Hi!
I¹d love to hear from any of you who have had to ³stop² a constellation
either because it felt as though there was no permission from the family, or
because the set-up seemed somehow compromised. I would love to know both
your criteria for doing that, as well as your view of what is occurring at
those times.
This happened to me for the first time (after facilitating for a number of
years) at a workshop yesterday.
The problem presented described a deeply divided and suffering family, with
some kind of painful secret, yet the constellation set up by the client
presented what appeared more like a ³staged² picture of ³one big happy
family,² that was very incongruent with the information shared in the
interview. All representatives reported feeling ³okay² where they were. No
one experienced anything else. There was an overall shallowness of affect.
The only tell-tale aspects were that in a workshop with a number of women
participants young and old, the client selected as a representative for her
thirty-something daughter, (the youngest of the family¹s children) the
oldest woman in the room. Also for the designated ³symptom bearer² the
client selected a participant new to constellations who all throughout the
workshop consistently reported that he experienced no feelings whatsoever
when he represented. Thus he provided no entrée into the experience of that
particular key family member.
The set up featured all the children as satellites orbiting around the
central dyad of the parental relationship which indicated that all the
family energy was directed towards supporting that. However, the client,
when questioned, reported a happy marriage with no former partners nor any
known entanglements that would lead to marital disharmony.
I ended the constellation because the set-up felt incongruent, and I found
no opening with the representatives. I said that I had no permission to work
with the system and I asked the client to contemplate who was at risk if the
status quo continues.
After the fact, it occurred to me that perhaps I might have moved the
children out of orbit and into new positions to see what happened. But in
the moment, it felt as though any movement would be an imposition onto a
system organized to conceal rather than reveal the secret.
Comments?
Alison
Alison Rose Levy
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