A Turkish drama went up a few years ago.
And a great many people who had never heard the phrase family constellation.
Went to bed that night having heard it,
Thinking about it.
So,
Three women.
A coastal town one of them seriously ill and not responding to treatment and a quiet man who works with them.
In a way that involves other people standing in for their dead relatives.
And what happened in enormous numbers?
Is that people watched it and something in them went oh Not,
What an interesting therapeutic modality.
But something older than that.
A recognition.
Because most people carry a private suspicion.
That they are leaving out something that did not begin with them.
That there is a pattern in their family that has been running longer than they have.
That the thing they keep doing in relationships is somehow the same thing their mother did and possibly her mother.
And that nobody has ever said this out loud.
And then this television program said it out loud.
And the recognition arrived.
Before any of the explaining dead bodies.
So people go looking.
And what they then find is a great deal of content that either summarizes the plot and tell them this is real therapy?
Or uses the show as a way to sell them a workshop.
I want to do something else today.
I facilitate this work,
I have run these groups and I have also stood in them as a representative.
And I have had my own turn in the middle of the circle.
And I am also clinically trained.
Which means,
I spend a considerable amount of my week being taught to ask what the evidence is.
So this is the honest version.
What the show gets right,
What television had to distort and what the research actually says.
Which is less than what you would hope.
And then maybe my own account of what I think is happening in that room,
Including the part I cannot explain,
And I'm not going to pretend that I can.
Start with what is genuinely well-captured,
Because it is more than I expected.
So the central premise is sound.
That an individual is not a sealed unit.
That a person arrives into a family system that was already running with its own history and its own unfinished business and that this shapes them in ways that has nothing to do with their own experiences or choices.
So this is not a fringe idea.
This is systemic thinking.
And it has been the basis of respectable family therapy for the best part of the last 70 years.
The show also gets the phenomena of the excluded right.
Which is the most interesting idea in the whole field.
When somebody in a family is written out,
The child who died,
The first marriage nobody mentions.
The alcoholic brother,
The uncle who left in disgrace,
The pregnancy that was never spoken of.
That the exclusion does not leave them.
It does not remove them.
It actually leaves a shape.
And then what happens is,
Somebody further down the line frequently ends up occupying that shape without ever knowing why.
So I have watched that in rooms and it is very striking.
That a person will just describe a feeling they have had all their life.
A sense of not being allowed to be happy,
A pull towards somewhere they've never been.
A grief they cannot account for.
And it turns out to correspond to something in the family that nobody had told them.
And the visual really works.
So that is the show.
And it is doing something that no book can.
When you see representatives placed in a room.
And you watch how far apart they stand and who is facing away from whom.
The thing becomes obvious in a way that no amount of talking achieves.
So families have geometry and putting it in physical spaces makes it visible in less than four seconds.
Now if this is what the show got right.
There are also distortions and these really matter because people arrive at real sessions expecting the televised version and then they are disappointed by something that was actually going fine.
So the first is time.
On screen.
A constellation reveals a family secret.
And the person is transformed by the end of the episode.
So,
In a real constellation,
Most of what services is very partial.
And a great deal of it will make sense to the person maybe three weeks,
Three months,
Sometimes years later when they are driving.
And the second is the single revelation.
So television of course needs a reveal.
One buried fact that explains everything.
Ideally involving a death that nobody mentions.
Now real constellations rarely produce a clean explanation.
They more often produce a shift in a position or an image that will not leave you.
An unexpected feeling towards somebody you thought you had settled with.
And the third,
And the one I mind the most.
Is the facilitator.
Now on the screen.
Quiet.
Knowing.
Apparently able to perceive things about your family that you have not told him.
It makes excellent television and a terrible model of the book.
Because the moment a facilitator believes they can see your family,
You have a problem.
What you have then?
Is somebody with authority making confident statements about your dead relatives in a highly suggestible room to a person who's emotionally open.
And that is absolutely not therapy.
So a good facilitator is much less impressive than that.
They set the space.
They slow everything down.
They ask what you notice.
And they trust the process.
Sometimes they also resist saying what it means.
And the fourth thing television did is the cure.
The show associates this work with physical healing.
There is a serious illness in the story.
And the arc goes where you would expect an arc to go and I want to be very firm here.
This work is not treatment for cancer or for any physical disease and no responsible facilitator would suggest that.
If anybody offers you constellation work as an alternative to medical treatment,
Leave.
Not later,
Immediately.
This is the single most important sentence in this talk.
And I would rather say it plainly than be popular.
Now.
Here is where I am going to disappoint anybody hoping I would sell this to you.
The research base for family constellation is extremely thin.
They are a handful of studies.
I've read all of them.
Some of them are small.
