Family Constellations

Family Constellations is a therapeutic method developed by Bert Hellinger and practised by psychologists, psychiatrists psychotherapists and alternative practitioners. Its objective is to release profound tensions within and between people. Those tensions may lie in a personal or professional context.

The method
A healing resolution is achieved when every representative feels right in his or her place and the other representatives agree. This is claimed to represent, in an abstract way, a possible resolution of the issues faced by the subject of the session.
 * A group (typically strangers) is led by a facilitator. In turn, members of the group can explore an urgent personal issue.  Generally, several members will be given an opportunity to set up a Constellation in each session.
 * After a brief interview, the facilitator suggests who will be represented in the Constellation. These are usually a representative for the seeker, one or more family members, and sometimes abstract concepts such as "depression" or a country.
 * The person presenting the issue (seeker or client) asks people from the group to be representatives. He or she arranges the representatives according to what feels right in the moment.  The seeker then sits down and observes.
 * Several minutes elapse with the representatives standing still and silent in their places. Unlike psychodrama the representatives do not act, pose or role play.
 * Emphasis is placed on intuition in placing the representatives and in subsequent steps of the procedure. The aim is to tap into what the psychiatrist Albrecht Mahr describes as the Knowing Field .  The Knowing Field is claimed to guide participants to sense and articulate the feelings of the real family members they represent.  This is inexplicable because the representatives have never met these people, have been told little or nothing about them and those family members may no longer be living.  Nevertheless, the representatives usually will experience feelings or physical sensations which inform the process.
 * The facilitator may ask each representative to describe how it feels to be placed in relation to the others. At this point, the facilitator, seeker, and group members may perceive something in the spacial relationships and feelings held by the representatives that is informative regarding an underlying dynamic that relates to the presenting personal issue.
 * A healing resolution for the issue generally involves the repositioning the representatives and for the facilitator to suggest one or two sentences to be spoken aloud. If the representatives do not feel better in their new position or sentence, they can move again or try a different sentence.  Sometimes the process ends before a full resolution is achieved.

Along the way to finding this healing resolution, particular attention is paid by the practitioner to configurations of the group that do not feel right or which generate negative feelings or physical sensations. This is because it is claimed that such configurations may represent systemic entanglements between the seeker's family members. Systemic entanglements are said to occur when unresolved trauma has afflicted a family through an event such as murder, suicide, death of a mother in childbirth, early death of a parent or sibling, war, natural disaster, emigration, or abuse. Proponents claim that the negative legacy from such events can be passed down to succeeding generations, even if those affected now are unaware of the original event in the past. The psychiatrist Iván Böszörményi-Nagy referred to this phenomenon as Invisible Loyalties

Criticisms
While participants in Family Constellations sessions report positive outcomes, the method itself, practitioners and its inventor have been criticised.


 * As a phenomenological approach, the Family Constellation method does not lend itself to being empirically validated by standard psychotherapeutic research methods.


 * Accreditation of practitioners is claimed not to be consistent and credible.


 * Some practitioners claim the process can resolve profound issues in subject's lives in a single session. This seems implausibly short to defenders of empirically validated psychotherapeutic methods.


 * A circulating article claims that victims of sexual abuse are oriented to accept the abuse and thank the abuser for the opportunity . At least one participant in a Family Constellation workshop committed suicide soon afterwards. As a rebuttal, it has been indicated that any facilitator who has the victim thank the abuser for the opportunity has not been trained properly, and is misusing the process.