FAMILY CONSTELLATIONS
Could this age-old therapy help you stop blaming your mother?
when I started 15 years ago, absolutely nobody knew what it was,’ says Tanja Meyburgh, founder of African Constellations. She is a trained facilitator as well as a registered counselling psychologist. ‘It’s still quite young in South Africa, and actually quite young as a therapeutic method too – it really started gaining traction only in the late 1980s/early 1990s.’
Classical constellation as we know it today was first developed by German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger. He came to South Africa in the 1950s as a Catholic missionary and spent 16 years in KwaZulu-Natal, where he became fluent in Zulu and learnt about traditional Zulu attitudes to family. ‘He speaks a lot about the reverence of the children for adults and ancestors,’ says Tanja. ‘He was really struck by the different ways in which families took care of each other and the dignity of the elders.’
When Bert eventually went back to Germany, he completed his psychotherapy training, left the church and became a therapist. ‘He believed that the transgenerational family system was of utmost importance for the health of the individual, and that that was something the West had lost.’
SO WHAT ARE FAMILY CONSTELLATIONS, EXACTLY?
‘It’s a way of understanding your family system and your behaviour,’ says Tanja. ‘It helps you to uncover dynamics that may not be seen or that are hidden, that can span across many generations.’
It’s not a replacement for regular talk therapy, but it’s a great addition, she says. ‘You start to see that it’s not just about you – you’re impacted by everybody in the family, and all those relationships are part of who you are. You can bypass some of the old ways in which you’ve always explained your issues and find a new perspective.’
HOW DOES IT WORK?
With the help of representatives (usually strangers) portraying your family members, a facilitator helps you ‘set up’ your family dynamic. ‘We don’t need the whole family to be present – and we don’t need any buy-in from anybody,’ says Tanja. ‘In regular family work we’d need the whole family there, and the therapist would work with all of them. [In our case] the representatives are usually strangers, and the less they know the person, the better. That way, they can be much more neutral.’
Representatives are assigned roles, then positioned in relation to one another. ‘You can actually see it in a visual, spatial way. We decide who in the family we could set up, and the client then places them in the space. Then together we’d look at it – just from looking at where people are facing and the layout, there’s quite a lot of information and potential for reflection.’
Tanja usually chats to the client to get a sense of what their issue is before setting up the constellation. Sometimes the clues lie in biographical details. ‘For instance, if someone had one child, then another six years later, I might ask, “Were there any other children?” And they’ll say, “Oh
ja, but they died.” So there’s an exclusion – but when a child is born after two children have died, their mother and father are going to parent them very differently. Those are the kinds of thing you can pick up through the facts.’
REPRESENTING
Tanja stresses that being a representative isn’t like role playing – it’s reporting on how you feel in that moment. Once you step into the ‘knowing field’, you start to tap into the family dynamics. ‘In Jungian terms we’d call it the “collective unconscious”, where we’re all connected,’ she says. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake likened it to a morphogenic field, a space that contains information: think birds that fly together in a flock without crashing into one another.
‘The moment I stepped into the constellation I was part of that energy flow rather than just being an observer,’ says Emily*, who has attended many of Tanja’s workshops over the years. ‘Even though I couldn’t really explain it, I could feel these emotions coming through.’
Representation is about stepping into a role, says Hope*, who is also a trained facilitator. ‘You don’t know that person, so you allow the role to take effect on you. You connect with that energy within a resonant space.’
Tanja describes representation as a ‘training in compassion’. ‘A lot of people struggle to see things from someone else’s perspective. These days it’s all me, me, me. To really sense and feel in your body what it’s like to be in this person’s position is quite a rare opportunity.
‘Children seldom or never dare to live a happier or more fulfilling life than their parents.’
People get a lot out of it.’
Representatives are often quite shocked by the depth of the emotions they feel within a constellation. ‘There are times when people have quite strong experiences,’ says Tanja. ‘That’s when they start to think that this work is somehow “magic”. It’s not really. It’s kind of a process that we’ve forgotten as human beings: that we’re connected, and that we can resonate with one another. You may find that emotions run higher particularly when you have similar experiences. Then you have quite a deep experience, and you work on some of your own issues inside somebody else’s constellation.’
