Family Constellations

Humans are affected by a variety of forces that originate both inside and outside the boundaries of regular space and time. Conventional psychotherapy works with the dynamics of family situations and family psychology in which there is indifferent or abusive parenting. There are also feelings and dynamics that appear to have originated with family members and situations from previous generations, often long before we were born. Somehow we are affected by what happened in our ancestral “family soul” despite the distance in time and space.

The constellation approach to transformational change work is a unique format. It looks and operates entirely differently from any kind of conventional counseling or coaching. It is also entirely different from psychodrama and family reconstruction therapy. The family constellation reveals and revises invisible forces that bind people into family pain across multiple generations. This heartbreaking suffering takes the form of entirely unconscious attempts to remedy the losses and tragedies of our ancestors by perpetuating their pain in our present-day experience. Once the tragic entanglements in a family are adequately revealed and acknowledged, the constellation opens the way for the entire system to release old—sometimes ancient—patterns that have been distorting the proper expression of love and hope in the family. When appropriate interventions are provided, family members in the present generation are free to make new choices, and to thereby respectfully allow past loss, pain, and tragedy to be left in the past, where they belong.

The family constellation operates in a quantum, non-local manner. For example, the usual experience and effects of time are absent in a constellation. Within the field of the constellation all time is right now. For example, if there are five generations interacting within the field, each generation is fully present in its own now, although they are obviously in past and future states relative to one another. Amazingly, the trans-generational family interventions accomplished within the constellation field “now” appear to affect both the past and the future of the client and his or her family. Entirely new possibilities for healing and reconciliation become available in places where there was only darkness and hopelessness before. All of these discoveries and changes are unfolded in the full view of all who attend, even if they do not participate in the constellation directly.

Example of Family Constellations: A Family’s Experience Involving Genocide

There are constellation evenings approximately every other week, and there is no charge to attend. For information on time and location, please go to: carlbuchheit.fullslate.com/services/913

“Human suffering arises from the terrible things we do to ourselves in an unworkable effort to say ‘I love you’ to another.”
— Kaskafayet, as paraphrased by Carl Buchheit