Healing Inherited Family Trauma Through Family Constellations
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By Yan Chee Yu | November 25, 2023 8:14 pm
“Accepting your fate is not enough.
You must agree to it.
If you are able to face up to your fate with humility, you gain strength.”
Bert Hellinger
It is a miracle that you and I are alive. What were the chances of us being born? We each won a battle against on average 200 million other sperms. Our ancestors suffered the consequences of wars and hardship and still passed life on. Maybe we endured considerable childhood trauma, and yet, we survived. Have you ever looked at your life in that way?
Life is a gift. Participating in and facilitating Family Constellations keeps showing me how precious life is, because the odds were very much against us; we see it all the time. In this work we also learn about systems. The body, for example, is a system – an organism consisting of many parts. Those parts are systems as well – each part being made of parts.
You are part of your family. If you did not exist, your family would be a different system; and equally, if you died, your family system would miss a part – you; and it would have to adapt accordingly. As families, we are part of communities, and as communities we are part of societies, and so on.
The aim of a system (or an organism) is to stay alive and grow until it has fulfilled its purpose. Systems have a life span. For a system to function it needs all belonging parts in their right place and fully functioning. This is where the so called “Orders of Love” come in, established by the late psychotherapist, philosopher, and poet Bert Hellinger, who developed the modality “Family Constellations”, later called “Movements Of The Soul”.
There is a natural order to all things, as in your grandparents came first, then your parents, then you. And, of course, you came before your younger siblings and before your children and grandchildren. If the order gets confused, for example, if a child treats a parent as if they were their child, the family system is not in balance, and everyone in the system will feel it.
Family Constellations is embodied work. When a participant wants to work on an issue within a circle of safety, whether in a group or one-to-one setting, we zoom into parts of their family system, and we zoom out in order to understand in which cultural, ethical and societal context this family is set. Together, we find out who belongs, who was or is excluded, whether there was or is anyone not in their rightful place, and where the flow of connection was or is blocked. We are looking for unaddressed trauma and hidden truths.
To deepen our understanding, participants can step into representations of issue-relevant family members in a defined space and feel into their bodies. Emotions, feelings and thoughts are being shared. This is how we illuminate and understand the underlying dynamics and entanglements of someone’s family system.
In this phenomenological way of working on issues we experience again and again that we are all connected. Working with intent and collectedness in “The Knowing Field” (or, as Rupert Sheldrake calls it, the “Morphogenetic Field”), we can experience that it can be possible to express information from the people we represent, whether they are still with us or not.
Silvia Siret
If you would like to find out more, please call 01865 243351 to arrange a free discovery call with Silvia.