What is Family Constellation?

Family Constellation is an approach to healing trauma across generations founded by the late Bert Hellinger.  Hellinger discovered that there are certain invisible laws that family and social systems follow.  These laws exist to care for the belonging of everyone in the system and means that later generations of a family, organisation or society often carry the unresolved trauma for previous generations, this act of unconscious carrying which keeps us stuck in the past we call ‘entanglement’ or ‘identification’.  We unconsciously carry things for our parents and our grandparents and often the bad choices we make in our lives are unconscious attempts to try to help them, of course this helping is in vain as those difficulties have already long passed.  All we end up doing is sabotaging our own success out of an unconscious loyalty to something that has already happened.  It is through bringing conscious loving awareness to bare on our identifications and finding a deeper acceptance for what is that we can begin moving beyond the suffering of the past and into a brighter future.  

There are some basic principles which underpin the classic Family Constellation methodology.  Those are Belonging, Order & Balance. 

Belonging

All those in the system have an equal right to be included in the system.  In Family Systems those who belong are parents and their siblings, grandparents and their siblings, sometimes great grandparents, former significant partners of parents and grandparents, aborted and miscarried children.  Perpetrators & Victims are also members of our system, what that means is that if one of our ancestors murdered someone then their victim also becomes part of our system and vice versa, if one of our ancestors is killed by someone from outside our family then through the trauma of that event the perpetrator then belongs in our system.  For example Jews and Germans are very much part of each other’s systems because of the holocaust.  You can imagine how this plays out that if you angrily reject the person who murdered one of your grandparents, you then unconsciously take on the energy of that murderer, you become aggressive & violent or alternatively you will end up constantly finding yourself playing the victim of other people’s violence in loyalty to the trauma of the grandparent.   The Soul of the system takes care that all those that belong are somehow included in the whole picture of the system, this often means that we (later generations) unconsciously behave in ways that don’t serve us in order to try and include excluded members from previous generations, this is often the root of our problems and difficulties in life.  Healing happens by bringing awareness to these unconscious identifications with excluded family members, realising that our belonging to our family does not require our loyalty to their trauma and by reclaiming our larger belonging to ourselves and the universe. 

Order

Those who came first chronologically are higher up the order.  Children respect the roles of their parents and grandparents, the parents respect the roles of their parents.  Younger siblings respect their older siblings as being older.  Current partners respect previous partners as having come first, current partners also acknowledge that children from previous relationships come before new relationships.  Everyone has there true place in the system based on the chronological order.  When everyone is standing in their true place chronologically then like a waterfall love flows through the roots and is able to move us forward in life.  The problem often is that due to unresolved systemic trauma everyone is not standing in their true place and love can’t flow properly.  This disturbance of order we call ‘entanglement’.  For instance, how often do you feel like the parent or partner of your parent? We call this phenomena ‘parentification’.  All children make themselves too big because they are deeply sensitive to their parents weakness and they want to help them, this helping behaviour over time cements into the formation of chronically repeating negative  behavioural patterns, the symptoms of which are many and varied depending on the types of systemic trauma which lie unresolved and unseen in the system which are causing the disturbance of order in the first place.  By acknowledging the true order in a safe healing context, progressive movements of soul are catalysed which bring us into a greater flow of love and connectedness.  

Balance

The principles of giving and receiving are also important.  A healthy image of balance within a family system means parents give and children receive, children need give nothing in return except be grateful for what was given.  Unconditional love has its place in parent-child relationships.  In a healthy partner relationship however the dynamics are somewhat different, each one gives and receives based on an awareness of the limit in the relationship.  Unconditional love has no place in the partner relationship, the love here is conditional on each person parenting and taking care of themselves.  Every time a partner gives something, the other needs to give something in return in order to maintain the balance.  If more is given than the other has the capacity to give back then this creates inbalance and rather than being a healthy partner relationship, it begins looking more like a parent-child relationship.  Its important in the partner relationship to maintain an awareness of limits, its when we begin wanting more than is possible that things become toxic and pathological. 
If we step back for a moment from the parents and partners, connecting with the bigger picture of the system over generations.  Balance over generations at the collective level also needs to be maintained.  For example if one of your ancestors was a Nazi who committed crimes against Jews during WW2, you might feel a strong unconscious impulse to try to correct the inbalance.  Maybe your work becomes helping refugees and those existing on the fringes of society, you are passionate about your work and you don’t know why, at some point it starts feeling like a lot of pressure and you realize through Family Constellations that you have been doing it for your family system.  With this awareness maybe its possible to let it go and do something in life that brings you more pleasure and joy.  

Looking Deeper

The way things look on the surface of things is often very different to how they really are underneath. The conscious mind often gets identified in ideas and narratives about one’s own personal truth which are false. When we begin listening to the unconscious reality of things (or the realities of the soul), then possibilities for healing often begin to emerge. Often whatever we think the reality of our personal situation is, the opposite is true. So this work has a tendency to challenge our preconceptions about ourselves. There is a culture in therapeutic/healing fields of working for change. In this work we orient more to the experience of ‘acknowledging what is’. In this work we are engaging in the practice of being present with a deeper reality, without attempting to change anything. This work is simply about ‘loving acceptance of what is’ and trusting in the transformational qualities of awareness.

I offer 1:1 Family Constellations also integrating SE.