Family Constellations

Basic Principles and Procedures

Jakob R Schneider, Colleen Beaumont

• Publisher: Carl-Auer Verlag
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783849781460
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

What helps love to flow freely? What keeps us entangled in the lives and fates of others? What can free us from entanglements? Family constellations can help us to look at these issues and take steps towards a happier and more fulfilled life.Family members often become entangled in the lives and fates of others in the family system. This book describes this process, how this appears in family constellations, and how it can be resolved. It clarifies the orders of love in the soul that support relationships between partners, parents and children, and others in the family system. It looks at how family constellations can help lay the past to rest and redirect life energy towards the future.Jakob Robert Schneider calls upon his rich background of experience in this accessible and well-grounded look at family constellations, from the basics to the depths of this work. Constellation leaders at all levels of experience will find support and inspiration in the open and informed discussion. Non-professionals can get an overview and orientation to this approach to family systems."This is a completely up-to-date, basic introduction to family constellations that is well structured, concise, and supported by many clear and often touching case examples. It summarises the development, basic principles, focus, attitude, and various procedures of constellations and it does so in a way that is always comprehensible, logical, differentiated, and stimulating. I know of no book that describes the broad scope of family constellations in such a clear, compact, yet comprehensive way."Dr. Gunthard Weber

1Introduction

What is new and compelling about family constellations?

Those drawn to family constellations often look first at one person, Bert Hellinger. Many people have experienced him as helpful when they were in need, and have sensed in him a quality of strength and wisdom, a deep sensitivity towards the dynamics and degree of order in relationships, and an awareness of the soul’s response to events. Therapists as well as clients have experienced a clear inner resonance and response to Hellinger and his work and a sense that what is transmitted rings true and is of great value. He has been intrepid in plumbing the depths of human fates, and has had the courage to openly reveal the potential and the limitations of his interventions.

However, Bert Hellinger’s personal effectiveness alone does not adequately explain the rapid spread of family constellations. Whether in individual or group sessions, various elements of many psychotherapeutic approaches come together to create a tool that allows processes of the soul to be seen and experienced directly. It is a method that focuses on the factors that are essential for resolution. At the same time, this instrument leads into a depth of human experience and discovery that reaches beyond the sometimes-narrow boundaries of psychotherapy into an encompassing, collective realm of mind and spirit. Constellations reveal bonds in the soul that are related to events and fates within a family and larger groups, and they often lead to the resolution of the attendant difficulties.

Central to family constellation work is the concept of ‘entanglement’. There may be a powerful impact in a constellation when we become aware that some of the pain we are suffering actually belongs to someone else in the past, but has not yet been laid to rest. We are not responding to actual experiences in our own lives; we seem to be trying to be of service to those in the past, attempting to bring peace to their souls.

Conflicts arise in the soul when opposing forces divide us internally or in our relationships to others. We are forced to either repress one side or engage in battle. We experience ourselves as divided and torn, indecisive and dissatisfied, under a strain that may even feel like insanity. Counselling or psychotherapy is the work of reconciling these warring factions. One of the primary attraction of constellation work is its power to reunite and reconcile such divisions.

This work makes clear that everyone, alive or dead, has an equal right to their place and connection to the system, regardless of their particular fate in life. It can support reconciliation between victims and perpetrators and their families and descendents, even in the most difficult of situations. Those who have been excluded from a family can be returned to their rightful places. Constellations offer a path that leads to peace in the heart, even in the throes of conflict.

An Example: Fear of Public Speaking

In an advanced training group for psychotherapists, a client was brought in to participate in a demonstration of family constellation work. The man stated his issue:

“I am at the top management level of my company and I often have to give presentations to large groups. Even though I am successful and respected in my work, I suffer from severe anxiety whenever I am doing a presentation in front of a group. Probably no one else notices it, but I always break out in a cold sweat. Sometimes the anxiety is so overwhelming that I try to get out of my obligations to give presentations.” When asked to be more precise about his fears, he said that he couldn’t say exactly what he was afraid of, but experienced a vague fear that something terrible could happen. He could not remember any personal experience that could logically account for his anxiety.

This middle aged, good-looking man was happily married and had two young children. His father had already died, but the man had had a good relationship with both of his parents. In an attempt to deal with his anxieties, the man had tried psychotherapy for a period of some months. Although the client-centred therapy was a positive experience, it did not relieve the presenting problem, which is what brought him to our group.

