Family Constellations Opens the Flow of Life Like Nothing Else
Family constellations (as seen on Netflix Another Self and also Sex, Love & goop, ep. 5) helped me heal deep father and mother wounds and find peace with who my parents were, their limitations, strengths, and all. I’ve found constellations to be enormously helpful to me and others and have seen wonderful kinds of community forming in constellation circles. And so I took training and, in 2016, became a constellations facilitator myself.
Benefits of family constellations:
- Finding answers to repeating negative patterns
- Experiencing enhanced self-love and acceptance of what is
- Harmonizing and deepening relationships with family, community, and nature
- Connecting with ancestral wisdom to more fully develop our humanness
- Being part of a supportive community in service to healing and growth that is emergent and stable, grounded in loving kindness, dynamic and responsive
I’m proud to be part of a professional constellations community that looks at our biases and is open to other ways of viewing gender, race, class, and other kinds of cultural conditioning. At the end of the article, there are links to more information about the actual mechanics of a family constellation. In this short article, I’ll share the basics of what makes family constellations so powerful, by using myself and a small fragment of my family story as an example.
Family
I grew up in hetero-normative culture, in a multi-cultural neighborhood in Chicago and come from a middle class, immigrant, assimilated Jewish family. My mother encouraged me not to have children. She did it in two ways — one unconscious and the other with conscious intention. As a single mom, she felt cheated because she had to sacrifice her own desires to care for us, pretty much without my father’s help. She acted in many ways more like a traditional father than a mother. She valued work and independence over domesticity. She had a job, made sure we had food, clothes, and a place to live, but when it came to hugs and cuddles, they weren’t in her vocabulary. My younger brother and I both felt her ambivalence about having had us. I didn’t want to give a child what I’d got — or not got. And so not feeling entirely wanted was an unconscious encouragement not to have kids of my own.
When I was eleven, awareness of human overpopulation was cresting and my mother was the one telling me how overpopulated the world was. She intentionally made it clear that I had a choice about whether or not to have children and rewarded me for excelling at school, stressing the importance of my having a career.
My brother married. He and his wife had two children. Both their children married and now there are three delightful grandchildren. I, on the other hand, made different choices — devoting my life to healing my inner child, helping others heal and mature, and following a spiritual growth path.
Which is more important today? To pass on life or to attend to becoming emotionally and spiritually mature humans, able to live together on our little planet? In my family, it seems, life chose both, one side for me and one side for my brother. Balance.
My dad was brilliant, charismatic, warm, affectionate — and crazy. He would act out at work and lose a good job. He would pretend to commit suicide and scare us all (except my little brother who was too young to know what was happening). I felt close to my dad in a way I never did with my mom, even though he didn’t live with us after I was eight. When I was sixteen, my dad committed suicide for real. I was devastated, and, tragically, not surprised.
That year, my brother turned fourteen and we all understood the pressure our dad had been under — around the time our dad was fourteen, his dad had committed suicide too. My dad had felt responsible for his dad’s death. Suicide intensifies the guilt the living feel.
My parents were quite in love when they conceived me. Two years later, when my mom was pregnant with my brother, my dad’s acting out was already wreaking chaos in our family and straining their marriage. After she asked my dad to leave, it was natural for my mom to take on the traditional father’s role. Partly out of necessity, but equally out of capacity, she rose to the challenges of divorcing my father, at a time when divorce was still quite taboo, and creating a stable home for us.
My mom’s mom, my grandmother Laura, who lived nearby, helped my mom in many ways — babysitting us, making our meals, and giving us guidance. Despite their care, I longed for my dad. His mom, my grandmother Esther, had lived in another city and passed away when I was five. I modeled myself on her in ways that are startling considering how little I knew of her. She was affectionate, caring, and patient with me like my dad. They gave me comfort.
After my father’s death, I felt like a motherless child. Powerless to raise my dad from the dead, I became chronically depressed, with suicidal thoughts of my own. I was terrified of death and that I might kill myself. There came a moment, a few years after his suicide, where I realized I was now in peril. And I confronted myself, “Are you going toward life? Or are you going to follow your father toward death?”
In that moment, I said, “Yes,” to life. I determined to try to pull away from death. But it felt like I was pulling away from my father too. My loyalties felt torn between my love for my father and my own life. New questions arose. How could I make peace with my father and the family legacy I’d inherited from him? How could I find the freedom and love to go forward in my life, instead of constantly feeling pulled back by his undertow?
