A few nights ago, I had the experience of having my family “constellated,” and it was an extremely powerful experience.
Here’s how it works:
A number of people show up to participate in the constellation—in the group I was part of, there were 14 of us. A facilitator chooses someone in the group as a subject, and the subject then chooses people from the group to represent his or her family members. In my case, I was asked to choose representatives for my father, mother, brother, sister, and myself. Later in the constellation, a representative was chosen by the facilitator, to play my oldest sister who died two years before I was born.
The death of a child is a personal horror of unthinkable proportions. And families handle such things in a variety of ways. In my family, the fact of my deceased sister and the details of her passing (lived three days; died of pneumonia) were not secrets.
What was kept secret, almost always, was the ongoing low-level (and sometimes high-level) grief it caused in all of us—not just my mother, who has spent the last forty-nine Octobers in deep mourning. It wasn’t that any of us was lying to ourselves about it—it’s more that the grief was so deeply buried, so often truly forgotten, so completely subconscious, that it was just left to have its effect on all of us in a way that was inadvertently secret.
Once the subject of the constellation chooses the family representatives, he or she is then asked to position the family members, without thinking, within the circle. It’s considered significant when a member is placed outside of the circle or facing away from the group.
Once the constellation is set, the facilitator begins to question each family-member-representative. There’s no observable rhyme or reason to what the facilitator does as it’s largely (if not entirely) intuitive. Technically, facilitation can be taught, but that’s like saying that someone can be taught to draw:
The basics are teachable, but in my opinion, the facilitation of a family constellation is among the highest of art forms.
The subject does not initially participate in her own constellation, but I was a representative in a later constellation, so I can tell you from experience that it’s an extraordinary experience. As you stand where the subject has placed you, you tap into the consciousness of the person you’re representing. In my own family constellation, for example, the representative for my father was asked how he felt, and the first thing he said was that his feet hurt, which was right on the money. Later, the person representing me spoke of her hands hurting and of carrying really heavy things in front of herself. I’ve had very significant hand issues, which even resulted in surgery on my left hand, due to having carried excessive amounts of weight over my ten years as a personal shopper.
But those uncanny revelations of known family details help mostly to convince the subject that the other, less-known, perhaps even long-secret family details are right on target too.
Nobody really knows where the “magic” comes from that makes the constellation process so powerful. Some say that our intentions within the circle give us access to what’s known as the “Morphogenetic Field”—the field in which we are entirely without boundary, and so everything is revealed. Not even Bert Hellinger, the creator of Family Constellation Therapy, claims to know, but subjects are almost always startled by the revelation of unknowable bits of detail about their own lives and family stories.
I’m not going to share the specifics of my family constellation—not because they’re so top-secret, but because it feels more self-indulgent than helpful at this point. But I will share with you my most significant “Universal” take-away.
Time and again, in both of that evening’s constellations, guilt, shame, grief, and all of their wicked sisters were handed back to those who’d handed them down to us. Mothers, fathers, grandmothers, and grandfathers were handed back the burdens we’d inadvertently taken from them over the years and carried faithfully ever since.
But the kicker is that every time the burden was handed back, both parties got lighter—both parties felt less burdened.
This is, on first blush, counter-intuitive. But on second blush, it makes PERFECT sense. No burden can be handed to another and actually released in the process. At best, burdens are shared, not given away. If I took on my mother’s grief, there is no way in which that made her burden lighter. In fact, the emotional diminishment of her beloved daughter—me—could only hurt her more. Psychically giving her back her burden of grief—promising her that I would no longer carry it—made her lighter, happier, the immediate recipient of the relief that passes all understanding.
The tiny act of handing back a burden is a brilliantly twisted act, having the power to un-break hearts in a single elegant movement.
There is, for lack of a better term, a lot of magic in the family constellation process, and it’s not just the subject who ends up getting shifted. The fact is, if you change, everything changes, and this process will change anyone who participates in it with an open heart, as well as everyone to whom that person is connected.
Significant illnesses and injuries are healed because individuals are no longer carrying burdens they are not entitled to carry. Decades-old grudges dissolve within weeks. People who never listen, suddenly start asking for details. People who seem hopeless, find hope.
As I write this, my father’s birthday is a few days away, and I feel like my constellation is, in some significant way, a present for him. Never, in all of my years, had it ever occurred to me how he too had suffered in losing his daughter, his first born, the beautiful baby girl he waited for not only for nine months, but for all of his life. I’d never thought about how difficult it must have been for him to hear condolences and awkward silences upon returning to work instead of sharing his joy, especially for a man of so few words. I’m not proud to say this, but I don’t think I ever really saw my father as a fully human being until I saw him represented by a tiny dark-haired woman with big eyes and a beautiful smile who wept at the death of his daughter as though any possibility for full emotional connection had left his body forever.
There’s no telling how many hearts were un-broken the night of my constellation, nor for how many generations the healing will carry forward. But it’s clear to me that there is movement, not just in me, but in my entire family.
Last night I told my daughter about her aunt who died as a baby, and about the grief that my entire family had repressed (a new word I’d taught her recently) only to have it manifest in all of us in all kinds of injuries, illnesses, and addictions. And then with newfound courage, I even told her about the miscarriage I had a year or so before she was born.
She listened with interest, assured me that she was kind of glad she didn’t have an older brother, and seemed to take no burden from it.
When we take no pains to bury such things, they just become part of the natural order—the perfection of everything. Sad things happen. Our job is to welcome all of them, pain and all.
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