About Family Constellations
Origins of Family Constellations
Family Constellations is based on the inspirational work of Bert Hellinger. A former priest and missionary to the Zulu in South Africa for 16 years, he was also an educator, psychoanalyst, group dynamic expert and family therapist. He brought his vast and diverse experience to this work helping professionals everywhere to embrace the new possibility that this innovative approach offers. Family Constellations have become the signature work of Bert Hellinger’s approach, as well as his observations and insights into family entanglements and their resolutions. I had the great honour to sit with Bert Hellinger in trainings in Austria, at this time he was working alongside his wife Sophie Hellinger.
He was very humble and his approach, his wisdom and light were easy to feel and experience. I consider my time sitting at the trainings with Bert Hellinger to be one of the great blessings in my life. The endless passion he had for this work has spread across the world to myself and many others.
What I experienced with Bert Hellinger was that he had transcended so much at this point in his teaching. He was working from what he called the ‘spirit mind’ which is in his words is beyond good and bad. His approach had no haste. It was thoughtful, mindfully slow and the direct work of spirit though him. He was offering us a transmission of his life’s work and his consciousness, which is one I am still receiving now as I continue this work. At the time he left his body I was in London with other students who had trained with him in Austria, we all heard the news together, this was no coincidence. We all had him deep in our hearts and our lives had been enriched by his life. My recent guidance to return to training others comes from a deep wish to honour this work and Bert Hellinger and to bring light into the suffering of others. It is also a wish offer a training that holds the wisdom of his later teachings.
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.