Revised from The Language of the Soul by John L Payne
When an individual wishes to work on a relationship issue, a theme in their life or an illness, we seek to look at entanglements within a family or other system that may be at the root of disruptive life patterns. Family & Systems Constellations work is event-oriented in-as-much as we take little to no account of personality descriptions or any particular bias or “story” that a client may have. In setting up a constellation, we are specifically interested in who is a member of the system and what specifically happened. Events of significance that often have impact on a family system include:
The client is asked to select participants in the workshop to represent concepts in their lives, members of their family or any significant individuals, be they grandparents, uncles, aunts, etc. Once all of the representatives have been chosen, they are asked to settle into the representation of that role, and it is at this point that the constellation comes to life. Representatives will be invited to notice any feelings, sensations, emotions in relation to themselves or while looking at the other representatives.
The great difference between Constellation work and psychodrama or “role play” is that the representatives are not acting out roles according to personality descriptions given by the client or responding to the client’s “story” about what went on. With the set-up of a constellation, the representatives move into and become part of the knowing field of the issue and remarkably take on the actual feelings and impulses of the real people or things they represent.
This process is a deep experience not only for the representatives, but also for the client as they watch their issue come to life in front of them. (The term, knowing field, was initially coined by Dr. Albrecht Mahr in 1997 at the first international conference on Family Constellations in Wiesloch, near Heidelberg, Germany.)
Once a Family Constellation is set up, the facilitator first observes the set-up in silence, observing both the body language and the pattern that has been created. Very often, the facilitator is able to see indications of certain events that have taken place within the issue simply from observing how the representatives are standing in relationship to one another and their overall demeanour, even when the client has made no mention of specific events. Once these preliminary observations have been made, the facilitator then checks in with each representative and asks them how they are feeling. The feelings reported can be physical descriptions or a wide variety of emotional states. When problems and entanglements are identified, the facilitator then use healing sentences to bring about resolution.