Healing Ancestral trauma using family constellations.

Are you feeling emotions that just don’t make sense? Have you inherited ancestral trauma patterns? Would you like to understand and heal some of the destructive behaviours that hold you and your family back? Family constellations may be the method to help break through.

Ancestral Trauma

Often, the unknown facts about the lives of our ancestors, their positive and their negative experiences, have the ability to impact our lives and in many ways, we may have never realised.  It is the DNA we have inherited from these ancestors that includes all the trauma they have lived that is imprinted onto us energetically, psychologically and physically.

It can be very obvious what we inherit from our parents and sometimes our grandparents when it comes to our gifts, behaviours, strengths and obviously our looks. We can also attribute our fears, negative traits or things we are attracted to, to them too, but we often forget to attribute or connect these things to our earlier ancestors,  generations before our birth.

Looking at the “Now” may not be enough

Lots of people do internal work on themselves to either understand or fix the problems they have experienced in their lives, they do this with the hope they won’t repeat the lessons of the past and they can move on more powerfully in their future life.

Unfortunately, our life isn’t quite that simple as we are multi-faceted in our design, so looking into the past to our ancestors’ lives can give us great insight into who we are.  By using Family Constellations, also known as Systemic Constellations we then get the opportunity to investigate the wrongs perpetrated and understand the behaviours of our ancestors. The opportunity then exists for us to change our own beliefs so we can change our own future refusing to take the patterns of the past into our future anymore.

What is a family constellation?

Family constellations are a dynamic therapy that works experientially on individuals’ subconscious, thoughts, belief systems, perception and bodily awareness, instantaneously in a multidimensional complete approach.  It enables participants to make changes quickly and deeply because they have new perceptions, awareness and emotions.

Family constellations are performed with a group of people – a facilitator, and others who will stand in to represent your family members.  These members are arranged in a pattern and they will tell their stories of the relationships and ancestorial patterns that were happening around the time of their lives.

I know this sounds rather woo-woo, but it is amazing what feelings are brought to the surface when two people are asked to stand together.  The proxy family members somehow embody the emotions felt by the actual members they are representing and they are able to verbalise the emotions and what is happening for them.

Origins of family constellations?

German psychologist and family therapist, Bert Hellinger (1925-2019), first developed the systemic constellation method of dealing with family trauma or family patterns. It was refined to help break the damaging repeated patterns of disaster, sickness, dependence, and sadness that are often repeated generation after generation in families.

What can a family constellation help with?

Family constellations can benefit all of us who have difficulties in some area of our life. Whether it be mental health, anxiety, eating disorders, abuse, self-worth, business relationships, business performance, relationships or even attitudes with possessions, we can all look at what our ancestorial beliefs have placed on our DNA and where our beliefs have come from.

Just as each of us is an individual, family constellations are different for each person that chooses to undertake them.  They bring family generational relationships to the surface and the inherited emotional baggage that were felt by the family members and have been passed on down the generations.

Exposing the beliefs, burdens, traumas and values of our past ancestors we then get the opportunity to see, understand and then keep or change what we use to believe as true in our own life, finding better solutions than our ancestors did.

How to do a family constellation

A trained facilitator is the starting point. When you decide to participate in a family constellation, you may be asked to be the participant or person the constellation is about or an observer. The participant then works with a facilitator to work out what they want to achieve from the session.  The participant chooses the people to represent the ancestors that might carry the messages they need to hear.  The facilitators guide the session by asking specific questions which reveal the relationships.  Placing ancestors in different places around the room creates the energy between the members, which will give the results.

Observer Insights

If you are an observer, you will have nothing to prepare.  Sitting in a circle with other observers, you may be privileged to be asked to be a representative of the person’s family.  With no previous knowledge of any of the background of that family, you will feel emotions, tightening stomach, anger and frustrations of the person you are portraying.

Family surprises are common

Don’t be surprised at what is exposed during a family constellation. I have seen death, the illegitimacy of children, sexual and other abuse, incest, war crimes exposed and all sorts of other trauma our ancestors have lived with.  All these things explain why they have felt or behaved as they did towards other family members. You have the opportunity to understand and make changes in yourself if you wish to.

The patterns that are passed from generation to generation do not have to be forever. You have the opportunity to heal ancestral trauma using Family Constellations.  You and future generations can thrive and move on powerfully.