Family Constellation: A Healing Ritual in Clinical Practice
by Brigitte Essl
Abstract
When patients with chronic illness do not respond favorably to standard medical or alternative therapies, an unresolved trauma in their ancestral lineage might be the source for such condition. Family Constellation work is based on the assumption that unresolved traumas in a family lineage can remain active in current and future generations until they are resolved. Descendants will at times entangle with the fates of excluded ones, victims, or perpetrators in such lineage, and suffer undesirable consequences, such as blocked personality traits, professional hardship, emotional stress, or physical illness. In the group setting of constellation work, such traumas become activated by the constellation field rather than individual enactment. By honoring the fate of ancestors and consequently including them back into their lineage, also the current and future generations become unburdened and find a healing response to this new situation. I will present cases of such chronic conditions in adults and children, and their healing progression after their experience of a Family Constellation.
Patients with chronic conditions seek out my practice of homeopathy in search of a successful treatment protocol for their ailment. The initial homeopathic intake is well suited for an in-depth assessment of the patient’s physical, emotional, and mental symptoms. Furthermore, the patient’s significant life events, traumas, even the entire family history bring important information for homeopathic treatment. Over the last three years, when working with patients, I started to implement a screening protocol to recognize traumatic events in the patient’s parents, grandparents, and great grandparents, and I view these events in the context of the patient’s conditions that stubbornly persist or reoccur despite a host of well-matched therapies that these patients have received from standard medical treatments or alternative methods of healing. What I found is an astounding discovery that some chronic illness can be linked to the patient’s identification with an ancestral trauma.
I have witnessed remarkable recoveries of patients with long-standing or untreatable symptoms. I noticed a powerful loyalty which binds these patients to their biological systems. Even patients with presumed indifference or lack of interest about their current family or family of origin have clear emotional and physiological responses contrary to their conscious beliefs. The modern adaptation of such ancestral lineage work is called Family Constellation Work and was developed in Germany by the family therapist Bert Hellinger. Over the years, I have combined Hellinger’s approach with homeopathic field work, and I developed a treatment modality for people with chronic health conditions.
Members of a family system are subconsciously bound to the traumatic fate of their siblings, parents or other family members of the previous generations. Ancestors who have been excluded or forgotten or mistreated can cast a shadow onto the next generations. Hellinger found that there is an underlying energetic field he calls “the family conscience.” Here, the memory of such exclusions or traumas is stored for generations. “It guards the family system by operating on an unconscious level … Nobody can be excluded without the family conscience seeking redress. When a family member is cast out of a family and denied his or her right to belong, then it very often happens that another member of the family, sometimes three generations later, unconsciously identifies with this excluded person and feels pressure to leave the family in some way as well. We call that an entanglement. This person imitates that excluded person, has the same feelings as the excluded person perhaps, follows the same patterns of living as the excluded person, without consciously knowing why” (Hellinger, p. 12).
A constellation takes place in a group setting where participants represent family members without knowing any particular information about them. These “representatives” tap into morphogenetic field information of the ancestral system of the patient. None of the family history or any traumatic events are disclosed to the participants. Over a period of about 1½ - 2 hours, the constellation captures the traumatic systemic events, initiates a reconciliation, and honors excluded family members.
Typical traumas for this work are loss through early death (parents, siblings), loss of country and fortune, exclusions (adoption, illegitimate children, or institutionalization for mental disorders or physical handicaps). There are instances of entanglement when people from outside a family system become a source for family dynamics. This happens, for example, due to the relation between a family member who became a perpetrator and his or her victim; entanglements can also occur due to former relationships that have not been honored. I have noticed the following three typical patterns of entanglement that can lead to illness:
* I follow you into death. When a parent dies prematurely in the forming years of a child, or when a sibling dies in early age, the emotional bond of the surviving child or sibling may be so profound that the desire manifests to follow the deceased, and consequently the child can become ill or accident prone.
* I die instead of you. When a parent is entangled with an ancestor’s fate, the parent cannot bond fully with the child. Out of deep loyalty and love to the parent, the child now tries to relief the burden of the parent and becomes ill.
* I stand in for you. When one sibling is stillborn or handicapped or given up for adoption, the remaining sibling might identify with the fate of exclusion or hardship. This is often associated with the feeling of not belonging, of having no home, or of not being wanted, etc. Or, if there has been a perpetrator in the family, the perpetrator’s descendants might identify with the victim’s fate and, consequently, fall ill. Four case studies from my clinical practice illustrate such entanglements.
Case 1: The Boy on Fire
When Mark was nine years of age, he came to my practice for treatment of chronic eczema around his mouth. His condition started at age five, when he stubbornly persisted through standard medical and alternative treatments. Mark is a well adapted child with no other notable conditions in his medical history. He is bright, very articulate, and somewhat serious and mature for his age. He seemed burdened. The oldest sibling in a loving family, he got along well with his younger brother. During the time of flare-ups he tended to emotional melt downs, expressed guilt about something he did wrong, but he did not know what it was.
