FAMILY CONSTELLATION CIRCLES

I’d be happy to talk with you about creating a private constellation for you. Here are some options to give you ideas for what’s possible:

• Private one-on-one sessions are a great way to work with constellations at your own pace. I tailor each session to make it most effective for you. We can use markers (e.g. stones, shoes, or cards) for yourself and for family members. Or some folks like is to use their inner sight to touch into their relationships with family members.
• I also offer custom packages which include: a private genogram session, where I would interview you to learn about your family tree, family’s resources and the patterns binding you. And then we’d set up a constellation I’d facilitate for you in a private group. I would help bring in experienced representatives for your constellation along with anyone in your network you’d want to be there.

Please click here to learn about nature constellations.

You are always welcome to sit in the outer circle, simply observing, without representing or setting a constellation. In constellations, we appreciate observers for your presence helping hold space for the whole group.

At the start of each group, I gain the consent of all present to a commitment of confidentiality. You may also prefer to do a constellation with me privately. Please see first question in FAQ above, or phone or email me to learn more.

I keep my circles small for a more personal experience and open with an agreement to confidentiality, a brief round of introductions, and then offer an invocation to create safe, ritual space. Whoever wants to work shares a bit about his or her issue and intention for healing or visioning. After clarifying the intention, I will help the seeker decide who should be represented. The seeker may invite the representatives, who can accept or decline.For example, with a family issue, I might suggest the seeker choose representatives from the group to represent father, mother and self. For a workplace constellation, there could be representatives for the boss, a manager, the seeker and a co-worker.

The representatives form a group, standing in the centre of the space. This initial constellation typically shows the stuck or unresolved dynamics. For example, the representatives may look away from each other. With my help, the representatives enter an inquiry together in the spirit of restoring love, dignity, and healthy relationship with each other in the family or other system.

I encourage everyone to stay in touch with their breath and body sensations. There’s no need for the representatives to make up a story or do anything more than report what they are actually experiencing. My role is to facilitate the unfolding movement, while the seeker watches from the outer circle. During the constellation, I will check in with the seeker and course correct as needed. The rest of the participants sit in the circle with the seeker, helping to hold space.

At the end of the constellation, I guide everyone in a brief releasing of the representations. I’m also available to see you privately for further integration.
By engaging in constellations, whether group members know each other or not, healing happens. The open format, dedicated to what is actually true for each person, allows for a variety of experiences coming out of one constellation. Constellations can be intense with emotions flowing and yet from all I’ve experienced, by the end, my heart opens. Often I feel everyone else’s heart opening too

In a constellation, we enter a ritual space that constellation facilitator and author Daan van Kampenhout described as outside of our normal sense of linear time. Upon completion of the constellation, we typically advise the seeker to refrain from analyzing, just as one would not pick at a scab, but rather allow the transformations of healing to take place in their own way. In my experience, some effects of a constellation are immediate. Yet there are many layers and dimensions to our lives. Do give your constellation freedom to work its magic in its own time, whether that be weeks, months or years. And trust in the power of silence.

Bert Hellinger had contact with the Moreno’s, the founders of psychodrama and studied sculpting with Virginia Satir. Yet, systemic constellation work is not the same as psychodrama or sculpting.

Systemic constellation work is a distinct method of its own. In constellations, we do not use the techniques of psychodrama, such as play acting or trying to create a particular plotline. Instead, each representative remains true to what she or he is actually feeling and perceiving in the moment. Typically, in sculpting, family members represent themselves. In constellations, we see the benefit of letting others represent family members, as those who know little or nothing about our family may be more open to directly portraying stuck or hurt places and to shifting into new possibilities.

In systemic constellation work, we create ritual space by welcoming our ancestors and guides. We recognize the importance of culture-of-origin and cultural history, the gift economy of giving and receiving in service, and exercise a general caution not to analyze during or after a constellation.

Bert Hellinger (1925–2019), the founder of systemic constellation work, became a priest in his native Germany at 20 years old and about 10 years later went to South Africa as a missionary. He taught seminary among the Zulu for 16 years, becoming fluent in their language. Toward the end of his time in South Africa, Hellinger left the Catholic Church to embrace the phenomenological approach—seeing what is.

The Zulu have a deep respect for ancestors who are seen as guides to the living and intermediaries with God. Traditionally, a Zulu sangoma throws bones, in ways remarkably similar to setting constellations, and then may seek out excluded figures as keys to healing individually and collectively.

