By Daniel J. Benor, MD

I’m finding the combination of TWR with Family Constellation focus is very powerful for me. Several years ago I had a couple of phone sessions with a very gifted intuitive FC therapist, John Payne. Recently, I attended a three day FC workshop with Francesca Boring Mason and several half or one day workshops with Heather Embree. All of these were helpful – as were Hellinger’s and Mason’s books.

Bert Hellinger is a wonderfully innovative psychotherapist who developed the Family Constellation method for helping people release interpersonal and intergenerational issues within families. In using this approach, the person who is being helped (I will use the term ‘focus person’ for brevity’s sake) states the issues needing help and then invites other participants in the workshop to stage a representation of her or his family members, including the spouse/partner, their children, and the focus person’s parents. Previous partners, any children brought into the family through marriage, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents and all significant others may also be included. Workshop participants are not familiar with each other, and very few details are shared by focus people about their families when the constellation is set up.

To this point, this method resembles the ‘family sculpting’ approach (Keeran; LeBlanc web references), in which the sculpture speaks for itself through the placements of the participants and the apparent relationships expressed in the human sculpting.

In Family Constellation Therapy there is a much more extensive and detailed exploration and unfolding of intergenerational relationships. The constellation facilitator asks each of the family representatives how they feel in the starting positions that the focus person has designated. Intuitively, the participants cue into the collective consciousness to respond – often with outstanding accuracy, as acknowledged by the focus person (and their spouse or partner if they are also present). The therapist then may invite participants to shift positions to where they are intuitively guided to more, or the facilitator may suggest various shifts in sculpted positions, asking for further feedback from the participants after each shift about how they feel.

For instance, a sculpted child may report feeling uncomfortable positioned next to one or the other parent. The therapist suggests shifts in position and in facing towards or away from other participants until more comfortable feelings are reported by all. In the process of sorting out the discomforts that are reported, in turn, by each family representative, many family relationship issues are clarified.

The facilitator may invite participants to state to each other how they are feeling, or may suggest statements that participants should make to others in the diorama. Through these and countless other interactions, conflicts and residues of old traumas and other feelings are rapidly cleared.

As a part of the clearing process, the therapist may suggest that the focus person take the place of his or her representative and make clarifying statements to various other members in the constellation. These seemingly simple interventions can be deeply transformative. Here are a few examples.

For a Laura whose brother-in-law had been a fireman who died on 9/11 in New York, and whose husband, James, was devastated by this loss:

Payne to James: Look at your brother and say, “The day you left us was terrible, it’s been difficult to let you go.” (p. 121)

Payne to Brother: Look at your brother and say, “You have a family, dear brother. This is my fate, and they need you.”

Payne to James: Now say to your brother, “I shall leave you with the dead and go to my wife and children.” (p. 122)

For a couple who were struggling with mother-in-laws problems:

To Sybil: Now, tell your mother, “This is my husband.”
Sybil: This is my husband.
Hellinger: “I have left my father and mother.”
Sybil: I’ve left my father and mother.
Hellinger: “I depend on him,”
Sybil: I depend on him,
Hellinger: “with love.”
Sybil: after a quiet pause with love.
Hellinger to Rathin: Now you tell your mother-in-law, “She is my wife, now.”
Rathin: She is my wife.
Hellinger: “I respect you in her.”
Rathin: I respect you in her. (Hellinger, p. 37)

Death of any family member may leave the living with unresolved emotions. This is also true when a child dies at birth or is miscarried or aborted. In the workshops, participants are volunteered to represent these children as well in the Family Constellations. Unresolved grief is often at the core of problematic issues in a family.

Hellinger: As a rule, an abortion is experienced deep in the soul as guilt. An abortion demands everything from the child, because the adults want to be free of the burden. It seems as though freedom is available, but the soul doesn’t agree to it and feels the guilt. Then, very often, the partners try to get rid of the guilt by atoning. They atone by letting themselves get into a bad place, and then often by not allowing later relationships to succeed. (p. 201)

Hellinger: Allow yourself to be looked at by this child, Then tell this aborted child, “Dear child,”
Martin: Dear child,
Hellinger: ‘Now I take you as my child,”
Martin: Now I take you as my child.
Hellinger: “I give you a place in my heart.”
Martin: I give you a place in my heart (Hellinger, p. 20).

One of the more fascinating aspects of Family Constellation work is that the actual members of the focus person’s family – who have no direct knowledge of what transpired in the workshop – may often experience changes in their relationships with the focus person. This is attributed to shifts that occur in the family field.

Hellinger may also suggest statements to be made directly to the actual family members of the focus person, or workshop participants may themselves decide to resolve issues directly with family members the troublesome, unresolved issues that had been festering for years (often for generations).

