What is a Family Constellation?
Have you ever found yourself pondering, "What's wrong with me?" especially when facing persistent issues in your life that neither psychotherapy nor other methods have resolved? This is where Family Constellations (FC) can help you truly breakthrough to new ground and find peace and resolution.
So many of us spend too much time feeling inadequate and flawed. But what if you just aren't looking at your struggles with a wide enough lens? What if the block isn't yours, but something you inherited?
Our current Western culture promotes individualism. Biologically, energetically, and spiritually, this is simply inaccurate. You belong to a larger energy system. This larger energy field is your Family Constellation, or Family System.
A constellation of stars is a particular arrangement of individual stars, with each one in a particular position relative to the others. Together they form a system...such as Orion's Belt, or the Big Dipper.
You occupy a similar position relative to those you are genetically connected to. If you are in a good position where life force and love flow easily to you, things will go well in your life.
When there are unresolved traumas in the system, they block the flow of love and life-force energy. These blocks can resurface or replay, masked as your personal challenge.
Understanding Traumatic Re-enactment.
In your personal life history, if you have experienced an overwhelming or traumatic event which is not resolved, this energy can re-enact in your life. It's like a whirlwind of undigested or undischarged energy that can be triggered out of a dormant state and go on replay.
It does this because it is seeking resolution and healing. No one re-enacts trauma on purpose!
Re-enactment carries many of the same elements of the original trauma, but the circumstances are different.
A simple example of a personal traumatic re-enactment:
A woman is in a car accident. Her partner is the driver, and she is on the passenger's side.
Elements connected to the event which later become triggers for re-enactment are:
Financial stress because the car is a rental on her credit card and they can barely afford the vacation. Now there could be damage fees on top of the rental and insurance fee!
Many days of stressful driving on unfamiliar roads in the UK, driving on the opposite side. Her nervous system is already tired and on high alert.
The risk that her partner will blow up if she gets emotional--a pattern that has been repeated in the relationship.
She has shock trauma from the blow to the car on her side. She isn't able to manage this and blows up at her partner and blames him. This results in a fight that lasts the rest of the vacation, so neither partner has the safe bond of the other to help discharge the overwhelm from the crash.
2 years later, the relationship has ended. The woman takes a drive to visit a sibling living 6 hours away.
She takes the scenic route to avoid traffic and takes the wrong exit.
This makes the journey over 8 hours long. She's tired.
She is under financial stress again. She isn't even able to pay for the gas, her sibling is covering it.
By the time she hits heavy traffic outside Toronto, she notices frustration and rage arising.
She arrives exhausted, triggered, and resentful about having to make the drive.
She snaps at her sibling. Her sibling is indignant and withdraws to cool off.
All of these elements are similar enough to the previous car accident trauma to trigger it.
Luckily, in this instance, the woman is trauma-trained.
She gets curious about why she is so stirred up. She sits and feels her body. A-ha! This feels just like what happened in the UK with the car accident!
As she sits with the uncomfortable sensations, she even sees scenes replay from the original incident with her former partner.
Although she feels scared she will get yelled at, she has a secure enough bond with her brother, that she risks going to him to share her experience. He expresses his feelings without blowing up and they work through it and reconnect.
Without her awareness of the underlying original trauma that was triggered, this re-enactment may have ended the same as the original one: a trip ruined by anger and disconnection by all that undischarged stress.
A very dramatic example of traumatic re-enactment:
A veteran of the Vietnam war witnessed all of the soldiers in his troop being killed by gunfire on July 16th.
When he returns home, every year on July 16th, he holds up a convenience store at gunpoint.
The police come for him. He has replayed the intensity of the original trauma. Without the proper awareness and care, the trauma energy must replay, be added to, and go dormant until the next July 16th which will trigger it again.
Your family system has a similar "ancestral alarm clock." Traumas often replay at the same age as an ancestor.
Traumatic re-enactment is really an unconscious cry for help and healing. So are your symptoms of physical or emotional pain.
Traumatic Re-enactment happens in family systems.
Blocks can be personal. We all have painful experiences growing up. There are no perfect parents, and shit happens.
Blocks can be inherited.
When a trauma occurs in the family that is not resolved, the impact, energy, and nature of that trauma get passed down and can re-enact.
This block can be one generation back in your parent's pain, or it can be 2 generations back in your grandparent's traumas. It can be further back, but in Family Constellations work, all the detective work we need to do usually lives in your 3 generation genogram (next blog post!).
It shows up again, hoping for a healing resolution. Learning how to recognize these re-enacting patterns is the area of expertise for FC work.
The Goal of Family Constellations work
In Family Constellations work, we aim to uncover and resolve such inherited and personal traumas. These issues may stem from as far back as three generations.
Recognizing and addressing these patterns allows you to break the cycle and promote healing.
This blog series will dive deeper into the basics of FC, helping you understand how it might be the solution you've been searching for to resolve deep-seated issues that other therapies have not addressed.
Read the whole series:
Part 1: Family Constellations: Resolve Patterns Once and for All.
Are you ready to make a big shift and transform repeating and defeating patterns?
We can work together on the patterns that you struggle with in 1:1 sessions here.
Or join me in my monthly Family Constellations group healing work here.
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