Many modalities and practices helped me. Compared to other family systems therapies, indigenous wisdom makes family constellations unique. Family constellations gave me basic understanding that is more ancient and more fundamental than Western psychology.
Family constellations
Bert Hellinger (1925–2019) became a psychotherapist and created family constellations after living and working among traditional Zulu people for sixteen years, starting in the early 1950s — even learning their language. The Zulu, as do many traditional peoples, understand the place, or role, of ancestors to be sacred intermediaries between living community members and Source. Not only do our ancestors give life to the living, but they also continue to help the living maintain harmony in community and family, even after they are “gone”. Living with the Zulu, Hellinger came to understand the importance of embracing one’s “place” in the family, in terms of one’s relational roles (grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, sister, daughter, and so forth).
From the Zulu, and many other life experiences, Hellinger learned about natural, loving patterns in family and community, like deep respect for the flow of life. Hellinger called such patterns “orders of love” because it’s the unhindered flow of love that creates healthy order in families. The “constellation” of family constellations is the arrangement of family members that reveals the state of the family soul —whether with distorted, disconnected love or with naturally flowing love.
Life flows always in the direction of the next life. Parents create life, mothers give birth to children — not the other way around. If we try to push back against the river of life, to go in the opposite direction, like me as a daughter trying to stay with my father, trouble results, as in my depression and suicidal thoughts. Once I learned to accept my father’s choice and fate as his own, I could love and honor him as my father, without guilt, free to move forward into my own life.
Family soul
Human families each have what Hellinger called a “family soul”. His use of the word “soul” here can be confusing. Hellinger’s concept of family soul seems to me to suggest a subtle energy field containing information particular to one’s family — but not a sentient soul, like an individual soul or spirit. Hellinger also coined the term “family conscience”, which encompasses the values, cultural imprinting, attitudes, and beliefs held by a particular family soul (also not sentient). As well, a family’s particular history of major traumatic events (e.g. stillbirths, murder, war, religious persecution, or famine) may color and distort the family soul.
Hellinger asserts families have more commonalities than differences — and if we focus on the commonalities, much healing can happen. Human relationships of grandparent(s) to children, parent(s) to children, siblings to each other, and so forth, are universal to all of us. The basic nature of family relationships gives us a kind of sixth sense — the potential to tune in to another’s family soul in a constellation setting.
Knowing one’s place in one’s family and recognition of each member’s belonging are both fundamental to a healthy family soul. And belonging is another of Hellinger’s orders of love. When our sense of belonging is lost, we feel alienation and there will be some level of distortion in the family soul. For example, in my family, my father didn’t seem to belong. My experience as a kid was that he kept disappearing until the ultimate disappearance. Also, my mother didn’t invite belonging. (What happened to my mother, in her family, is another story.) Naturally, I didn’t feel like I belonged either.
Working with the distorted constellation of my family soul led to a healthy image for my family soul. I did constellation work on my nuclear family and both my mom’s and dad’s families to understand and heal the parts in me that were hurt by family soul distortions. My healing came in stages over time, using family constellations and other modalities.
Connecting with my ancestors
Recently, as a participant in an online family constellation ritual, I asked to connect with my family lineage ancestors. By ask, I mean with the intention to open and learn, I went inside to explore an inner experience of my family line.
Touching into father’s father’s father’s line back to the beginning of human life, I sensed a dense atmosphere with wisdom in it. There was also a lingering, if slight, quality of suffering of the Jewish men that seemed to still need healing. Yet the overall feeling was strong. I felt dynamic throbbing energy infusing me from my father’s line and giving me the agency to move into life with purpose.
Sensing into mother’s mother’s mother’s line, I felt pure joy, bubbly, complete, and connected in my heart, with all the women who came before me. It was quite a miraculous feeling, so pure and unadulterated.
Feeling joyfully at one with my mother’s line, I once again invited my father’s line. At first, I sensed maternal and paternal distinctly and then a mysterious melding as the two lineages combined in me. It was like two rivers of energy melting together into a new balance. I am free and able to express life in harmony with my ancestors.
Family constellations doesn’t replace individual counseling. They each have their place. One might need one, the other — or both, as I did on my healing journey. With the insights and resources family constellations brings, it can be easier to resolve issues in counseling. Family constellations is like nothing else I’ve found for moving our understanding of family or lineage trauma out of the head and into the heart, and for restoring the flow of love that gives us life.
This is the first in a series on embodied transformation covering family and nature constellations, spiritual inquiry of the Diamond Approach, and collective inquiry constellations.
