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Systemic influences may be outside of your
awareness, yet these relationship dynamics influence your life.
Systemic diagnosis offers insights into your emotions and hidden dynamics
- and potential solutions for achieving goals or solving problems. But talk
is cheap and lasting change needs work!
Systemic insights are simple yet profound,
hidden yet obvious, and always revealing. And you may never understand your own
family as well as you understand somebody else's.
After Family Constellations
A family constellation represents the subjective experience of
imagined family members. It can also be called a ritual map or
family panorama, but differs from a genogram, which maps
relationships and medical history.
Family Constellations were first described by Alfred Adler.
Applications of family constellations were developed and incorporated into family
therapy by Virginia Satir (see New Peoplemaking), and more
recently popularized by Bert Hellinger and his trainers.
In the demonstrations I witnessed, people trained by Satir or
Hellinger briefly explored people's family compositions and histories, and then
asked those people to spatially represent their families using other students.
Family constellations were often made with actors (during trainings),
or with empty chairs or other objects (during private sessions).
The resulting layouts of people or objects are often
called family constellations. These layouts were then modified
or changed, following the feelings, guesses or
intuitions of the leader or participants.
The emotions described by the representatives are
often claimed to 'belong to the real family members' - the
absent family of the central person. This philosophy and methodology seems to
offer simple solutions
for complex problems, and its popular appeal is generating interesting
consequences ...
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My research into
Hawaiian spirituality
indicates that many rituals utilized non-local action. The rituals of
ho'oponopono,
ho'omanamana
and awaiku assume that human health reflects human relationships, and
that information can pass between distant relatives. (When action at a
distance becomes healing at a distance, it seems miraculous.) |
Constellation Work?
WARNING - moving actors during a
family constellation or family panorama communicates: "You can feel
good and relax because you have imagined that you have solved a
problem".
We find that these good feelings often support short-term changes, followed
by a relapse. We find that lasting change requires appropriate changes
in a person's emotional maturity, relationship skills and behavior.
Good feelings often seem to decrease people's motivation to improve their
communication skills and accept their responsibilities.
We help people stabilize their desired changes by helping them
change both
their subjective experience and their relationship behavior.
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When we help people heal relationships,
we respect each person's values, and we honor each person's wisdom.
We don't try to make people do anything.
We find that people make intelligent choices when they know what
is possible; when they know the potential consequences and when they are not entangled in limiting
beliefs. |
My talks with trainers, students and clients of family
constellation workshops indicate that the benefits of imaginary change-work
often vanish within a month, although some practitioners told me
that any long-term follow-up is intrusive and should be avoided.
See Systemic Health
and Systemic Magic.
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For helping professionals:
Be honest - only promise what you whole-heartedly believe
you can deliver. Let your experience speak to you as well as
to your clients about what to expect. You can promise to discuss
the potential consequences of every technique before using it,
you can offer many choices, and you can promise your clients your
compassionate attention! |
Trauma, Tragedy and Health
Every family experiences drama, trauma and
tragedies. Some common examples of family trauma include the consequences of:
Most families can resolve relationship trauma
and move on, but some get stuck, unable to find a balance between giving and
receiving, between honoring and forgetting, between life and death.
Families unconsciously follow family rules.
For example, if a family member is ostracized, another family member may
marry a substitute for the excluded person, or may identify with the missing
person. If that missing person is not brought back into a family, a
system - and system members - lose part of their identity. A family
member may unconsciously express the missing or lost qualities.
Cross-generational entanglements
explain why some tragedies are repeated in each generation. Relatively
simple but toxic examples of cross-generational systemic suffering are
the varieties of covert emotional incest and suicide.
See Mother-Son Entanglements,
Father-Daughter Bonds and
Suicide.
Children can become entangled in the
drama of missing, hurt or grieving relatives, and can identify with
or bond to those relatives. Later in life, as these adult children
act out their entanglements, creating the seeds of chaos for the
next generation of children.
We help people recognize and resolve
cross-generational entanglements with our systemic coaching.
Failure to resolve severe family entanglements can
have unpleasant consequences, such as bipolar
disorder, depression,
anxiety ...
and suicide.
Risks, Responsibility, Consequences and Effectiveness
There are risks for people who participate as actors in
other people's family constellations. If observers of a system interact with
the members or substitutes of that system, the consequences of observation
flow both ways. People who play roles in another person's family systems,
may identify with those roles, and forget themselves.
Many family systems seem to require one or more
members to be unhealthy, and their members may identify with unhealthy people, and experience psychosomatic
symptoms. This seems to be common (based on discussions with participants
of family constellation workshops and with our own research).
Another risk of family constellation work is the risk of
installing beliefs. If a constellations trainer is accepted as an authority, a
concise diagnosis that seems to simplify a complex problem may have the rapid
placebo effect called instant healing. Well ... temporarily anyway ...
until the family system reasserts its power.
Short-term results are a curse to many alternative therapies -
except that some family constellation trainers suggest that practitioners avoid follow-up with their students or clients! Follow-up, they told me, can
be terribly intrusive and damage the newly adjusted family systems. Is this
wisdom - or an
impressive way to justify avoiding learning about responsibility, consequences and
effectiveness?
Information offered by actors in a family constellation is
second-hand ... filtered by the actor's own experiences, values and beliefs. I have
witnessed many constellations in which the actors propounded beliefs from
various religions, cults and philosophies as inspired truth.
I have also seen apparently unstable and immature
people become enmeshed in dysfunctional family constellations. They
may react and abreact to what they discover, and distort their own
relationships. The consequences of role playing and identifying with unhealthy
people can be very unpleasant.
Family constellations provide a way to change inner
representations of relationships. However, changing representations is
unlikely to change other people's representations, nor motivate other
people to ignore any past hurt or forget injustices. Unless followed by
appropriate action and interaction, the apparent benefits
family constellation workshops seem to disappear within three months.
Our Systemic Coaching
We also apply systemic coaching in human resource management
and organizational development, to provide efficient and effective models for
solving problems and organizational re-engineering. (Some interesting
theories of this work involve morphogenetic
fields and chaos coaching.)
Consequences of relationship trauma (e.g. abuse,
betrayal, suicide, abortion and adoption) often continue in families as cross-generational entanglements. Junior members of a
system may follow senior members into obsessions, illness or death.
Some questions that expose systemic stress are:
- How is power delegated?
- How do leaders gain power?
- Who really makes decisions?
- How are those decisions communicated?
We help parents or leaders to restore order, and
change the human resources of a family, team or organization. This
emotional
intelligence can help people answer some important questions:
- How can we increase happiness?
- How can we increase effectiveness?
- Which person best fits our organization?
- How can core competencies be duplicated or improved?
Following systemic diagnosis, we coach people to
define their goals and plans to reach them - including relationship
goals. Verbal and nonverbal objections and entanglements are explored
until each goal is congruently desired (no verbal or nonverbal objections)
and limiting beliefs are dissolved.
Our systemic coaching reflects
participation in life responsibilities,
rather than in somebody else's theories or intuitions. We can explore
who supports you, who blocks you, and relationship ecology
(effects on relationships following proposed changes) to help you
assess the desirability and consequences of potential solutions.
Online Coaching & Mentorship
Plagiarism is theft. Copyright © Martyn Carruthers 2001-2012 All rights reserved.
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