In the homeopathic intake, I recognized his response to the field of fire. Eczema burns like fire, hot food makes it worse, and Mark had recurrent dreams of fire and explosions. The family history contained a recently revealed family secret. The maternal grandfather served in Vietnam where he used explosives to perform atrocities. Mark did not know about this. During the constellation and unknown to him, the representative for Mark identified with the victims. He has also tried to help his grandfather carry the burden of guilt. Such instances of double identifications are difficult to bear; I have conducted several constellations where family members with a dual identification of victim and perpetrator developed mental disorders.
After the constellation, Mark became ill with acute bronchitis and high fever. Over the course of a week, his eczema vanished and did not return. Over the next 2 month, his emotional melt-downs occurred only twice. After taking one dose of a homeopathic remedy, he started to stabilize emotionally. I saw Mark only 2 times, at the initial interview and then ½ year later, to assess him for a constitutional remedy. I was stunned about the positive changes, he had gained some weight, and showed balance and well being. His sense of burden was gone, so was the eczema, and neither one condition has returned a year later at the final follow-up visit.
Case 2: The Boy Who Was Not Heard
The boy’s parents came to a constellation workshop in Austria to seek help for their youngest son, who had developed a therapy-resistant stutter that impaired his self-esteem and social development at the age of seven. The Family history revealed that the maternal great grandfather was a high-ranking official in the German SS. After World War II he was tried in Court and shunned by the family. Later, he committed suicide in high age. The Constellation revealed an identification of the boy’s representative with the great grandfather. The stutter was an embodied attempt of this boy, who 3 generations later attempted to speak the forbidden truth of his great grandfather who was first highly redeemed and later treated as an outcast. The boy lost his stutter 2 weeks after the constellation with no reoccurrence.
Case 3: There Is A “Ghost” In The System
Susan, a forty-one year old woman, came to my practice with a multiple sclerosis diagnosis. Her physical symptoms were mild and the typical changes in the MRI did warrant the start of more aggressive therapy. However, her neurologist advised her to consider first an alternative treatment, and consequently, Susan contacted me for homeopathic treatment. The family history revealed the tragic death of her great grandmother, who died in her early thirties, just one week after giving birth to her youngest child. The family story portrays her as a woman bravely fighting for her life to support her children, but who was taken away by death. Her death had an effect on the next three generations of females, from the grandmother who had to take care of her siblings and father at a very young age, to the mother who did not allow her maternal instincts to benefit Susan, and finally Susan, who was terrified of becoming pregnant and also developed MS. During the constellation, the great grandmother’s representative displayed the symptoms of an anxious dead person. Although she literally died decades ago, it seemed that her strong presence continued to remain in the system. The representative for the MS, without knowing any details about the family situation, felt that he can leave Susan once a bonding of the female lineage occurs, and when the bonding between daughter (Susan), mother, grandmother and great grandmother had occurred, the representative did “leave the system.”
About one week after the constellation, I also prescribed Susan a homeopathic remedy. Five months later, another MRI was performed. All original MRI findings had disappeared. Since Susan received a homeopathic remedy at about the same time of the constellation, both events may have to be counted as contributing factors. Three years later, the patient was still in remission.
Case 4: The Woman Who Could Not Stop Crying
At the age of fifty-one, Mary was referred to my practice for homeopathic treatment, because her depression did not respond favorable to medication. The family history revealed that she was adopted and that she had a late and very traumatic abortion. There was also molestation in her background, which repeated in her daughter. Mary had never met her birthmother. Her main symptoms were a sense of profound loss and crying spells after she entered menopause several years earlier. Mary is a successful professor, teaching at university level, is married and has one daughter. During the constellation, Mary’s representative felt a strong attraction for the birthmother’s representative. As they both went through a process of reconciliation between the birth mother and Mary’s adoptive parents, a profoundly positive effect on Mary’s outlook on life manifested. About one month after the constellation, Mary reported a newly-found sense of connection, she had never felt before. She even traveled to her birth region. Although she did not succeed in finding traces of her family of origin, connecting with the land and the people made her find home. Mary has also received a homeopathic remedy and some nutritional supplements to support her through all the changes. Several months after the constellation, her depression fully vanished and left her with a renewed sense of health.
Response patterns to constellations vary between adults and children. In adults, the integration of a constellation and its full effect on physical symptoms can be established in a period between six months to one year. Children have a faster response rate, very likely because of their readily available vital force.
In this paper I have explored the possible effect of ancestral trauma in the development of chronic illness for next generations. There are patterns of identification or entanglement, where family members of the next generations unconsciously carry the burden of an ancestral trauma. Constellation work can bring the unconscious entanglement to light, and utilize its ritual setting to unburden the patient and the family system. It may be significant for the positive outcome of the presented cases, that all patients were treated conjointly with homeopathic remedies.
Reference
Bert Hellinger and Hunter Beaumont, Touching Love: A Teaching Seminar with Bert Hellinger and Hunter Beaumont, Heidelberg, Carl-Auer-Systeme Verlag, 1999.