Family Constellations & the Knowing Field

by Peter Mark Adams

www.petermarkadams.com petermarkadams@gmail.com

There is something soothingly evocative about the word family, a flood of associations and memories revolving around the themes of security, nurturance and support. And underlying these ideas we invariably find our own expectations for unconditional love, a sense of belonging and the right to be respected for simply being ourselves. But from where did we acquire these expectations? For when they are compromised our families become the setting, the arena, for some of our most intense dramas, our greatest battles and our worst defeats. In short, the place where our karma comes most resolutely and bruisingly into contact with reality! A new light is being cast on these old problems by a radical form of therapy called Family Constellations that provides some of the most intriguing and, frankly, astounding insights into the deepest layers of our common humanity. Family Constellations is a unique form of therapy most usually associated with the name Bert Hellinger, a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist with a wide experience of different therapeutic modalities. Bert Hellinger developed Family Constellations from an amalgamation of insights derived from many different therapeutic and indigenous traditions. The result is a paradoxical and novel form of therapy. It is in some ways a continuation of the systems tradition in Family Therapy seeing the family as the context for an understanding of an individuals problems and seeing that persons problems as an adaptation to the familys dynamics. But Family Constellations is an extension of these ideas with a radical indeed revolutionary - difference.

It is a group activity facilitated by a qualified therapist but it offers a uniquely personal therapeutic experience tailored precisely to a particular persons needs and issues. Although a group activity it requires no play acting or psychodrama on the part of the participants nor do the participants need to know anything whatsoever about the situation that they are required to enact or about any of the people involved in the real life situation for which the therapy is required. Although Family Constellations offers a deeply personal therapeutic experience it requires no confession or personal disclosure, it requires no recounting of past trauma, no analysis and no accounts of significant people or their actions. In fact Family Constellations does not even appear to require the active participation of the person the Client - receiving the therapy! For the most part the Client sits on the sidelines and merely observes the action taking place in their name. Does Family Constellations produce results? And if so, how can such a form of therapy possibly work? Perhaps I should first simply state what you would observe for yourself if you were to attend a session of this therapy? You would find a room of ten to twenty people some of whom know one another whilst others are complete strangers. If you were to talk to the people you would find that they come from all different walks of life - from housewives to bank managers. The Therapist facilitates the ensuing session for which they are the sole and absolute authority. The Therapist is also the only person to intervene, direct or comment on the proceedings. The Therapist asks who would like to make a constellation in order to resolve a specific problem that they have. The Client then briefly states their problem and the Therapist invites them to select people from the group to represent key aspects of their issue. For example, when the problem is one of personal relationships then they will choose Representatives for the major players in their real life relationship issue including someone to represent themselves. Since most people have major issues with members of their family the name of this type of therapy has been taken from that context hence Family

Constellations. The therapy is by no means restricted to family or indeed relationship issues for just about any issue that you care to name can be modelled. Now the Client places the Representatives in a way that intuitively reflects their relationships to each other. At this point the Client leaves the scene to sit on the sidelines and observe what is about to take place. Please note that all of these people are, generally speaking, complete strangers to one another and to the Client and that the Client has only briefly outlined their issue. No questions are asked of the Client since no further information is required for the therapy to proceed. This distancing of the Client from the process and the lack of any need for intimate disclosure makes this form of therapy far more comfortable for most people to commence. And so with all of the roles assigned, the Representatives standing in position and the Client watching from the sidelines something utterly extraordinary now begins to unfold before our eyes. The Therapist goes around each of the Representatives and asks them what they feel. Each and every person appears to have the feelings appropriate to the person or situation that they are representing even if that person is long dead and the situation is deeply buried in the past. Experience over many sessions suggests that these emotional reactions are invariably accurate, but how is this possible?

The first phenomenon we notice here is that there is obviously a dimension of awareness that we all share. We all participate in a common field. The representatives often feel and behave like the actual persons they represent, although neither the therapist nor they themselves have received any prior information beyond the initial facts..How to explain this phenomenon remains a mystery. 1

Bert Hellinger The Phenomenological Approach in Psychotherapy see Bert Hellingers web site at www.hellinger.com for this article
1

For those seeking a scientific explanation of this shared dimension of awareness Bert Hellinger refers to the research work of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake has postulated the existence of Morphogenetic Fields2. fields of energy that surround and structure all living organisms a concept that he believes can be extended to any members of a group such as a family. The knowing field3 is seen as providing one possible approach to understanding many otherwise inexplicable phenomena4. We need to understand that in this area, as with most energy based healing work, scientific understanding is either lagging far behind the actual practice or is in complete institutional denial that any effect exists that needs to be explained. Thankfully, in order to experience these phenomena for yourself you do not need to be a scientist, you just need to be open minded about what you are experiencing. Most energy workers and sensitives will be in absolutely no doubt that a constellation creates a powerful energy field. It is a characteristic of these kinds of fields that they are not limited by the usual restrictions of time and space and that they are capable of manifesting the qualities inherent in the participants intention. The explanation for this, along with the means to record and verify their presence, is currently beyond the capabilities of Western science. But then so is 95% percent of the universe, the majority of which consists of Dark Matter and Dark Energy5. The invisibility of subtle energy to modern science proves nothing, the vast body of experiential evidence for the existence of such fields is well attested in the broad range of energy healing practiced worldwide from the earliest times and covering such diverse modalities as Acupuncture and Reiki. The Therapist proceeds to focus in on the main emotional issue underlying the situation that is being worked on. They do this through careful attention to the balance of feelings reported by the Representatives until the underlying emotional causes of the problem
See Rupert Sheldrakes web site at www.sheldrake.org for an introduction to Morphic Fields A term coined by the psychiatrist and Family Constellations practitioner Albrecht Mahr 4 See The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot, 1991 and more recently The Field by Lynne McTaggart, 2001.
2 3

