What is Family Constellations therapy?

“When we look at our parents, then we see that behind them there are their parents, and behind their parents there are other parents, and so on through many generations. The same life flows through all of them until it reaches us.” - Bert Hellinger

“Like trees, we are interconnected with our family system and communities in unseen ways.”

What is it?

Emerging scientific evidence suggests that we may inherit trauma in our family lineage. Family Constellations Therapy was created by Bert Hellinger, an approach designed to help reveal transgenerational trauma, hidden dynamics in a family or relationship and can be experienced either privately or in a group context. It assumes that what happened in our family line may affect the way we think, feel and behave out of loyalty or entanglement. By revealing disharmony and unhealthy habits it’s possible to receive new perspectives, change negative self-beliefs, experience internal shifts that may transform blockages in our lives in relationships or life situations. Family Constellations refers to the interconnectivity of family members, how we affect each other and how the ‘whole’ is also affected by each individual.

This method draws on elements of Family Systems Therapy, Gestalt Therapy, Psychoanalysis, Psychodynamic Therapy, Hypnotherapy, Virginia Satir’s Family Sculpting, Existential Phenomenology and Zulu beliefs. The main part of this work is to recognise transgenerational trauma, family entanglements, both personal and systemic. By creating new ways of relating during the Constellation and new images of the family system, the person that brought their healing process and anyone else that resonates with the dynamics gains a new perspective of their family and, their own life. As a result, he/she feels enabled and empowered to lead life and relationships in a new and more conscious way, with deeper love, compassion and a greater understanding.

We want to feel like we belong. When previous family members leave through unusual circumstances - dies young, commit suicide, accidents, wars, addictions, miscarriages, abortions, adoptions, emigrations, these or other traumas of separation cause painful patterns of exclusion in our family system, trapped in the unconscious field. Later generations may be drawn unconsciously to repeat these patterns. Current family members might find themselves doing things which make no sense in the context of their own lives, until they discover which earlier family member, they're "following." These inherited patterns, transgenerational trauma, create powerful unconscious behaviour. When we honour and restore the excluded ancestors or family members, we re-establish the integrity of the field, dissolving the transgenerational tendencies and liberating the living, our children and future generations.

Each time we release past family and ancestral entanglements, our future generations and each one of us are more free to follow our own unique fate.