What is Family Constellations?
Family Constellations, also known as Systemic Constellations, offer a powerful method for finding resolutions to deeply felt issues – from personal and relationship issues to issues within families as well as all the different groups (or systems) that we are part of.
In contrast to other approaches, which tend to view personal issues in the light of individual experience, Constellations view many personal issues as stemming from entanglements within the families or systems to which we belong and because the roots of such issues are often outside our conscious awareness, resolution can be very difficult to achieve without access to a systemic perspective.
How does Family Constellations work?
A Constellation is a simple therapeutic process: A person or client comes with an issue or intention that is connected with their current psychological and emotional life difficulties. Instead of talking about the problem or trying to solve it with our thinking mind, the Constellation opens a space and provides access to the less conscious aspects of ourselves, thereby allowing for change and integration of traumatic memories that underlie our life difficulties.
The client constructs their constellation by choosing group members (or markers in the private session) to represent relevant parts of the self, and family members if necessary, placing them in the available space according to an internal sense of the issue at hand. The constellation then becomes an external representation of the internal psychic structure of the person.
Once set up the representatives often have quite strong experiences, which almost always make sense to the client in a helpful way. It is as if once the ‘intention’ is set and the constellation is constructed there is a field of resonance between the client and the representatives whereby information and experience is shared, transferred and allowed between them. Often truths emerge that were held unconscious before, and traumas that have been split off are allowed to surface and be integrated.
How does this way of working help?
Family Constellations are a solution-focused healing approach and have the capacity to reveal systemic influences that are affecting our wellbeing. They are designed for individuals and couples who are seeking help with a range of different issues. These include:
Constellations also serve people who are confronted with difficult choices, whether they are issues around personal direction, career or relationships. Constellations can help with this decision-making by giving you the unique chance to observe representatives actually embodying the choices in question. This can provide insight and clarity at an important crossroad in your life.
The History of Family Constellations
Family Constellations started in the work of Bert Hellinger and has been taken on in many ways all over the world. In his early adult life Hellinger was a Catholic priest living amongst the Zulu people of South Africa where he experienced their cultural respect for the ancestors who still had influence on them in the present day. He explored many psychotherapeutic ways of working gaining many years of experience in group and family therapy. During this time, he began developing a new phenomenological approach where respresentatives of family, based on very little information, seemed to connect with deeper, more hidden dynamics within family systems. The work has been taken forward by a large number of international constellators in different ways. Franz Ruppert has chosen to use it to understand our inner world and our intra-psychic splits and how we integrate to become healthier in relationship with ourselves and others.
Trauma Constellations developed by Professor Dr Franz Ruppert
Franz Ruppert began his study of trauma back in the late 1980s and began to develop his theory from his own research and exploration through his work with clients and his own personal therapeutic exploration. In the early 1990s he came across the work of the German therapist and philosopher Bert Hellinger, the work known as Family Constellations. The method employed in Family Constellations provided him with a research tool that he continues to use today, although today the method we use, The Sentence of Intention, has evolved considerably from the original as used by facilitators of Hellinger’s work.
Ruppert’s theory of Identity-oriented Psychotrauma Therapy (IoPT) has evolved into a clear and elegant theory of psychological trauma that, while having roots in many earlier theories and thoughts, is in itself cohesive and complete.
The foundations of this theory are:
Trauma is an experience we are unable to psychologically metabolise and remains split off and boundaried in our psyche. It is likely to be a feature of all of our lives in some form. Often we have been affected by trauma that happened to our parents or grandparents, because the effects of trauma influence the availability of our parents to us as children.
For most of us the trauma that we manage, every day, is from a time in our life that we may not remember in our minds. This is for two reasons: one is that the way humans generally deal with trauma is to split the experience off and relegate it to our unconscious, thereby erasing it from our memory. The second reason is that the traumas that probably have the most influence on us are from a time before we had developed the capacity for cognitive memory, perhaps even before we were born. But it is becoming clear from many different areas of research that we do have a memory before that time; it is held in the cells of our body. In fact everything we need to know in order to heal our trauma is within us when we are ready to access it.
Family Constellations, also known as Systemic Constellations, offer a powerful method for finding resolutions to deeply felt issues – from personal and relationship issues to issues within families as well as all the different groups (or systems) that we are part of.
In contrast to other approaches, which tend to view personal issues in the light of individual experience, Constellations view many personal issues as stemming from entanglements within the families or systems to which we belong and because the roots of such issues are often outside our conscious awareness, resolution can be very difficult to achieve without access to a systemic perspective.
