Family constellations series : What the heck are constellations ?

🧶 In this episode I give a long awaited overview of the practicalities of family constellation work: what to expect in a workshop, the different shapes the work can take, etc.
As always, if you have questions or need recommendations, please reach out to me directly via one of the many avenues available online.

📚Things I talk about in this episode:
Bert Hellinger : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_Hellinger
Jodorowsky : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Jodorowsky
Virginia Satir : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Satir
Francesca Mason Boring's book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13151251-connecting-to-our-ancestral-past

If you have no idea what constellations are, I recommend listening to S1 Ep5: Family mythology, the told and the untold or read more about it here : https://www.laureporche.com/modalities

🎬You can also watch :

This very short explanation of constellations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOrBgWdcq3g
This talk by Rupert Sheldrake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty5lz9mVezU
Another self : https://www.netflix.com/fr-en/title/81380432
Ep 5 of Sex, Love and Goop: https://www.netflix.com/fr/title/81459349
This great video on hidden loyalties by Shavasti: https://youtu.be/Sd7umLz77Cw

Get notified when the Silken Mirror membership opens in 2023 : http://eepurl.com/dxzCk9

Follow us on Instagram @moonlitpathchannel

This podcast is hosted by Laure Porché: http://laureporche.com. You can follow me on Instagram @laureporche
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Transcript

[00:00:00] Laure: Hello, everyone. It's late here, really the middle of the night, which is kind of the only time when I can record this. I'm sorry this took a long time, but this podcast is really an extra thing that I do on top of everything else that I do. And lately, I have had virtually no time at all for any extra thing.

[00:00:27] So it took me a while to record this episode that I promised you in the last one. So this episode is going to be, I think, pretty short. And it's going to be my attempt at explaining Family Constellation in the best way that I know how. 

[00:00:48] And again, I've put many resources that you can find in the show notes of all the other episodes of the Family Constellation series. So, if you want to dive into the Constellation rabbit hole you have plenty of material to do so.

[00:01:06] So, Constellation is a modality that was devised by Bert Hellinger. And... He didn't pull it out of his hat. Okay. You can call him the creator of it, but I think it would be fair to say that he, I guess, emerged it from existing practices and studies, part of which were indigenous, and like born from his observations of the Zulus whom he lived with for 15 years. And part of, part of it was like all the existing work about family system at the time, the work of people like Virginia Satir, and all the 70s kind of new Therapeutic techniques that were, that were getting born in Germany at the time.

[00:02:00] And you know, if you read my teacher's book, so for her, Constellation is very, very familiar to the indigenous fields that she was raised in. And I think this is something that you can find in many indigenous culture. And I guess Family Constellation is the, I'm not going to say completely appropriated, because that's not exactly true, but it's like the acceptable, white version of it, I guess.

[00:02:38] And it's difficult to define constellation because, first, because there's as many ways to constellate as there are facilitators. And so... I could talk to you, for instance, about Francesca's work, who leans more towards ceremony and definitely towards but that would be a completely different experience than say the work of a German facilitator or the work of a facilitator who would be more constructivist or more interventionist. Both ways of working have equal value. They're just very different. And so first I feel like I should say, for the French listeners, I know I have some French listeners who speak English, that in France, there are two schools of constellation.

[00:03:24] There's like the Bert Hellinger school and there's a Jodorowsky school. And in my experience from what I've seen, and again, like, this is my very personal opinion. I wouldn't call the Jodorowsky constellations, I wouldn't call them constellations, actually he didn't call them constellations, that came after because they're not relying on the same things for me, and they're more like psychomagic acts than Constellation, which for me feels different, like the field is different even the process is different from what I've seen. So in this podcast, I'm going to talk about family constellations as developed by Bert Hellinger around like the 70s and 80s in Germany.

[00:04:07] So, in its simplest expression, constellations are a way to observe the true dynamics between the different elements in a system. A system being a group of elements that are interdependent and connected. And so obviously, even though as human beings we tend to forget it, everything is a system. The universe is a system.

[00:04:34] We are completely interdependent with our environment, our body is a system, everything that surrounds us basically at the micro or macro is all a system. So technically you can constellate anything and I've done it so it works. But I'm going to focus on family constellation for the sake of this podcast. And so with family constellations, we look at the dynamics between the different members of a family system. And where it's a little different than say psychotherapy or like traditional family dynamics or family system work, is that we include the dead in the system. We include everybody because the constellation is actually mostly about radical inclusion.

[00:05:29] At least that's my sense of it, that's my idea about it. And so, with constellation, when it's done in a group, what happens most of the time is that somebody will have an issue that is not necessarily family related, right? It can be something like, I can't find a partner, or every time I buy a house I lose it, or I can't find my place in the world, or I don't feel confident. It can be so many things. And that person will speak to the facilitator about their issue, and the facilitator will ask questions. Sometimes, not always. And from what the person is telling them, from observing their bodies, from asking questions about their family system, the facilitator will get an idea about the dynamics that would be interesting to look at and to see.

