Understanding Systemic Family Constellations
Often, a strong unresolved experience in an older generation shows its effect in its later generation. Understanding and healing such a transcending of experiences into later generations needs a study of family dynamics, history, and Systemic Family Constellations.
Systemic Family Constellations is a way of working with issues within human-related systems using our felt sense and wider ways of knowing and perceiving. Developed by Bert Hellinger, a German psychotherapist, through his experience with the Zulus, this study originally focused on family systems to disclose the deeper forces that unknowingly influence our thoughts, behaviours, and emotional experiences through multiple generations.
Over time, this systemic approach has been applied to other human-related systems including organizations and larger societal issues in our communities and the world.
- Through the approach of Family Constellations, one can create a model of the family system.
- That which has remained hidden gets to come to light and hidden patterns that are difficult to understand and change are revealed and transformed.
- These various applications share a common purpose to explore ways for understanding our relationships with each other and the conditions and circumstances in which we are interacting with one another.
- Systemic constellations are particularly useful when the source of the issue or the solution is not clear, where previous attempts to change have not endured, or where there is a sense of ‘stuckness’ in the whole or part of a system.
- By understanding the nature of the patterns and dynamics, Systemic Family Constellations can offer information and options on how to resolve our most complicated problems and complex challenges.
- Accepting or admitting the “what is” in a system tends to soften hidden loyalties, complete missing conversations, and open new paths toward resolution and balance.
These concerns might include family of origin issues, parent-child relationship difficulties, broken relationships, and intimate relationship challenges.
Systemic Family Constellation: Who can benefit from it?
In Family Constellation work, we learn that every issue has a solution within it, and with this learning, we can allow the solution to emerge. Healing sentences, rituals, and imagery are included to deepen your experience. This work is often experienced as spiritual healing.
The workshops on Family Constellations that we at Sambhavana provide, are for people whose Family Constellations work is considered most effective in addressing concerns that are systemic in nature. These concerns might include:
- family of origin issues,
- parent-child relationship,
- difficulties, and intimate relationship challenges.
It may be used as a potential therapy method for people who:
- Are seeking to address negative or harmful relationship patterns.
- Want to be in a romantic relationship.
- Are attempting to resolve family entanglements.
- Want to overcome inner turmoil.
- Have experienced significant trauma or loss.
- Are in search of personal and professional success.
‘Trauma’ Does one carry it from past ancestors and generations
Tanvi*, a 55-year-old lady, came to me for Therapy. Hot flashes, no zeal in life, constant anxiety, social isolation, and irritability were her major concerns. Upon her sessions, it came to light that her son of 28 years was also facing similar concerns since the age of 15 years. The family wouldn’t understand the cause of such a situation as they had an Upper Middle-class lifestyle. Pathology reports showed them physically healthy.
Upon further sessions, it came to light that Tanvi’s grandmother Shobha had been sexually abused at the age of 12, and that trauma was never resolved for her. Rather, it was a repressed memory for her which she never mentioned to her daughter or it was kept as an ugly and shameful secret that passed on to the further generations and showed up as symptoms in the current generations.
Through different modalities, this STORED trauma was released which allowed Tanvi and her son to be free from the burden of the emotional trauma that they were carrying for SHOBHA.
Family Constellation Therapy – What can it reveal about intergenerational trauma?
Intergenerational trauma, also known as multigenerational trauma or transgenerational trauma, is a distressing psychological experience that affects multiple family members through the generations. It’s a type of trauma that’s become part of a family’s collective memory. Though family members may be consciously ignorant of their ancestors’ past trauma, the legacy still has the power to shape their emotions and behaviour. The scientific field of epigenetics tends to back up that assertion.
Studies show that trauma can actually alter an individual’s genetic expression. This means that a baby can literally inherit a mother’s traumatic experience through the uterine environment.
In Summary
- Family constellation therapy (FCT) is an approach to healing that confronts intergenerational trauma both mystically and empirically.
- Late Bert Hellinger, a German Psychotherapist, devised FCT as a way of connecting ancestral pain and traumatic events to someone’s current difficulties, then restoring peace to the system.
- Through FCT workshops or one-on-one sessions, individuals can use constellation work to restore balance and agency.
Do we forget people in the family that we are born in?
Satish*, a 38-year-old male, comes for therapy as he has impatience, is alcoholic, impulsive, has sinusitis, is snoring, and struggling to make his identity since the age of 15. He is loved but not recognised for any achievements in his family who society labels as The Black Sheep in the family. He was extremely sceptical about Therapy.
Through Clinical Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy sessions, his alcohol addiction drastically reduced, his sinusitis went away, and his snoring was controlled. What caught my attention was that his income for the past many years was stuck at one figure and it bothered him.
Me: “Satish have you ever wondered why you have never been able to make your identity in the family?”
Satish: “I have done whatever I could, but I am not seen and recognised, also not heard. I am working hard but my income is in a miserable state. I put efforts but I don’t get any results I have gotten fed up.”
Upon further speaking it came to my notice that he was carrying the energy and pattern of DEPRIVATION – Constant in the depriving space, even if he would receive he would blow it away. I set up Family Constellation using Figures. It was intriguingly revealed that Satish had gotten entangled in the energy and pattern of one of the family members in one of the past generations who had a similar fate and was forgotten by the family as he also was the black sheep in the family.
The energetic field in which we are connected never lets us forget anyone, and the system has its own way to make them remember. Satish was helped to release himself from this entanglement and this pattern of Depriving himself constantly of the JOYS of life.
* All names and ages have been changed to protect the privacy of patients.