How does Family Constellations work?
A Constellation is a simple therapeutic process: A person or client comes with an issue or intention that is connected with their current psychological and emotional life difficulties. Instead of talking about the problem or trying to solve it with our thinking mind, the Constellation opens a space and provides access to the less conscious aspects of ourselves, thereby allowing for change and integration of traumatic memories that underlie our life difficulties.
The client constructs their constellation by choosing group members (or markers in the private session) to represent relevant parts of the self, and family members if necessary, placing them in the available space according to an internal sense of the issue at hand. The constellation then becomes an external representation of the internal psychic structure of the person.
Once set up the representatives often have quite strong experiences, which almost always make sense to the client in a helpful way. It is as if once the ‘intention’ is set and the constellation is constructed there is a field of resonance between the client and the representatives whereby information and experience is shared, transferred and allowed between them. Often truths emerge that were held unconscious before, and traumas that have been split off are allowed to surface and be integrated.
How does this way of working help?
Family Constellations are a solution-focused healing approach and have the capacity to reveal systemic influences that are affecting our wellbeing. They are designed for individuals and couples who are seeking help with a range of different issues. These include:
- Relationship difficulties between partners, parents and children
- Unresolved childhood pain and trauma
- Concern for the well-being of children and siblings
- Divorce and separation
- Depression
- Illness and accidents
- Death, suicide, bereavement and loss
- Adoption, abortion and miscarriage
- Incest, rape, violence and murder
- Addictions and obsessions
- Family secrets and ruptures
- Stuckness and feelings of powerlessness
- Problems with Money
- General Stress
Constellations also serve people who are confronted with difficult choices, whether they are issues around personal direction, career or relationships. Constellations can help with this decision-making by giving you the unique chance to observe representatives actually embodying the choices in question. This can provide insight and clarity at an important crossroad in your life.
The History of Family Constellations
Family Constellations started in the work of Bert Hellinger and has been taken on in many ways all over the world. In his early adult life Hellinger was a Catholic priest living amongst the Zulu people of South Africa where he experienced their cultural respect for the ancestors who still had influence on them in the present day. He explored many psychotherapeutic ways of working gaining many years of experience in group and family therapy. During this time, he began developing a new phenomenological approach where respresentatives of family, based on very little information, seemed to connect with deeper, more hidden dynamics within family systems. The work has been taken forward by a large number of international constellators in different ways. Franz Ruppert has chosen to use it to understand our inner world and our intra-psychic splits and how we integrate to become healthier in relationship with ourselves and others.
Trauma Constellations developed by Professor Dr Franz Ruppert
Franz Ruppert began his study of trauma back in the late 1980s and began to develop his theory from his own research and exploration through his work with clients and his own personal therapeutic exploration. In the early 1990s he came across the work of the German therapist and philosopher Bert Hellinger, the work known as Family Constellations. The method employed in Family Constellations provided him with a research tool that he continues to use today, although today the method we use, The Sentence of Intention, has evolved considerably from the original as used by facilitators of Hellinger’s work.
Ruppert’s theory of Identity-oriented Psychotrauma Therapy (IoPT) has evolved into a clear and elegant theory of psychological trauma that, while having roots in many earlier theories and thoughts, is in itself cohesive and complete.
The foundations of this theory are:
- A clear and distinctive definition of what trauma actually is.
- An understanding of the psychological splitting that happens as a result of trauma.
- A clear understanding of what surviving trauma involves.
- An understanding of the role of pre-verbal and pre-birth trauma, including the trauma of failed attachment to the mother
- A clear concept of identity, and the trauma of identity that results from having to give up on oneself in order to have connection with the mother
- A concept of autonomy and symbiosis as lived every day in our life.
Trauma is an experience we are unable to psychologically metabolise and remains split off and boundaried in our psyche. It is likely to be a feature of all of our lives in some form. Often we have been affected by trauma that happened to our parents or grandparents, because the effects of trauma influence the availability of our parents to us as children.
For most of us the trauma that we manage, every day, is from a time in our life that we may not remember in our minds. This is for two reasons: one is that the way humans generally deal with trauma is to split the experience off and relegate it to our unconscious, thereby erasing it from our memory. The second reason is that the traumas that probably have the most influence on us are from a time before we had developed the capacity for cognitive memory, perhaps even before we were born. But it is becoming clear from many different areas of research that we do have a memory before that time; it is held in the cells of our body. In fact everything we need to know in order to heal our trauma is within us when we are ready to access it.