THE ORDERS OF LOVE
Back to Bert: his work is founded on four basic principles, which he named the Orders of Love. ‘These four “orders” help love to flow in the family,’ says Tanja. ‘If they aren’t observed, it results in entanglements – which is what we call it when things get stuck.’ The first order is that everyone has a right to belong to the system. ‘When family members are excluded, that causes problems,’ explains Tanja. ‘For instance, handicapped people, murderers, stillborn babies… people just pretend they aren’t there. That causes trouble because the system wants to balance itself. So if something is missing, it’s always looking for it.’
That missing piece will manifest elsewhere, she says. ‘Someone in a subsequent generation will behave strangely, or act out something that looks like a mental illness. It’s like they’re including that person unconsciously, through that behaviour. When we include that missing person in the constellation, that behaviour disappears. You often find this with children.’ Order number two: everybody has a place. ‘We need to honour the order of the system,’ says Tanja. ‘You’ll find younger kids trying to take over the position of an older child. Or when a parent lost their parents very early or had traumatic relationships with them, a part of them becomes almost frozen in a childlike state. So their kids start to act like parents; they look after their parents’ emotional needs.’ The third order is that everybody must carry their own destiny. ‘When we try to carry the emotional burdens of others, it weakens us and them. So how can we leave the responsibility where it belongs? We can help and have compassion without taking it on. When people are allowed to carry their own burdens, they have more dignity.’ Lastly, says Tanja, is the balance of give and take. ‘Love and life flow in certain directions. You give to your children; you get it from your parents – that is the correct order. When a four-yearold child is giving to a 30-yearold mom, there’s a problem. In adult relationships, where things should be equal, difficulties arise when one person is the giver and the other is the taker; we see that in addictive or co-dependent relationships.’
THE UNWRITTEN RULES
‘Children seldom or never dare to live a more fulfilling life than their parents. This is kind of the essence of the work,’ says Tanja. ‘We find that we’re deeply loyal to our families. Even if we leave the country and live somewhere else and never speak to them again, it doesn’t work. Every family has a set of “unspoken rules”. If you follow the unwritten rules of your family, you’ll feel innocent and happy. If you go against those rules, you start to feel guilty, or like you’re doing something wrong. So people can do things that are seemingly nice yet feel guilty, or do things that are shocking and feel fine about it.’
This loyalty often lies at the heart of some deep-seated issues. ‘Often in that unconscious loyalty we may remain loyal to a parent who never had a good relationship, or a father who didn’t earn enough money. Perhaps your father and your grandfather struggled financially, so you sabotage financial opportunities that come your way. There is an unconscious loyalty: “I can’t do it differently because then I can’t belong.” We perpetuate those patterns.’
Addiction is another issue that Tanja deals with a lot. ‘Addiction and co-dependence – I don’t think you can treat addiction without looking at the family system. Another thing I’ve had a lot of success with is excessive depression and anxiety.’
INTERVENTIONS
Constellations are often just about opening the client’s eyes to family dynamics. But sometimes symbolically moving the representatives around or addressing them can bring about real-life change.
‘I might suggest some movements or sentences,’ says Tanja. ‘Sometimes things get stuck in certain ways and when we shift them in the representatives, everybody starts to feel better. Or, we might intervene with ‘healing sentences’, something short and sweet that gets to the point. In the case of a child acting like a parent, it might be something like: “You are my parent and I am your child. Whatever happened between you and your parents, I leave it with you.”’
During a recent session with a client who suffers from severe anxiety and depression, Tanja uncovered a family dynamic that explained it all. ‘Her anxiety is around performance – she’s a major overachiever, a perfectionist. She does what 10 people usually do. I asked her. “Do you have siblings, or was it just you?” She said, “Yes, but they were all miscarried.” I asked how many. “Seven.”
‘She’s the only one that survived – that’s the pressure she’s feeling. She’s living all their lives for them in some way; she has to be really good because they didn’t make it. We had a ceremony so she could honour their place and say, “I’m not the only child. I’m the baby. And I can be small – I don’t have to be so strong.” Her anxiety reduced dramatically after the work we did. Anxiety is often about trying to control things that are bigger than us.’
‘We get to the existential thread, the essence. Really interesting things have happened over the years – people who haven’t spoken to their family for years… after the constellation, they suddenly get a phone call, because of that shift.’
Even Bert Hellinger found it mysterious at times. ‘He said, “It’s a mystery. It doesn’t matter what it is; we just know that it works.”’
‘It’s kind of a process that we’ve forgotten – that we’re connected, and can resonate with one another.’