Greetings from China
I ran a constellation workshop here on the weekend, and had an interesting incident, which I would like to hear how others may handle.
One woman brought up the issue of her child’s stammer. I proposed three reps: herself, the stammer, and her child.
She placed all three next to each other, facing the same direction. Ok, that was an obvious arrow. I tried to discern who they could be facing. After questioning it seemed most likely to be her grandfather, who was a policeman during the cultural revolution. As is usual in China, this was never spoken about, so she had no further information. But it seemed there was a victim, a woman, and the rep for the stammer indicated this very clearly.
The work was powerful, and the client, who had experienced no feeling at all watching it for some time, suddenly burst into tears. Something shifted through the process.
Afterwards when I fielded questions, one woman played the ‘doubting Thomas’ role. She said - well, you have no real knowledge it was the grandfather. He might have been a clerk. You created the emotion because you put him in there, and directed the drama. You might be misleading her unnecessarily, and there is no proof at all that this is really what the stammer is linked to.
This was a reasonable interrogation of me, the rationalist mode. I answered as best I could: explaining that we use feelings as guide, that we notice the structure of the constellation, and do our best to read it, listening deeply to what it is communicating. I explained the difference between ‘forensic truth’ and systemic truth, and tried to communicate the contrast between linear causal explanations and multiple causality.
She was not really satisfied, and kept on pressing her concern that I had simply conjured up this drama, possibly deceptive in my confidence.
I finally had to tell her that perhaps we had different ways of valuing feelings and the fuzzy logic/impressionistic approach of constellation work, and invite her to notice her own feelings as well as her thinking.
I feel confident of course in my history of how constellations work, and how they benefit. But it was certainly confronting to have someone strip it down like that in the cold light of ‘rational’ analysis. Whilst I can see that she only views one side, I think she does point out a danger in our work, subjective as it is…
Well, I open this up to how other facilitators deal with this kind of objection.
Vinay
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Calm is over all the hilltops,in all the treetops you canhardly feel a breath.The little birds are hushedin the wood.Wait, soon you will be calm too. - Goethe
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Steve Vinay Gunther | Director
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