[00:06:31] And the facilitator will offer that idea to the client and the client can say no at any time. I kind of want to stress that because it's not, not every facilitator remind people of that, but any situation, whether you're in like a therapeutic relationship or you go to a family constellation workshop, you can always say no. It doesn't matter like what the facilitator or the therapist wants what matters is what you are able to see or hear or integrate. And anything that is too much for you to see or hear or integrate has basically at best no impact at worst bad impact. So I just want to remind everybody that you're always free to say no in any situation, any therapeutic situation.

[00:07:23] So the facilitator will, will offer their idea to the client and the client, if the client says yes, then the facilitator will invite that person to choose, from the group, strangers, basically, to represent the different elements of that constellation. So, for instance I had a constellation not long ago where someone was having very severe anxiety, had had that all their life. And, during the interview she talked to me about her mother and her mother's father and the fact that her mother's father was very explosive, had been kind of verbally violent and physically violent. And so I said to her, okay. Do you want to place someone to represent you and then someone to represent your mother and her father? And she said yes, so I said okay, ask people in the group to be these people. And then place them in the center of the circle, in the way that you feel is their place. Like where you feel is their place, basically.

[00:08:33] So the person will do that and then they will sit back down. And then we'll start observing what the representatives are experiencing. And it's hard to explain, that's why I didn't really want to explain it. Because it's, unless you've seen it or done it it sounds very abstract. Because you're like, what? Like, how can you... basically become someone else. But that's, that's what happens to a degree. So what happens is that once the representatives are placed in their respective representations, they start feeling things or having impulses or having like physical manifestations that speak to the dynamics that exist in the system.

[00:09:19] And the job of the facilitator is basically to watch everybody like a hawk to see, you know, what is happening in people's bodies, and then ask the right questions. And then ideally, maybe like, you know, either offer the right words to support a movement or place something that will support a movement. So in this case, my original idea, like I had placed this constellation thinking that maybe the grandfather's temper had had an impact, the anger had had an impact or the anxiety had had an impact. But when she placed everybody, what transpired between the mother and her father was very different. Both representatives were talking about what was behind them and they didn't want to look at what was behind them.

[00:10:11] And so that's, when we talk about phenomenology, that's exactly what it is. It's like I place something with an idea because you have to have one because otherwise you wouldn't place anything. But then the Field, what we call the Knowing Field, which is like the field that we work in in Constellation is showing me something else. And it's showing me there's something behind them. So in this case, probably it's an ancestor or something that happened before they were there that, you know, is more important than their relationship and speaks more to the issue at hand. So, what I did in this case is that I placed someone, I chose a representative to represent the origin of the anxiety, and I placed that person behind the mother, and her father. And then that whole constellation kind of moved slowly towards resolution because that ancestor then could be acknowledged and some words could be said that honored what happened, which even though I didn't know what happened, but that person's, the representative's body, like what was happening in his body was telling me a lot of things about fear and about like a great, something that happened, like an event that must have been terrifying or where that person might have died or thought that they were dead or something of that nature. 

[00:11:42] And so the facilitator will work with the information from the representatives and from the field to let the truth of the system emerge because sometimes it's actually enough that things are seen. You don't need a lot of intervention to, you know, to make things move or to appease things. Sometimes it's just enough that the person, the client, sees what is actually happening in the system, like the dynamics that are happening and what was passed down and who was before and and what is happening in people's bodies.

[00:12:25] And sometimes that's enough. You don't actually need to do more. And in any case, the stance of the facilitator, of the constellation facilitator... I mean, it's not always the case, but in the, I guess the lineage that I come from or the school that I come from the stance is that we are not seeking for a solution. We're just there to witness, to hold space for everyone, to be, you know, to hold everyone's place in the system, including the less savory characters, you know, cause there's a lot of exclusion going on, that can be going on around ancestors that were perpetrators or that were abusive or, you know, all of that.

[00:13:11] So that's our job is to hold everybody's place and to witness and if needed to help voice some unsaid or unseen truth that need to be said, or seen or heard. And support wherever movement wants to happen and can happen. But there's definitely not, I mean, ideally, it's not always the case, but ideally there's no agenda and there's no desire to solve anything and there's no desire to find a solution or save the system or save the client or any of that. I mean that should be the case in any therapeutic situation, but I feel like constellations even more, that stance is even more important, I think, for the field to be able to express, do its work. Because if you have resistance to anything that shows up in the field, then you're kind of dead in the water. So I don't know if that's really clear. But because we're not looking for resolution, a constellation can look many different ways. Sometimes there can be a beautiful movement of, you know, people moving closer and connecting and things flowing again. And sometimes there can be an extremely small movement that feels like almost nothing, but it's actually already a lot. And it's also the job of the facilitator to know when to stop. Ha, ha, ha, ha. And there are many other ways to do constellation, not just live with people. You can do it with objects, you can do it with paper you can do it in your mind's eye, like this.

