin to realize the devastation around me. I listened to the news, I listened to the stories of my friends in Bergamo, Milan, and Germany. I listened to my clients, more or less affected in various ways.

I felt like a miracle, lucky to live through the lockdown period as a gift. I thought about what my contribution could be, how to assist people in difficulty during this period of forced closure.
My practical experience with the Twin System seemed to make me understand the difficulty of those who, closing off escape routes through work, entertainment, and travel, felt trapped at home, in other words, in their amniotic sac. Not only that: they were confined with their families, that is, with the substitutes for their less-loved twin siblings, those who, to put it simply, kept us alive through the disturbance, the annoyance they caused us, and which we poorly tolerated.

On Facebook, I read a post by a psychologist offering free hours of consultation to assist people in difficulty. I thought perhaps I could do the same.

I then proposed the Tuesday evening Zoom meeting of the Twin Group, addressing the disabling relational dynamics in cohabitation during the lockdown in light of Twin Trauma.
From the end of April 2020, for 42 evenings, we met to discuss the theme of the Surviving Twin and the impact on relationships with partners, children, parents, the state, health, work, money, sex, and study.

In the meantime, my students also felt the need to continue their training. So, I started online with the 1st Theoretical-Structural Course of the Twin System, which was divided into 8 meetings.

These online experiences were crucial and contributed to creating a language and support for the methodology of the experiential journey with intrauterine experiences.
Soon, the need arose to add the Integration and Interview Techniques Course, both for clients who needed to deepen their constellation and for students who wanted to apply the Freni method in their work.
This year, after a fairly regular resumption of in-person seminars, we added the Online Supervision and Internship Course for professionals who apply or intend to apply the method.

In July 2020, I was contacted by Geraldo Martelli from Brazil. He asked me to train Brazilian facilitators in my Twin System method.
After more than a year of collaboration, we are now at the 7th Theoretical-Structural Course. In Brazil, I also began training the second-level facilitators in Twin Constellations with the veil, a practice that my Italian students experience live in the experiential seminars.
In July 2021, I was invited by Angelica and Alfonso Malpica of CUDEC to teach at Verano, their summer training camp.
I am very happy with these opportunities that online work has created, making a valuable contribution to the awareness and integration of intrauterine traumatic experiences, from survival reactions to action in life.