An Ode to Family Constellations
I first came across family constellations work during my original psychotherapy training some 26 years ago, we did a couple of sessions on it and I was fascinated. Some years later after my supervision training, I reconnected with it and attended a few workshops in London and completed some training in using constellations in supervision. Again, I was blown away by the phenomenology of this work. I read some books and delved a bit deeper, but other things took over, and I didn’t actively engage in it again for a while.
Until 3 years ago that is, when I met an Austrian woman at a festival in Dorset. We got chatting and she told me she was a family constellations facilitator. I told her I loved that, and I’d had some experience and would love to do it again. OK, rewind a few years to what was going on in my life at the time…
I’d started to re-connect with my stepmother after years of no contact. My dad had died when I was 27, and my Czech Oma when I was 17. I’d also got back in touch with my dad’s cousin – his only living relative - she’d also escaped to England as a refugee at the end of World War 2 when the Russians moved into Czechoslovakia. It seemed I was on a mission to not only reconnect with unprocessed grief around my dad but also to find out what had happed to my Opa – my Czech grandfather. He was never talked about, in fact, my father was never even allowed to ask his mother about him. We knew he’d been imprisoned in Czechoslovakia for passing messages to the Czech resistance, but the rest of his fate was unknown. My father and Oma had both died not knowing what had happed to him. In family constellation terms he was excluded from our family system.
Somehow, I had a calling that I needed to bring him back in and after much research, including a trip to the homeland and on-line investigations, I received via email, a copy of his death certificate, stating that he had died in Auschwitz – not because he was Jewish, but because he was a political prisoner. It turned out the fate he suffered was as part of the medical experimentation that took place there.
In that moment of seeing his name on that death certificate, it felt like I’d bought him back to life and he was acknowledged in the system. I say the fate ‘he’ suffered, but knowing what we know about family constellations, this was a fate that we all suffered as that trauma was no doubt passed down through the family line. It turned out that he’d died before my dad and Oma had even left Czechoslovakia, when they’d escaped on foot and embarked on a 3-week journey helped by a German officer, pretending to be a German family, hiding out from the Russian soldiers. These 3 weeks of sheer trauma – my dad 11 years old – were mostly spent in Austria (an important detail of this story) before making it into Germany and then to England.
And so, back to the Austrian lady at the festival in a field in the Dorset countryside. After I enthused to her about my love of family constellations, she told me that she had a workshop coming up next month and there happened to be a space on it. “I’m in!” I told her…” It’s in Austria” she said. I had shivers, and knew this was all meant to be. What I didn’t know at the time though was that the village she lives in in Austria and where the workshop took place was the next village along from where my dad and Oma had spent most of their time in hiding and where most of that trauma took place. You can’t make this shit up.
I travelled to Austria, did my constellation with a group of Austrians, mostly speaking a mix of German and English which was translated for me - another incredible detail of the phenomenology of the piece – given that my constellation was involving my Opa’s death at the hands of the Nazi’s.
That constellation was hugely shifting in terms of naming that which had never been named. It also reignited my love – and it seems calling – for this work. I attended several more of Maria’s (Austrian lady) workshops in Dorset and she became a good friend and mentor to me, sharing all that she had learnt in her 25 years’ experience and various trainings. Also, a year after that workshop in Austria, my sister and I made a pilgrimage to Auschwitz to honour our Opa, and finding his mug-shot photograph on one of the walls was another huge moment in acknowledging both his existence and his fate (in family constellation terms – bringing the system back into balance).
Knowing that I wanted to do more training, I began searching for courses, and eventually signed up for one which seemed to tick all my boxes – it was also a chance to re-unite me with a long-standing love affair I have with Ireland, as well as brining in German connection it seemed (given that the trainer grew up and had lived in Germany). What I’ve learnt on this training has been immense – both personally through the deep work that I have done, and been part of and witnessed, and also in terms of facilitating which I am now up and running with.
Another important thing to mention is that at the same time as this training began, I signed contract with 3 friends to lease a piece of land in Thailand where we are each able to build our own house as well as create a community and nature-based living. Saying yes to this was a huge process of me overcoming the self-limiting beliefs in my head and paying attention to the huge surges of energy in my body telling me; YES, YES, a thousand times YES. The significance here to family constellations is that one of the others is a female friend of mine and the two are Russian men. In the moment that I signed that contract, I’ve no doubt that a healing took place, given that all of the women in my paternal line were raped or sexually abused by Russian soldiers. In agreeing to collaborate and co-create with these Russian men, a forgiveness has happened, and I can now be free from the aspects of that which I know I have carried. I am sure those surges of energy were my female ancestors willing me on.
And on another interesting note, I recently find myself in a new relationship which has no doubt come in as a direct result of everything I’ve written about here. And what’s not lost on me is that he has the same name as my dad – well, the German/Czech version of it – which I’m taking as a nod from the universe that, by bringing things back into balance, something in my father line has healed which in turn has enabled me to heal my relationship patterns with men.
I continue to be fascinated by this work and, for me it’s one of the most powerful ways I have experienced of being of service to ourselves and others. The ripple effect of each constellation reaches wide. And as now I hold space, facilitate and bear witness to other people’s constellation processes, I am incredibly grateful that it found its way to me.