Constellation Talk Friends and Colleagues -
The document below is my preliminary research project proposal abstract. It
should be self explanatory.
I am soliciting pairs of researchers from Constellation Talk to participate.
One member will serve as an evaluator to administer the test instruments. The
other will serve as the Constellation facilitator. The team will jointly
recruit a cohort of subjects to participate in the study. These will be
individuals who are dealing with pathological grief.
In terms of level of effort, the steps involved are:
· Recruit a group of individuals to participate in the study.
· Administer the test instruments to establish a baseline.
· Have ½ of them participate in a Constellation workshop. The other ½
will serve as a control group and can be given generic material on grief.
· Re-administer the test instruments in six months.
I acknowledge the comments from those who feel that attempts to fit the
Constellation process within the confines of scientific psychology will
bastardize the process to the detriment of the clients. Outweighing those
concerns for me is the need to establish a minimum amount of credibility within
the broader professional community. This study will not achieve that goal in
itself, but it has the potential to demonstrate the efficacy of the process
according to generally accepted standards.
This is a preliminary document and I am open to suggestions and modifications.
There are several of you who have indicated your interest in participating. I
will contact you directly.
Ideally, I would like to begin collecting data in September 2005 and complete
the longitudinal outcome tests by June of 2006. To accomplish this, we will
need to identify the teams, finalize the protocol and schedule the workshops in
the next 6-8 months.
The budget for this effort is €£¥₣$ 0.00. If this becomes a limiting
constraint, I will have to reevaluate. My expectation is that the level of
effort will not be prohibitive and our community of facilitators will mutually
benefit from having a published study on the benefits of the Constellation
process. I will be generous with acknowledgements and co-authorship citations.
The more I am immersed in this work, the more I value its worth. (There were
two teen suicides in our town the past two weeks. I attended a counseling
session for concerned parents at a school auditorium last night. The insights
on suicide gained from the Constellation field were wholly absent from the
presentation. I went home to my own children feeling particularly grateful.)
5 degrees (c) and raining in Boston,
Dan
(On-line at www.HiddenSolution.com/abstract.htm)
Preliminary Abstract
A LONGITUDINAL OUTCOME STUDY OF THE SYSTEMIC CONSTELLATION METHOD FOR TREATING
ACUTE GRIEF
Dan Booth Cohen
Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center
The purpose of this study is to measure longitudinal outcomes of a single
session existentially-oriented therapeutic intervention, known as a Systemic
Constellation, on a pathologically grieved adult population.
The Systemic Constellation method was first developed by the German
philosopher/psychotherapist Bert Hellinger. Though it has roots in European
depth psychology and Gestalt therapy, and the American branch of family systems
therapy associated with Moreno, Satir and Boszormenyi-Nagy, it differs from
conventional psychotherapy in four radical respects: first, the client hardly
speaks; second, the process is a singular intervention that is not repeated;
third, critical information that serves to reveal hidden entanglements and
possible solutions within the system is supplied by surrogates who have no
actual knowledge about the family; and fourth, the client’s parents are not
blamed for anything.
There are several thousand practitioners of the method worldwide, but no
English language research has been conducted to assess the efficacy of the
treatment. This study aims to be among the first to fill the gap.
The lead investigator proposes to recruit several teams of English speaking
researchers in different regions of the world to execute the research protocol.
The teams will recruit a cohort of subjects who have experienced the death of a
spouse or adult child and who are struggling to cope with the aftermath more
than one year later. One member of the team will administer the Inventory of
Complicated Grief, the Wahler Physical Symptoms Inventory and the Impact of
Event Scale at the outset of the study and, again, six months following the
subject’s experience of the Systemic Constellation intervention. The other
team member will facilitate a Systemic Constellation with a randomly assigned
group of subjects. A control group of subjects will not receive treatment.
The data will be analyzed to determine if significant differences can be seen
between the two groups.
The study will serve as a starting point for research into the efficacy of
Systemic Constellations.
