Therapies

Family Constellation Therapy (also known as Hellinger Therapy, Systemic Constellations, and Systemic Family Constellations) is a form of emotional therapy and a three-dimensional group process that has the power to shift generations of suffering and unhappiness. This alternative therapeutic method helps to reveal the hidden dynamics in a family or relationship in order to find and address any stressors that are negatively impacting them.

Bert Hellinger, the founder of Systematic Constellations, who practiced this method for more than 50 years, observed that many patients unconsciously adopt destructive familial patterns of anxiety, depression, anger, guilt, alcoholism, and even illness as a way of loyalty to their families. For instance, bonded by a deep love, a child will often sacrifice his or her own best interests in order to attempt to ease the suffering of a parent or other family member.

The goal of family constellations is to allow a patient to break these toxic patterns so that they may live healthier and happier by setting a new life course.

How it Works

Just as one inherits eye color and blood type, they also inherit the residue from traumatic events that have taken place in a family. While physical traits are easily discernible, this emotional legacy is often hidden. Anxiety, fear, financial worries, depression, illness, and unhappy relationships can all be forms of unconscious inheritance.

Family Constellation Therapy is an effective new therapy that is an alternative to traditional counseling and that is very established and popular in Europe and spreading around the world. It is quite powerful and effective at uncovering unfavorable or detrimental situations and providing solutions to relieve emotional stress. Most patients resolve their issue in a relatively short time using Family Constellations or a combination of therapy and constellation work. It is a relatively, quick, easy and cost-effective method. For many, this is a profound life-changing experience.

It has been found that changes within a patient may often result in unexpected changes around them. This may be due to changes in the connecting field of which one is involved and/or unconscious shifts due to starting an impulse in the personal and family soul that is set in motion by the Family Constellation process.

Family constellation is indicated for those with emotional disturbances and unresolved trauma that has afflicted a family through an event such as murder, suicide, death of a mother in childbirth, the early death of a parent or sibling, war, natural disaster, emigration, or abuse.

Benefits of Family Constellation Therapy

Clinical experience has shown that family constellation therapy may be used for a number of conditions and issues and that the benefits include:

• Reveals hidden cross-generational patterns that are affecting our lives through unconscious loyalty to family
• Helps to find the “right place” within our family and discovering ourselves
• Empowers and strengthens our capacity to respond to challenges
• Connects us to the source by letting go of uncovered toxic relationships or memories
• Frees from remembering and analyzing the past

How we apply it

Family Constellation is a method of family
therapy or systemic therapy, in which individual persons are positioned (set
up) in the room as stand-ins for family members and relationships who
typically are drawn to one another. In this way, the network of relationships
within a family can be visualized. The members of the constellation
typically don’t know the client or the client’s family.

Immediately after the session, you are encouraged to talk
as little as possible in the first half hour after your constellation.
Give yourself all the time and space you need to integrate your insights and
experience. Avoid analyzing and questions out of curiosity of others around how
things went or why. This can serve to disrupt and distract the process.