Several have very significant problems with their methodology and there is actually very little in the way of the kind of large well-controlled trials that we would want before making confident claims about any intervention.
And that is simply the position.
And I would rather you heard it from somebody who does this work than found it afterwards.
Now a thin evidence base is not the same as evidence that something does not work.
Those get confused constantly and in both directions.
Much of this has not been properly studied because it is difficult to study and partly because the people who do it have largely not been the people who run clinical trials.
But I am not going to dress that up.
If you want an approach with substantial evidence behind it for a specific difficulty,
Then you find an approach with substantial evidence behind them.
And they are there.
And I will point you at them without hesitation.
And there is a second problem here which is closer to home.
Parts of this field have an unfortunate relationship with certainty.
They are practitioners who will tell you with total confidence.
That your migraines belong to your grandmother.
Or your business is failing because of an ancestor.
That there are lineages of this work with fairly rigid ideas about how families ought to be arranged,
Some of which come from a particular time and a particular set of assumptions and which do not always sit well.
So if you go looking for this,
Go looking carefully.
Now all this raises the obvious question.
That if the evidence is thin and this field has its own problems,
Why is this working?
Still on offer.
Why do I still do this?
Now,
This is me speaking from my own personal experiences.
I have watched things happen in those rooms that I have not seen happen elsewhere.
And because I think several of the mechanisms are entirely explicable.
And one of them is not.
And I will be honest about which is which.
The first is externalization,
And it is not mysterious at all.
Taking something that has been going round in your head for 20 years and then putting it to a physical space changes your relationship with it immediately.
Because it's now outside of you.
You can walk around it and you can see the distances,
You can see the geometry.
This is actually not new.
Psychodrama has been doing versions of this since the 1920s.
And there is a whole family of therapists built on the observation that enacting something works differently from discussing it.
The second is your body.
You stand up.
You're asked to move.
You're placing people,
Turning,
Noticing.
Noticing what happens in your chest.
Noticing what happens when somebody is behind you,
Then beside you.
An information arrives through the channel that does not arrive through talking.
Anybody who works somatically would know this,
That the body will tell you in seconds what it thinks of an arrangement and it actually does not consult your mind first.
And now the third is the witness,
Which I think is enormously underrated.
Something happens when a room of people watches your family made visible and does not flinch.
Shame is a social emotion.
It is the fear of being seen and found wanting.
And it does not resolve internally.
It resolves by being seen and not rejected.
So a constellation,
Among other things,
Is a very,
Very efficient machine for being seen.
And the fourth is sentences.
In this work,
You say things out loud in the presence of others in a formal register.
Things like,
This was yours,
Or I was a child,
Or I give it back to you with love.
And people are often astonished at what those sentences do.
And I do not think it's mysterious either.
Every culture on earth has understood that saying a thing out loud deliberately in front of witnesses is different from thinking.
That is actually what a vow is.
That is also what a confession is.
And that is what a funeral is also.
And the fifth is it's a ritual with a beginning and an end.
We have almost no rituals left for the things that need them.
There is no ceremony for the pregnancy nobody mentioned or the emigration that split a family or the parent who was not there.
So people carry these things with no way to put them down.
A constellation gives them somewhere.
Whatever else is going on.
It is a formal occasion at which something unacknowledged is acknowledged.
And then there is the one thing that I cannot account for.
Their representatives.
A person who has never met your family,
Who has simply been chosen at random given a name,
A gender and a position and nothing else sometimes well all the time in my experience They will report a sensation.
That turns out to correspond to something they had no way of knowing.
A pain in a specific place and urge to look in a particular direction.
A feeling about somebody they have never heard of.
I have seen it enough times that it doesn't surprise me.
They are respectable explanations available also.
The person seeking the constellation is in the room.
And Human beings leak information constantly through posture and micro-expression and breathing far more than we know.
So representatives are picking up cues maybe.
There is a strong pull towards meaningful coincidence in an emotionally charged setting and we remember the hits and forget the misses.
All of that is real.
And it probably accounts for a good deal of it also.
But I would say I have sat with instances that those explanations do not comfortably cover and I hold that lightly.
And I would think less of myself if I either dismissed it or dressed it up as proof of something.
I do not know.
This is the honest answer and I have made peace with it.
Now one more thing because this TV series makes a strong claim and a great many people have taken it as settled.
The idea that trauma is inherited.
That what happened to your grandmother somehow is biologically present in you.
Now here is the careful version.
Something transmits across generations is not in doubt.
It is one of the better supported observations in the whole field.
Children of people who went through terrible things as groups.
Affected by it.
The question is how?
And the well-supported answers are somewhat less exotic than the popular version.
Behavior Transmits.
A frightened parent parents differently attachment transmits because the capacity to soothe a child comes from having been soothed yourself.