have been laid bare. It is at this point that the importance of having the direction of a trained Therapist becomes manifest. The carefully unraveled tangle of feelings, the exposed core of disturbance all now need to be resolved and rebalanced. One of the great educative aspects of experiencing Family Constellations is the light that it throws on ageless human values. The emotional knots and tangles can only be released through the honest acknowledgement of pain given and pain received, through the offer of forgiveness and the willingness to accept it. It is at this point in the proceedings that the full awe and majesty, the depths and the heights of the human soul are made apparent. It is a period of profound healing and understanding and, ultimately, of spiritual growth. For a family constellation is the sum total of relationships in a family network stretching back to a remote and unknowable past. It is blood, inheritance and memory, the raw and some times bloody! - roots of our identity in the here and now. A constellation has a sense of inevitability and the inescapability of destiny about it. It is therefore precisely what we most want to forget, to escape, to deny and to cover up for there are few families without their dark secrets, their buried memories. The accumulated jealousies, hatreds, betrayals and even, sometimes, murders runs like a dark turbulent stream through the heart of many families. All too unconsciously we can find that we are compulsively playing out in our own lives archaic scripts written by our ancestors. An emotionally cold, unresponsive parent is both a victim of their own upbringing and the all too unconscious perpetrator of fresh emotional pain in their own children. And so it goes on down through the generations, who has the courage to call a halt to it? In the words of Marx, the traditions of the dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the minds of the living. Family Constellations is an energetic resurrection of this dark stream, a diversion of its polluted waters out of the darkness of denial and suppression where its runs quietly and deeply from generation to generation up into the light of day. Its emergence within the civilized circle of life comes with a great belching sound and smell carrying all before it. If

this were not appalling enough the souls of the dead with all of their accumulated suffering and unresolved hatred vomit forth with it. Even though dressed in a bright modern tracksuit and T-shirt you are immediately cast back to some remote age, in an instant you have become Odysseus questioning the hungry, demanding souls of the dead. Even the atmosphere turns chilly, fear grinds in the stomach and scenes of primitive barbarism need to be enacted to appease the violence of the past. In the end you do what needs to be done to restore a sense of peace, balance and harmony to the atmosphere in the room and to your own soul. You acknowledge the supreme value of each and every person, even those you have most hated. You forgive the wrongs done to you and beg that a similar forgiveness will be afforded to you in turn. In an age of rapid social change it is only too easy to dismiss these values as the products of a nostalgic wish fulfillment, an emotional throwback to the romantic ideal of a more traditional era when roles and their corresponding social obligations were taken more seriously. But whether any such age ever existed is neither here nor there, for it is becoming increasingly apparent that these values represent an enduring core of humanity. They appear to transcend history, race and culture and might even provide the underlying principles by which all human social life is organized. It is as though Platos world of Ideal Forms actually existed and that it contained a template of ideal human interaction. It appears that any major deviation from this template produces real stresses and strains upon family members in their daily lives. This insight is striking home to an ever increasing number of people as the only plausible explanation for the stranger than fiction reality that is experienced during the average Family Constellation therapy. Family Constellations is a form of ritual drama which is purer and more austere than Greek tragedy. It is played out on a bare stage, articulated only by position, posture and symbolic personae - the inscrutable mask of a strangers face. It is Oedipus, and Antigone,

Agammenon and the Women of Troy all wrapped up together, presented in a small, intimate space by actors who play their part according to a script that only appears in their hearts from moment to moment as the action unfolds before the steady gaze of the witnesses. As in the ancient ritual drama, this is no casual entertainment. It is ourselves stripped bare, without adornment or saving graces. Why, you might well ask, should anyone volunteer for such an exercise, why open such a Pandoras box of past evils? And why should apparently ordinary people go anywhere near to such dark necromantic rites? The answer is that they go in the hope of achieving a successful exorcism, a releasing of the ghosts of the past and that through this catharsis - the release of their most painful feelings - new life and energy will be able to flow into their future. People approach these dread domains when the dullness or pain of the present overwhelms them and they can no longer find their way. Then they intuitively know that to continue living they need to find a way to call a halt, to draw a line under the inherited burdens of the past. Enacting a Family Constellation is a supreme act of expiation. The wrong of the beginning, no matter what it is, must be surfaced and put right....