Hi Dan,
Sorry to take so long to respond to your e-mail about research. One
interesting consideration about research with family constellations is that
many practitioners have actually done quite a lot informal unstructured
qualitative research on clients who have attended constellations. These are
people such as myself who have had ongoing clients come to a constellation
workshop and then continued to follow up these same clients.
Although this is not ideal in terms of being free from pre-conceptions about
the clients when they have their constellation, this does allow for reasonably
detailed impressions about the effect of the constellation. I have made
several interesting observations so far. I am sure other practitioners will be
able to add to these impressions.
I noticed that most people seem to benefit from attending a workshop
regardless of whether they did there own constellation or not. Often they
would relate intensely to an experience they had as a representative which was
very close to an experience they had in there own lives. This seemed to allow
the client to gain useful insights, which would allow them to progress more
easily in their own lives. As well, most clients were impressed by the fact
that so many other people had simular stories in their lives. This experience
plus the experience of seeing love flow with restoration of order, helped the
clients to have a sense of belonging with their family, their friends and the
human race as a whole. This experience is even more intense in clients who have
done their own constellation.
In regard to the specific outcomes of a constellation, I noticed it was much
clearer if the client had clearly defined the issue prior to the constellation.
The Dutch couple, Peter Van Zuilekom & Otteline Lamet do this very well. In
interviewing the client they often ask questions such as "Tell me, what is your
greatest pain?" In this way they lead the client to the most important issue
for them right now. They also ask the clients to define the issue in terms of
themselves. So for example if someone says "I want my sister to treat me
better". The client might end up re-formulating it as "I want to behave in
such a way as it helps me and my sister to be more relaxed with each other".
As well as giving a clear focus for the constellation, this also gives it a
clear focus for outcomes that you might be researching.
The next point that I noticed was sometimes clients were not consciously aware
of quite dramatic breakthroughs around the issue for which they had a
constellation. In the earlier mentioned example of the woman had not spoken to
her sister in a friendly way for a couple of years prior to the constellation.
In the months afterward she had began to go shopping with her sister and to
enjoy her company on a regular basis. However, because the change felt so
natural and effortless she hadn't consciously noticed the change and its
connections to the constellation until specifically asked.
In terms of research I think the implications of this finding are:
1.. Issues of a constellation needs to be clearly established before the
constellation
2. The questions about the outcome on follow up also need to be include clear
and specific questions related to the constellation issue.
I hope that this is helpful. I hope other practitioners will confirm or dispute
these findings as well as contribute their own observations to this group.
hasta la vista
Chris Walsh
An Australian Constellation Website:
www.constellationflow.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan Booth Cohen" <danbcohen@xxxxxxx>
To: <ConstellationTalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, 12 October 2004 11:39 AM
Subject: [ConstellationTalk] Research Project
To members of Constellation Talk,
I am entering the research phase of my Ph.D. program and am beginning to
formulate the direction of my dissertation. The text below is a summary
of my initial concepts. I am expecting that the members of our group
with support me with feedback, guidance and might also participate
directly in the research, as described below.
The aim of my dissertation is to provide the professional and scholarly
communities with both an introduction to the principles of Constellation
work and a credible piece of research to suggest its promise as a form
of treatment.
When I facilitate a constellation for a client, very often the immediate
and short-term results are extraordinary. Since the process is a single
session intervention and I am not a psychotherapist, I do not maintain
an ongoing relationship with the clients. However, I generally contact
them 4-6 weeks afterwards for feedback on their experience and whether
the presenting issue has shifted. The responses have been remarkable
and consistent with the results obtained by other professional
practitioners worldwide in thousands of constellations conducted over
the past 10 years.
However, there are no credible English-language outcome studies to
independently confirm these results. For my dissertation, I am
intending to pursue this question: Do clients who participate in a
constellation process show improvements in their presenting issues after
one year?
My research study as currently envisioned would be to establish a
protocol to test the longitudinal impact of constellations on clients
suffering from acute grief. I would solicit participation with a number
of constellation practitioners from the U.S. and Australia. They would
offer a constellation workshop to members of a pre-existing group, such
as a church, hospice or hospital bereavement group for widows and
widowers. We would use an established instrument scale to measure grief
prior to the workshop and again in the future, say 6-weeks and 6-months
afterwards. We could also test a control cohort of members of the
bereavement group who do not participate in the constellation work. The
data would be analyzed to isolate changes in the grief scale that can be
ascribed to participation in the constellation. An alternative or
supplement, we could work from a case study perspective to collect
subjective interview data from the participants.
My first question is what type of research methodology is most
appropriate at this stage? A randomized controlled trial is considered
the "gold standard" for judging clinical treatments. However, it may be
premature to attempt this at the outset. There is a progression from
case study, to pilot study to randomized controlled study. Also, since
I do not expect to receive grant support, I need to formulate a question
and methodology that fits within an unfunded dissertation.
Another question involves the suitability of using traumatic grief as a
presenting symptom for studying the effects of the Constellation
process. As with most therapies, Constellations can be used for a broad
range of symptoms and conditions. I am targeting grief for two reasons:
first, as an existential therapy, Systemic Constellations deal directly
with healing relationships between the living and dead. Second,
traumatic grief seems to be a concrete and measurable condition that
does not ordinarily yield to conventional psychotherapy and medication.
Can traumatic grief can be segregated and studied on its own?
I look forward to working together with you to bring these ideas to
fruition.
Dan
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