After his time with the Zulu, Hellinger returned to Germany and studied to become a psychotherapist. Out of his training and life experience, Hellinger identified cross-cultural, universal human dynamics we all share. He originated Family Constellation work, a modality practiced primarily in a group setting, as a way to aid individual and inter-generational healing — starting with German Jewish victims, Nazi perpetrators and their descendants.
He began publishing in 1993 and has written many books on Constellations. Facilitators who studied directly with Hellinger further developed the work, as have their students, continuing to today. The modality started with families and grew to include any human and/or natural system, coming to be called systemic constellation work.

Systemic constellation work remains controversial because it directly challenges traditional Western beliefs and norms. Yet it has spread internationally and is being used in a wide array of settings and contexts, as part of a multi–disciplinary approach to problem solving, healing and social evolution.

It seems many of the universal family dynamics Hellinger originally identified can come to play in any human system and even in nature. Constellations can be set for systems and nested systems (systems within systems) including familial, organizational, societal and with nature. The International Centre for Wholistic Law uses Constellation Work as part of their approach to environmental and other legal disputes. Constellations have been used to envision peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and in other traumatized nations, including Rwanda and South Africa.

Often newcomers to Family Constellations are surprised that it doesn’t matter whether or not the representatives know anything consciously about the family member or aspect they are representing. They wonder, “How can I be truly helpful?” All it takes to be a “good” representative is to not try and fix the situation, but rather to simply to report what you are feeling in the now.

I have read about and personally witnessed representatives displaying behaviors of the person they are representing that they had no foreknowledge of. Time and again I see a seeker shake his or her head in awe at how a representative behaves like or says things her or his family member would have done or said. This is with folks who know little or nothing about the seeker’s family.

No one knows for sure why constellations work, but we have some pretty strong evidence, based on decades of observation that constellations do work and that representatives naturally, without special training, can be extraordinarily helpful.

Here are the basic hypotheses:

• Life connects us.
• We share the experiences of being human, of having parents (whether we knew them or not), of the force of group conscience on our beliefs and actions.
• Human beings pick up information through the 5 senses but also in unseen ways, we have yet to fully understand.
• All beings are immersed in unseen informational fields. In constellations we work with what we call the Knowing Field, a field we share with our ancestors.
• Like magnetic filings are moved into a pattern on a piece of paper by an underlying magnet, through an unseen magnetic field, we can be moved by the Knowing Field.

The scientist Rupert Sheldrake proposes that constellations work because of these unseen informational fields. In particular, he identifies the morphogenetic field and offers the analogy of birds flying in a flock or fish swimming in a school. Their incredibly responsive and synchronized abilities are difficult to explain without a Knowing Field from which, under supportive conditions, we can gain needed knowledge, information and healing.

Recent research shows trauma can alter genes. Neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda, PhD and others discovered that a mom or dad who survived 9/11 or the Holocaust and underwent trauma related gene changes, then passed on those changes to their children and even their grandchildren. Yehuda’s findings give support to Family Constellations possibilities. If our genes can change coding based on traumatic events in our lives, perhaps we can also change them back with immersive positive experiences.

Somatic methods and attunement are fundamental to Constellation Circles. Peter Levine, Diane Poole Heller and many other psychotherapists and healing professionals working with trauma, attachment and developmental disruption have demonstrated the importance of attuned relationships, tapping into the body, sensation and utilizing physical enactment as critical to success for true and lasting healing. In all my constellation work, I utilize the latest understanding about attachment healing, attunement, and post-traumatic growth.

Here’s a short post about the basic principles of family constellations using my own healing journey from my dad’s suicide as an example: Family Constellations Opens the Flow of Life Like Nothing Else

In my blog you’ll find some accounts of family, cultural and nature constellations I’ve led. Here you’ll find some good books on constellations. They’re in the section titled, “Family, Nature & Systemic Constellations”, towards the bottom of the page.

Watch Another Self on Netflix, a Turkish drama dubbed in English about cultural and ancestral healing with constellations. And also Episode 5 of Sex, Love & goop on Netflix. Constellation Facilitator Kato Wittich does a lovely job leading two family constellations, one for each member of a romantic couple. H/T to Kato for coining the term resonator as an alternative to representative.