A few weeks after the seminar, she visited her husband in the nursing home. Although he was hardly able to understand what she said, she told him: “We were married and we have three children. I honor you as the father of our children and I will hold a memory of you in my heart. But now our marriage is over. I feel free.” As she said that to him, her husband beamed. That’s an appropriate action, and there’s a greatness in it for everyone concerned (Hellinger, p. 247).

Family Constellation work is a wonderful approach to healing through the collective consciousness. While it has been used for several decades, it is now increasing in popularity and increasingly available in North America and Europe.

TWR for family relationships

Many people are unable to attend a Family Constellation workshop, or end up with issues that have not been resolved during the workshop. Hellinger notes that the effects of a workshop may percolate for several years. TWR offers complementary approaches that can deepen the effects of the workshops; that can relieve stresses experienced with emotional releases; and that can open into deeper clearings of issues clarified and brought to consciousness in the constellation work.

It is possible to address unresolved issues with relatives in your family, using TWR in several ways. The first is to connect with the issues that are troublesome:

From my own experiences with this approach:

I have worked diligently over a period of years to release feelings of having been abandoned and betrayed by God – in past life experiences (as in being an orphan) and current life difficulties with my parents in early childhood. (Some of these are shared in Benor, 2009.) I had never considered the possibility of exploring my relationships with my grandparents. I met my maternal grandmother only once, and never met any of my other grandparents.

From information provided by my parents, I knew my grandparents had all experienced very difficult times in their lives. So I set aside meditation/ self-healing time to explore my relationships with each of them. Using sentences such as those shared by Payne and Hellinger in their books, and from several phone sessions with Payne, I cleared any burden of residual emotions that I was carrying from my grandparents and thanked them for the legacies of healing I bore from them – through my parents.

From my paternal grandfather there was a particularly strong feeling of love and acceptance. While these were characteristics my father had described for his father, there was a palpably strong quality to my experience in these communications:

“I thank you, grandfather, for the gifts of compassion and love I have received through you.”

“I know you had a very difficult life. I now leave you to deal with the burdens of grief from the losses of your children and wife and from other losses in your life.”

“I now move on to live out the lessons of my own life.”

Through these and similar statements with each of my grandparents, I felt a distinct lightening of my personal sense of beingness in this world.

I added several rounds of TWR to release feelings of responsibility and guilt over abandoning my helping role I had chosen on a soul level because of some of the suffering I brought upon myself in my life. I could sense that there may well have been a family legacy in these burdens I had volunteered to carry.

I also offered healing to my grandparents through the approaches of Ho’oponopono and TWR (Benor, Web references). In this adaptation of TWR, one offers one’s own experiences of feeling and clearing pain and healing as doorways for others to follow in their own clearing of similar experiences and feelings. Again I felt a distinct lightening within myself.

An adjunct for self-uses of these approaches is muscle testing. This is particularly helpful with clients, where both the client and TWR facilitator can use their intuitive awarenesses to validate the perceived feelings, memories and clearing of emotional burdens, as well as the installation of replacement positives to counteract any residuals of negativity that might remain or might be triggered out of habit.

My sense is that the combination of TWR and Family Constellation approaches provide enormous potentials for complementing and deepening the work of each of these methods as used individually.

References:

Benor, Daniel J. Brief version: World healing through collective consciousness http://wholistichealingresearch.com/World_Healing_Collective_Consciousness.html
Full version: Using any therapy as an opportunity to heal the collective consciousness and our planet: lessons from Ho’oponopono and TWR
http://wholistichealingresearch.com/col_con_hooponopono_whee.html

Payne, John L. The Healing of Individuals, Families & Nations: Transgenerational Healing & Family Constellations (Trans-Generational Healing & Family Constellations series), Forres, Scotland: Findhorn 2005. (See book review in the International Journal of Healing and Caring.)

Hearn, Jeff and Lawrence, Marilyn. Family sculpting: II. Some practical examples. J. Family Therapy 1985,  (7)2, 113–131.

Hellinger, Bert. Supporting Love : How Love Works in Couple Relationships , Ithaca, NY: Zeig, Tucker & Theisen/ Cornell University Press Services 2001.

Keeran, Daniel. The use of family sculpture in group therapy
http://www.academia.edu/2049544/The_Use_of_Family_Sculpture_in_Group_Therapy

LeBlanc,Toby. Live Family Sculpting http://www.myacpa.org/comm/ccaps/09Nov-5.cfm

 

You may reproduce all or parts of this article in your journal, magazine, ezine, blog or other web or paper publication on condition that you credit the source as follows: Copyright © 2013 Daniel J. Benor, MD, ABHM   All rights reserved. Original publication at WholisticHealingResearch.com where you will find many more related articles on this and similar subjects of wholistic healing.