Describing Constellating is Notoriously Difficult

Both, facilitators and participants, often throw up their hands when asked to. Part of that is the striking accuracy with which strangers can represent someone in your (family) system. Someone they  have never met. They may even have greeted you for the first time, just half an hour ago. What we will experience has no explanation in a Newtonian world view. Other ‘explanations’? There are other models … a theme for another day.

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So, let me try

Constellating Systems (again, families, organisations, an Inner World System, and more) is done by embodied representing of parts that constitute a given system. Parts are chosen in relevance to a change seeker’s presented issue. In a narrative/story (‘intakes’) the spacial and directional architecture of how parts relate is mostly left out. Setting up representations of said parts results in a –breathing– snapshot of the spacial relations. An inner  narrative is translated into an embodied 3D constellation of parts. Rather immediately, we can see their relational patterns;  disconnect, enmeshment, or balance shows us the ‘story’ in plain view.

An outdated loyalty to the family of origin, role chaos in an organisation, troubles at a workplace, and no less, transmission of cultural ‘habits’ across tribal generations, we can simply see it. The positioned person (representative) is affected –literally– by standing in an other’s shoes (parts).

In short, representing systemic parts and their placing, makes ‘relational architecture’ of issues and troubles visible, and makes life-giving and life-limiting patterns tangible.

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For Constellating Systems Days we meet In-Person

While representing can be facilitated (online), bodily representation reveals the full range of sensations and emotions experienced (usually) by a stranger– emerging from the between and processed via ‘lived’ experience. The bodily willingness to feeling an other’s troubles, pain, and struggle is a participatory service. Blessedly, it becomes a learning experience, all its own. A day (or longer), of withnessing and feeling the ‘other’, is a praxis toward (body-mind-soul) enrichment. 

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Sprawling Issues are Narrowed toward Commitment to Change

Then, the change seeker (‘client’) chooses representatives, sets them up inside the circle of withnesses, according to his or her present moment experience of spacial relationships between them (snapshot!). The somatic experience of a representative shifts within moments. Sensations, emotions, ways of holding the body, needing to move, wanting to leave, and more, are usually quite distinct from how someone felt before standing in a designated place (mother, the family do, a tree, a country of origin, and more.) Representatives are strikingly attuned to the represented part in question. Their changing experiences, shared with the facilitator, guides the facilitation process. Clarifying relational grievances, shifting burdens and responsibilities, nourishing starved parts –and more– unfolds in the procedural development toward balance and (greater) ease among the parts. 

We engage language, sensations, placing, movement, emotional expression, play, and bodily contact (although, not mandatory) in the trauma mending process. Frayed places in your ancestral (or present day) fabric are tended to, enmeshment is noted and (where possible) unbraided, outdated sacrifices are revisited, belonging is restored, life-giving distance is considered. For example, issues with a co-worker, your father, a sibling, your headache, a generational legacy, and more, may be explored and processed. Internal (and, if useful external) resources may be discovered and invited. Possibilities are imagined and tried on.

Every daylong group is unique. We enter a veritable heterotopia (third-space), created by humans willing to serve, and be served. This makes each group a system all its own, with distinct co-awareness and mending power.

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 The Takeaway

Relational tapestries, co-woven during several constellations during the day, are now embodied experience for each of us to take away. We can remember and  reach for them days, weeks, and months later. We can remember how painful and complex issues were honoured. We can retain, and recall, the shared grace and each other’s gratitude for brightening the room.

Above all, via other people’s stories, we literally practice embodied connecting to Self, Others, and the World at Large.