One-on-one Family Constellations
Family Constellations began with Bert Hellinger, a former Catholic priest, teacher, philosopher, author, and psychotherapist. He had an insatiable curiosity about what was required to make peace with ourselves at a soul level.
When he left the priesthood, Hellinger took what he had learned from his work with the Zulu people and the valuable insight he’d gained into how they structured their extended families. Although imperfect, they appeared to have a place, connection, and love.
This innate ancient knowledge is familiar to many indigenous groups, folklore, and deep inner knowing. It has been deeply imprinted through centuries of cycles of war, famine, and invasion, as well as the beauty and craziness of our nature as fallible, sentient human beings.
Hellinger did a wide range of psychotherapeutic education, where he developed the core of philosophy, from which came healing processes for us in the West. It assists us in reconnecting to our roots and reinstating essential core wisdom. How do we live collectively, receive nourishment for survival, have an inner connection, and develop a healthy sense of worth? A gift we could nurture in our children. These are aspects we have largely lost in our Western world, as many of us have lost our connection to our tribal, cultural and shamanic wisdom as we are born into disconnection. Our modern trend has moved largely towards the norm of nuclear, single-parent, split and blended families.
Hellinger developed Family Constellations as a dynamic (continuing to develop) philosophy, art, and practice that provides us with ways to self-heal and reach healthier places of acceptance and respect for ourselves through respect for our ancestors.
Hellinger rediscovered the importance of spatial awareness of human connection, place, and the availability of love as an innate requirement for human health and well-being. To navigate and co-create ways to live well in the present as individuals connected in groups in our materialistically focused lives.
The constellation process
Part of the process is recognising, accepting, and taking responsibility for our multifaceted natures—innate goodness, darkness, selfishness, insecurities, and the potential for violence and atrocities. Look at our world. It’s all there.
“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Hellinger developed the idea that we must first honour ourselves as part of our system and then look at what we struggle with from this place. Giving us a bigger picture of ourselves as individuals and our struggles in the context of where we come from. The science and research of Epigenetics prove that patterns and trauma are transferred through generations. Details
It’s no longer a ‘woo-woo’ pseudo-science.
It is limiting to explore the deep-seated issues of individuals as isolated entities in counselling and psychotherapy, not considering the effects of our relational nature involving loyalties, burdens, and entanglements that we are born into.
Attempting therapy without including the context of the environment, such as the family system, culture, history, and relational bonds, is missing a huge opportunity to tap into valuable resources that may be available.
A person’s context shows what is present and also what is missing. Such as resources and strength, dysfunctions, and insecurities. What is within forms our inner world and drives our relationships, needs, beliefs, and how we conduct our lives. Suppose the core of who we think we are is based on incomplete or faulty foundations. How can we expect to make a functional, healthy sense of self with good connections and be part of a functional society?
The Field
Hellinger found that in sitting with a group of people who had never met before, if one person is elected to look at a personal issue, Hellinger would instruct them to choose people from the group to represent the key people of their issue and place them spatially from each other in the space; something interesting happened. The people placed (representatives/reps) start to experience sensations in their bodies. Hellinger believed that we appeared to have entered the ancestral energetic field of the client and their family system. Revealing the family’s unspoken, subconscious generational information and the presenting problem. He developed ways of working with this to provide a safe place where acknowledgments and expression could realised so that the client’s family system could be brought into better order (Orders of Love). From here, healthier connections may occur, and love can flow to all system members. New perspectives may arise, resulting in new experiences and possible solutions.
This way of working is frequently challenging for other modalities such as counselling, psychotherapy, psychology theories and practice, and mental health. It may be because it is too simple intellectually. The theory is not rocket science, yet it can connect to and shed light on the deepest part of who we are psycho-dynamically.
It requires immense emotional development, openness, and maturity in the practitioner, which is not required to the same extent in psychotherapeutic knowledge and education. Intellectual knowledge, understanding, and awareness are not the same as the knowledge that comes through constellation experiential growth and an understanding of what the heart and soul require for healing.
Those who do Family Constellation training frequently find it challenging because working this way requires rethinking everything we have been doing so far. For many, this is painful, mainly if we’ve spent years in an educational psychotherapeutic field and have developed a strong sense of devotion and loyalty to our teachers and colleagues.