by Douglas Economy
For a brief introduction to Constellation Work please click here..
Fractal Image: Fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is a reduced sized copy of the whole. This depicts the holographic / holistic nature of the human being & the universe. The 5 levels is also based upon this principle
At a recent workshop of mine a young lady in her early thirties had signed up to do a constellation. Natasha (not her real name) was an immigrant from Poland (I changed the country). She had a very strained relationship with her mother, as a matter of fact, she couldn’t stand her. In the constellation, the representatives of both women stood far apart, facing in different directions; her representative could not even look at the person representing the mother. Upon my asking, the real Natasha verified that this behavior was congruent with her feelings.
In a short conversation at the beginning of the process, Natasha shared that her grandmother had been violently uprooted and forced to immigrate to Poland under horrible circumstances from her homeland, Serbia (not her actual homeland). I therefore had Natasha also choose someone to represent Serbia.
The dynamic of the constellation was complex and I will only describe one, yet central, aspect. The grandmother was a stoic woman, stiff and quite unable to access her feelings. The process revealed that she had a strong bond and yearning for the homeland. Yet she was unable to ‘live’ that connection since it was too painful. Natasha had a strong personality with vibrant energy but was also deeply identified with Serbia and considered herself more Serbian than Polish. She also felt much more connected to her grandmother than to her mother. Her mother, on the other hand, was frail and despondent with a ‘victim-like energy’. She felt alone and ostracized from the family and experienced no connection to Serbia.
In the ensuing process I had the person representing the grandmother ‘face’ her pain caused by the loss of her homeland and ‘work through it’. This resulted in a deeply emotional physical embrace with the person representing the homeland. As this happened a pronounced shift in the mother’s energy as well as the relationship between mother and daughter occurred. The mother was suddenly revitalized and her energy transformed into a much more empowered state as if a new personality had appeared. The person representing Natasha emitted a huge sigh of relief and started to relax. She also spontaneously turned and started to look at her mother.
I then had the person representing the homeland stand behind the mother and hold her by the shoulders and asked the mother to discover and embrace her connection to the homeland. As this happened the real Natasha walked over and fell into a deep, heartful embrace with her mother representative.
So what are the dynamics of family entanglements that this constellation process revealed and healed? This was an example of probably the most common form of entanglement: taking on a parent’s burden. Children very often try to relieve their parents of their burdens by taking these burdens on. The grandmother did not deal with her pain, so the daughter unconsciously “tried to do it for her”, and therefore lived a despondent life. The grandmother also failed to ‘live’ her connection to the homeland which would have provided her with an important source of strength. She was not able to pass this connection on to her daughter, thereby strengthening her.
Natasha, on the other hand, did find her connection to the homeland (for whatever reasons) and was able to derive much strength from that. This huge burden, carrying the connection to the homeland for everyone else, which she had unconsciously taken on, caused issues in her life – she became “the strong one” for everyone else in the family. This caused her to resent her mother – she had actually shared that her mother was a “wimp” and “not one of us Serbs”. However when grandmother and mother took ownership and resolved their own issues, Natasha felt unburdened and the entanglements that had stood in the way of her relationship with her mother were released.
This process demonstrated two very important facets of our psyche: that the connection to one’s homeland is an important, although often unthought-of, source of life energy and that people often unconsciously take on a parent’s burden. Family Constellation Therapy is a powerful tool to uncover these dynamics and leave a person free to experience more intimate relationships, among other benefits.
