FAMILY CONSTELLATIONS
Family Constellations is a treatment modality that allows us to look at patterns in our lives that we can’t clearly see or change using conventional methods of therapy.
It makes use of the concept of the “knowing field”. The suggestion is that this is a field that exists in a timeless space and holds all the information, patterns and relationships that we have with people and events in our lives, as well as the relationships and patterns between us and those who came before us.
In our current life experiences and standard therapy we can only deal with what we know and remember about our lives.
We generally work with OUR own life and THIS life only.
Family Constellations suggest that the lives and life experience of our ancestors have subtle and invisible influences on our lives.
We can unconsciously adopt behaviours, and play out family patterns and loyalties which can have a negative or confusing influence on us.
Family Constellation is a treatment approach designed to help reveal hidden dynamics in a relationship or family, making the invisible more visible. It allows us to start to see these patterns of behaviours and family loyalties in a three dimensional more concrete way using people or objects to represent them.
When are able to view and work with these situations in this tangible way we create new opportunities to shift old patterns of behaviour.
Bert Hellinger, the founder of this work, who studied and treated families for more than 50 years, observed that many of us unconsciously "take on" destructive familial patterns of anxiety, depression, anger, guilt, aloneness, alcoholism and even illness as a way of "belonging" in our families. Bonded by a deep love, a child will often sacrifice his own best interests in a vain attempt to ease the suffering of a parent or other family member.
Family Constellations are a way of discovering underlying family bonds and forces that have been carried unconsciously over several generations.
Family Constellation would can be used to work with more than just family relationships but also our relationships to ourselves and the structures in our lives.
The work is often done in groups using other participants to represent people or things in our lives.
It can also be used very effectively in an individual therapy session using objects to represent people, issues and things in our lives.
Viewing and working with these objects with in this concrete and objective way often offers enlightening and fresh perspectives which in turn create new opportunities for growth and change.
Family Constellations allow us to break old patterns so that we can live healthier, happier, more fulfilled lives. In a moment of insight, a new life course can be set in motion. The results can be life-changing.