About Family Constellations
What are Family Constellations?
Family Constellations are a unique, powerful methodology to free yourself, and your children, from repetitive patterns, damaging behaviours, uncomfortable emotions which are out of proportion to the situation in front of us and addictive tendancies. These can be unconsciously taken on from the family system and can both control and limit your life. In Family Constellations we look at the whole picture of the family and seek to address the individual as part of a family system that functions as an organic unity.
This method of working allows us to uncover hidden dynamics and loyalties which entangle us and link us to the fate and destinies of former generations. Through this work we look into the family soul and see who needs to be included and where the love needs to flow. When the inner order of the family is re-established with love, the way is free for our own potential and task.
The process can be deeply moving and often shows surprising solutions.
What happens in a Constellation?
It is an opportunity to look at your situation by setting up the structure of your family. This is done by selecting other members of the group to represent your own family members or other issues you may choose to bring. When they are set up, the representatives feel like the people they represent without knowing them. I invite the participants to trust their own movements. Together we go beyond judgements of good and bad, beyond judgements of ourselves and others, beyond fear. We open to acceptance of other people as they are, ourselves as we are, everything as it is and our life, as it was given to us. This is what Bert Hellinger calls ‘movements of the sprit mind.’ There is a possibility to move into another consciousness and a healing energy field opens and movements towards all that supports love and life is possible. In this way we learn from the inside about life, other peoples’ feelings and our own belonging to humankind. It is a very enriching experience. The work is not a theatre or an encounter, it shows something of the human condition and a bigger picture of what affects our daily lives.
We are not on our own; we are connected with others in a very significant way. What comes to light in Family Constellations is that all in the family are equal. Nobody is better, nobody is worse. So, we can take our place in the family and by taking our correct place we can be freed from old restrictions and a new strength can awaken. We become free to live our own destiny unimpeded by the past and connected to the gifts of our ancestors.
Origins of Family Constellations
Benefits of Family Constellations
This work can benefit anyone, we all have families, and, in some ways, we are all entangled.
Bert Hellinger discovered that people’s lives are controlled extensively by hidden dynamics.
These are the kind of issues that constellations can help –
Relationship issues
Couples relationships
Making decisions
Family issues
Blended Families (step children, step parents)
Sibling issues
Mental health
Physical health, illness
Lack of happiness
Financial difficulty
Learning difficulties
Anxiety
Bereavement
Loneliness
Adoption
Issues with homeland
How do I recognise when family entanglements are operating? What are the characteristics and signs to indicate that someone could benefit from a constellation?
Unfinished situations from the past express themselves in later relationships in the form of impulsive, inappropriate actions and inappropriately intense feelings. Whenever a person displays unusual, intense emotions and behaviours that aren’t understandable in terms of the current situation you can suspect that there is a systemic entanglement of some kind. It is also possible to look at a persons’ life and see where despite their best efforts it simply is not flowing and for no reason that you can possibly understand.
What situations may impact on the subsequent generations?
Early deaths of parents and/or grandparents
Still births, miscarriages, abortions, or death of a child
Sickness or death of the mother during birth
Adoptions, illegitimate children or abandonment
Suicide or suicide attempts
Murder, crimes, violence
Incest, sexual abuse
Family injustice: inheritance, money, cheats, or riches at the expense of others
Family member made into the role of black sheep or excluded
Addictions e.g: drugs, alcohol, gambling
War & genocide
Immigration
Illness due to physical and/or mental health issues
Loss of money or home in previous generations
‘Secrets’ Mixed Media Installation by Charaka
A piece inspired by Bert Hellinger’s Family Constellations work, which reveals the effect that past secrets have on current and future generations.
In this work we learn that everything that is suppressed in the family does not simply dissolve into thin air, but rather floats around the family system. In consequence, the newer family members, namely the children, feel this energy and live it out.
Wrapped ceramic parcels are displayed as cakes, as a metaphor for the family secrets that we are asked to ‘swallow’ in order to remain members of that particular family. They are clearly inedible, just as family secrets- wrapped up parcels that can never be digested.
Discovered in a small brown suitcase in a junk shop, a mysterious collection of family photographs, notes, letters and fragments of an ancient book, were printed and stitched onto the walls of a tiny room and all its furnishings. The walls are full of secrets, in the metaphor that the family secrets remain embedded in the foundations and structure of the family unit. As long as they remain hidden they powerfully stay with the subsequent generations, often causing chaos.