A constellation can be used as a tool to bring clarity and release to problems you are experiencing within your family; either your family of origin (where you grew up), or your current family.

Although it is possible to do this work one to one in a session with a practitioner, it is probably more easily understood and more fully experienced in a group of people who come together at a ‘Family Constellation Workshop’ . A group like this provides a safe, confidential environment. It’s not necessary for whole families to attend (although couples or one or two members of a family might choose to come together to a workshop). Usually one member of a family will have a desire to look more closely at something that is of concern to them.

When you decide to ‘work’ on your question or issue a constellation is created which is something like a ‘living map.’ Members of the participating group are used to ‘represent’ your family members. It’s different from psychodrama or role-play in that the representatives simply stand in their places and allow themselves to feel whatever they feel as they take up their role. They don’t have to ‘act’ or be fed any information. You set this constellation up -without speaking or describing what you are doing. The picture that starts to unfold, with the support of the facilitator (or ‘constellator’), is often different from your usual family story or myth. Sometimes people who have never really had their place in your family history will become vital and the connections with them seem surprisingly supportive, deep, and moving. Events that formed the history of the family are given their true weight and significance.

Rather than just describing someone as ‘cold’ or ‘he was never there’ or ‘she was an alcoholic’, the larger story can reveal itself, as the constellation gives you the courage to look with an open heart. You then become freer to take a more compassionate overview of the context or the situation. The child that you were is relieved of the burden of trying to provide solutions to the problems of an adult world. There is often relief as a larger space opens up for healing and release.

Deep feelings can find their true place with the people who originally experienced them, or they can be lovingly released. When this happens you can make more sense of a perplexing lifelong need to hang on to those feelings (depression, rage, weakness or failure or a sense of being an exile -for example). This may have been a way of holding an excluded person from your family system in your heart. When a constellation has revealed what you need and are prepared to see, you gain strength, energy and clarity to find the next step on your path, and hopefully feel surer of your place in the world.

‘….and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do –

determined to save

the only life you could save.

(~ From Mary Oliver’s poem ~ The Journey)