About
Family Constellations, also called Systemic Constellations, is an alternative approach developed by German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger in the mid-1990s and facilitates healing for issues proving difficult to treat with traditional therapy. It draws from a number of other modalities, including Gestalt therapy, psychoanalysis, Virginia Satir’s family sculpting, psychodynamic therapy, hypnotherapy, systemic family therapy, and Zulu beliefs.
Family Constellations is a unique and powerful approach for exploring and bringing to light the unseen forces that move us in life. Such forces often appear as difficulties, issues, or a sense of being stranded and stuck; affecting our behaviours, life decisions, relationships, career, health/wellbeing or even financial circumstances. It is a therapeutic process for self-exploration, healing and integrating the inner child, understanding core behaviors, breaking subconscious patterns, and removing impediments in order to reintroduce movement and growth towards life, as a conscious adult today. It is considered most effective in addressing concerns that are systemic in nature. These concerns might include ancestral and personal trauma, family of origin issues, and relationship adversities (parent-child, professional, and intimate).
Moreover, Constellations are an incredibly potent means of getting in touch with your body and the messages it holds for you. Accordingly, it can help with unresolved/repressed emotions such as fear and anxiety, grief and rage, in a strong, supported and held environment through allowing their confrontation and processing. For the mind may be distracted and forgetful, but the body will always be present in remembrance.
In this method, we work with the family as the foundational blueprint for every human relationship. Constellations provide a live, three-dimensional image of one’s inner reality as it unveils our entanglements, exclusions, and blockages in our family history, and so, what we’ve attracted in our life at present. We bring awareness and clarity into challenges by focusing the client on the root cause of such difficulties.
In Constellations work, the “client” is referred to as the “Seeker”. The method uses workshop participants (not related to the “Seeker”) as “Representatives” to stand-in for key people in the client’s life such as family members, partners, ex-partners, colleagues, etc. sometimes “abstract” concepts such as an emotion, character quality, country of origin, religion or destiny are also represented. All information is received from the morphogenetic field, which highlights our sense of interconnectedness.
Constellations bring to light hidden dynamics, provide a fresh and clear perspective to unprocessed emotions and events, and open the way for full-flow living and authentic relationships.
“Successful therapy completes something of the past, psychologically and physically. It restores a person’s capacity to be more in the present and available to move forward in life. Having processed and integrated a painful history effectively, a person develops strength that he would not otherwise possess. Now a true ‘Yes’ to life is possible.” – Svagito Liebermeister
What To Expect
Upon booking, you will receive a Family Constellations Assessment form to fill, which provides me with the information about your family, childhood, early recollections, dreams, and as an individual today. This is interpreted to ensure alignment with the issue you’re seeking to resolve and provides the framework for our session.
Unlike traditional therapy, talking about the issue and re-telling the ‘story’ is not the emphasis. We access the issue differently as facilitator and client; working with what is hidden through the deep wisdom of the body in a still, quiet, and safe space and beyond the linear time we experience in this daily world. We will explore the generational system that you are part of and how the patterns and events of the past may be impacting your present relationships and life, and the individual lives of your family members.
In this 90-minute Individual Online Session- I begin by grounding you inwards to ensure you’ve left the mind and are rooted in your physical body to enable receiving from the Living Field and then we begin the constellation where you are innately guided to set up 3-dimensional representation of your ‘inner image’ of your family. Unlike in-person workshops where others are present, we work with figurines or footsteps to represent the family members or elements belonging to the issue that you bring to the session.
This spatial setting out of the people or elements that belong to your issue offers an instantaneous ‘visual map’ of the relationships between each person in the family system. Together we enter into the Field and work through this initial image and the emotions that rise within you during the process, grounded in our hearts and guided by the initial principles of family Constellations (The Orders of Love, Belonging, and Balance).