When asked about any significant events in his family of origin, the man could not immediately come up with any information that might be relevant. Since it was apparent that he was suffering greatly from this affliction, we proceeded with a constellation anyway, and asked him to choose representatives for his father, his mother and for himself, and place them in accordance with his inner sense of their relationship. He placed the father and his own representative facing each other but at a distance. He placed his mother somewhat off to the side, turned towards his father. The father immediately looked down at the floor and seemed very far away, with no relationship to his wife or son. As this sometimes suggests a death, I asked about his father’s parents. The man explained, “My grandfather died very young, while my father was still a small child. My grandmother raised the children alone.” The client was asked to place a representative for his grandfather next to his father. The father, without glancing up, moved several steps away and turned towards a window. The grandfather stood motionless for a while, looking at his grandson. The grandson (the client’s representative) appeared shaky, and seemed mesmerised by his grandfather. The grandfather then made a curious gesture. Several times, he wiped his hands over his face and threw his head backwards. When asked what he was doing, he responded: “I don’t know. It’s as if something flew into my eyes and almost blew my head off.”

The client was extremely moved and said: “My father never spoke about his own father, but my mother told me that before the war, my grandfather was a training officer in the army. One day he was demonstrating how to arm a hand grenade and the grenade exploded in his hand and killed him.” No sooner had the man finished telling this story about his grandfather than, in the constellation, his father threw himself into the grandfather’s arms with heart-wrenching sobs. As if floodgates had opened, all the deep pain and consequences of the terrible, gory past were released, presumably having been locked up in the father’s family all this time. And we could see a strange parallel to the client’s fears about something terrible happening during a presentation. Something terrible really had happened to his grandfather while giving a presentation to his troops. I asked the client to take his representative’s place in the constellation and to approach his father and grandfather. The three men embraced warmly. There was a palpable feeling of relief in the entire training group, and the client appeared very relaxed at the end of the constellation.

This is just one of countless examples of what makes constellations so compelling to so many people. In a short period of time, something was revealed that was immediately understandable and touched the heart. It shed light on current personal difficulties and revealed connections between crucial events and relationships. It opened the possibility for resolution of the issues as well.

2Constellation Processes

The idea of using strangers to represent personal process and relationships is not a new one. Very early on in psychodrama, JL Moreno used role-playing methods taken from improvisational theatre and made inner conflicts and relationship issues visible through dramatisation. Role-playing has also been a favoured method for sorting out social processes, using not only words, but also positioning and gestures. Virginia Satir had a finely tuned sensitivity to the network of family interactions and their effects on individual family members and in her family reconstructions, she created impressively staged scenes of entire multi-generational, extended families. Through the various dialogues that ensued, she would then track the family stories, almost like a detective, searching with her clients for clarification and understanding. “Sculpture” also allowed a glimpse into inner conflicts, as parts of an individual personality were portrayed and then rearranged to bring about useful movements.

Bert Hellinger intuitively grasped the importance of order in families in these psychotherapeutic methods and recognised that insight and direct experience were the essential goals of therapeutic intervention. He incorporated the use of representatives and intensified the process in his own style. He soon recognised that constellations offered a potential for portraying inner processes and the bonds of family relationships. He saw that they could initiate a helpful process in the client when representatives were directed or allowed to move spontaneously. With few questions it was possible to reintegrate excluded family members and promt short dialogues of resolution.

Constellations

The basic procedures for doing a constellation are actually very simple. In the context of a therapy or personal development group, clients are asked to choose representatives for those people who are important to their issue, including a representative for themselves, and to place them in a spatial relationship to one another. These may be members of the person’s family of origin, which could include the client, siblings and parents, or perhaps only the person’s parents and the client. Sometimes a constellation represents only the client and some symptom of distress. The client chooses the representatives from the people present in the group and, without any comment, positions them within the working space. The person should do this according to a feeling, or some inner sense of what is right, without regard to any reasons for this placement and without consideration of any particular time or any images of historical “scenes” from their family life. The person simply keeps an open heart and follows whatever inner impulse might arise. Normally, it needs to be clear who is representing which person or abstraction (abstractions might include a symptom such as anxiety, or an abstract concept such as “the secret” or “death”).

The therapist may ask the client for information about the family history before the beginning of the constellation in order to get a feeling for the “weight” of the elements and to determine which family members should be included in the constellation from the start. The less the representatives know about the facts, the more convincing their feeling responses, but a constellation usually receives the initial impulse from some essential information. Surprisingly, experience has shown that the course of the constellation is more influenced by the feelings and sensory awareness of the representatives than by the information provided by the client or the therapist’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titel
• Impressum
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Prologue
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Constellation Processes
• 3 Bonding and Resolution
• 4 Elements of Constellation Work – More Than Merely a Method
• 5 Applications and Effects of Family Constellations
• 6 Comments on a Theory of Family Constellations
• Bibliography
• About the Author