Silence also transmits.
And possibly most powerfully of all,
Children are extraordinarily sensitive to what a family does not talk about.
And they will organize themselves around an absence without ever knowing what it was.
The claim that it comes down biologically through epigenetic marks passed in the germline is far shakier than the popular books suggest.
There is animal work that is genuinely interesting,
But the human evidence is limited,
Contested,
And it does not currently support the confident version you will hear at workshops.
And here is why I bother saying this rather than letting the more magical version stand.
The phenomena does not need the over claim.
What happens in these rooms is real and interesting without anybody pretending the mechanism is settled.
And over claiming is precisely what gets this work dismissed by people who might otherwise find it useful.
So I would rather have a smaller claim that holds.
Now we've been talking about this work for a while.
Let me give you something rather than only describing it.
This is not a constellation.
This is just a small solo version.
And it might give you a sense of the shape of it.
So settle however you are.
And just start with this.
Bring your attention to your breath.
Now,
Your feet.
Feeling the floor under your feet,
The hard surface,
The ground.
Now,
I will ask you to bring certain people to your awareness.
There's no perfect visualization needed.
Just be open.
Now let the space in front of you be empty.
The space in front of you,
Let it be empty.
Now,
Let your parents be there.
Let your parents be there.
And place them behind you.
Not in the front.
Not beside.
Behind.
Let your parents be there now behind you.
Which is where they belong in this workbook.
Because they came first.
And because what came from them arrives at your back.
Whatever your relationship is with your parents.
Whether you talk to them or not,
Dead or alive.
Just let them be there at whatever distance feels true for you.
With your parents behind you?
Let their parents be behind them.
Maybe your grandparents,
You can sense them,
You can see them,
Or you simply know that they are there.
My parents are behind me,
At a distance that's comfortable for me,
And their parents are behind them.
You do not need to know who they were.
Most of us do not.
Past two or three generations.
And now let their parents be behind them.
And behind those more.
I can see.
.
.
My whole line of ancestors behind me.
First my parents,
Then behind my parents are their parents,
And then other ancestors,
Which I may not even know.
Let the line stretch back as far as it goes.
A great many people.
More weight arriving from behind.
Just at this stage,
Notice if you're feeling anything in your body.
Don't dismiss anything.
Warmth,
A cold,
A tingling,
A tightness,
A sensation,
Anything.
Just notice.
Very slowly,
Very gently.
We are going to turn around and face them.
With a gently turn around.
I can see my father on my right.
My mother on my left.
And all the other people too.
Behind them.
And for today,
We'll just say this very,
Very general statement.
This is not a healing,
This is not a constellation,
It's just to give you a sense of the workings of life.
Thank you for giving me life.
Thank you for giving me life.
Thank you for giving me life.
Just notice what happens as you say it.
In some people something settles.
In some people something objects quite strongly.
And they are both just information.
For now.
Just let it go now.
See them fade away.
Fade away,
Fade away,
Fade away,
Fade away.
Your feet on the floor,
Your hips on the chair.
Arms,
Hands.
Now coming back to your breath.
If your eyes were closed,
You can open them.
So whatever your experience was.
You simply got a sense of where you came from.
Once again,
This was not a constellation,
This was not a healing.
It was simply me acknowledging,
Me getting life from those that came before me.
A few things.
Family constellation is not therapy and it does not replace therapy?
If you are in acute distress or actively unwell,
A workshop may not be where to start.
Some of the most useful work I do is sometimes telling people that the constellation can wait.
Then,
Also be wary of certainty.
Anybody who tells you confidently what your family did or what your illness means or which ancestor is responsible is doing something I would not want done to me.
Maybe.
There is one story that has come live in that day.
It's just one layer of something you may be experiencing.
Then expect it to be stranger and less conclusive than what you saw on TV.
You may leave without an explanation.
You may leave just with an image and no idea what to do with it.
That is actually not a failed session.
A great deal of the movement in this work.
Happens.
Maybe in the next few days,
Weeks,
Months for some people.
And the realization comes while you're doing something else.
So now I will leave you with the thing I think the series actually got right,
Which is its name.
Another self.
Not a better one.
Not a healed one.
Because that is closer to what happens than the language of fixing.
Nobody comes out of this work as the person they would have been if nothing had happened.
That person does not exist.
They never did.
What can happen is that you stop living the version that was assigned to you.
The one shaped around somebody else's unfinished business.
Carrying a weight allocated before you arrived and start living one that is more nearly your own.
Same history,
Same family,
Same dead.
A different position in relation to all of it.
And you can really only see the difference from behind,
Years later,
The way you notice in March that the evenings have been getting longer for weeks now.
So thank you for listening.
Go gently.
And until next time.
Namaste.