[00:14:58] There's so many ways. Personally, I really like people, for many reasons. The main reason is that we need community badly. And that constellation is for me the fastest way to remind people that they are not alone and that they are not isolated. That they're actually interconnected with everybody else and everything else. And constellation stresses that in a way that I think nothing else does. Because when you start feeling, you know, strangers emotions and sometimes bodies, then you really, you have to admit that you're not, you know, like a, a separate entity floating in space. That you're actually connected to everything and everyone around you and everything and everyone that came before you.

[00:15:48] And so the thing with Constellation is like it's, it's really "in" right now thanks to Netflix and a lot of other, other stuff which I think is great. I'm not, I'm not dissing that. I'm not complaining about that. But I also want to remind you that Constellation is not a magic tool. It's not going to solve your life. Yes, sometimes the results can be extremely powerful. And reach beyond the client, like it can change whole family system dynamic. And sometimes there can be miracles, like I've seen, I've seen that. But it certainly doesn't replace you know, like a long term involvement in your own therapeutic process and your own process of consciousness and being closer to yourself and learning to be in your body in a good way. And all of that is like long term work and it's slow work.

[00:16:51] And what I see, I'm not going to say a lot, but a lot more since it's become so popular is people who come to constellation, they think they can, you know, solve all their life's problems through a constellation and that's just not the case. Also, some things are not necessarily constellation material. Constellation work, as a rule, works mostly in systemics. So it can be systemics of the family, it can be also systemics of the self, where, you know, it can kind of veer towards psychotherapy in a way, but in a, in a slightly different approach. But there are things that people bring me and I'm like, I can place something and we usually we do a constellation, but I'm like, this is not gonna replace all the work of turning towards yourself that you need to do.

[00:17:45] You know, there's like something that needs to be like a daily kind of attention brought to your own processes that constellation will not replace. And also depending on the facilitator, there are many different colors of constellation. And I guess the main two would be, you know, the people who work more psychotherapeutically in the realm of constellation. And some people would say that's not constellation because we have purists as well. And then there are some people who work more geared towards the soul and work with the soul in general and the soul of, you know, not just individual soul, but also collective souls of family systems and people. And I think my work is kind of in between. I tend to oscillate. I can do very psychotherapeutic work sometimes, and then I can do very soul based work sometimes. And it kind of really also depends on the, on the group that I'm working with, on the Field of the group that I'm working with. I think both are interesting.

[00:18:52] Definitely soul oriented constellations when they're well, when they're well held , can be life changing and are very powerful, can be very powerful. I also think that Constellation is a fabulous tool to look at your own inner system and I guess you could you know, equate it with IFS, which is Inner Family Systems work. Where you can place different parts of yourself in a constellation to see how they relate to each other. You know, the part of you who wants to move forward, and the part of you who doesn't want to move forward, for instance. And then you look at them and you're like, okay, what's happening between you two? I, I really like working that way as well. So one more thing that I should say about Constellation is that because it's phenomenological, it serves the group. In a workshop, it's been my experience, and also because I hold that belief very strongly in myself, but it's been my experience that the people who are watching, just like in the circle, work as much as the people who are representing, who work as much as the people who are the clients.

[00:20:09] Everybody receives that as much in my experience because the people who are chosen to, to represent, even though it's random, technically, it's never actually random. More often than not, it's very close to their own history of their own issue. And so they end up constellating for themselves as they're representing for somebody else.

[00:20:35] So for me it's a very efficient modality where the group serves the individual and the individual serves the group. And the work that is done serves everybody equally. Which I find fabulous, personally. So, that's it for, you know, what is Constellation. I can't really go more into it than that. If you, you know, it would take like another 10 episodes to go into specific dynamics that you find in Constellation and how you would, and this is not the purpose of this podcast, right? Like if you were interested in training in Constellation, there's many trainings. If you don't know which one to take, you can send me an email and I can recommend people for you. But it's just to give you an overview of what can happen in a Constellation circle. You know, and, and basically how we look at how the transgenerational dynamics in a family can affect the living and can affect the descendant.

[00:21:38] And how we basically try to give everybody back their dignity and their place in the best possible way so that the descendants are free to live their life as a descendant of that specific system. So if you have more questions, feel free to drop them either by email or through my website. Or on Instagram, you can comment on Instagram. I'm always happy to answer any questions you might have. But again, I would recommend that you go and do it. Because you will never learn about it through books, or through reading about it, or through watching it watching videos and stuff. You need to go do it to really understand what it is. And again, if you need recommendations of facilitators near you, hit me up. I know a lot of people in the community.

[00:22:29] I can direct you to good people and that's it for today. And in a couple of weeks, we'll be back to our regular schedule with a really amazing interview with David Sewell of Storying with David. And I loved that conversation, so I'm excited to share it with you. And just so you know from now on, maybe the episodes will be a little less clean, less edited there'll be a little more stuttering and transition words and stuff like that because I just don't have as much time as I need in order to do something as clean as I used to. And you know, better done than perfect. So I apologize in advance, but I'll do my best so that it's still easily listen-able. And with that, I wish you a good day, a good night, a good summer. And I will talk to you in a couple of weeks.