After 15 years of attending family constellations workshops, I felt a deep calling to sign up for practitioners training.
Since I have learned a lot over the years from various practitioners of this powerful modality ( both the right and wrong ), I would like to share what IS and what IS NOT in the spirit of family constellations:
1. The practitioner is not God and if he/she poses as such, that person has not yet gone through their own process of purification and peeling away the layers of their ego.
Bert Hellinger, the father of family constellations, called this modality ‘The Language of the Soul’.
So before you give your trust to a practitioner, first check if they speak the language of the soul, which is soft, gentle, honest, direct, grounded, centered and emotionally balanced.
There is no place for superiority, rudeness, judgment….
2. You BELONG and have your place in the family system.
Don’t let any practitioner tell you otherwise.
This happened to me personally and I was told that I do not belong to my biological family or my foster family.
Since this practitioner ( who is unfortunately even an educator of this modality ) also set herself up as God, above us, mere mortals, because she Knows and we who come to her – Do not Know – I unfortunately believed for a moment that what she was telling me was really true, even though my soul was shouting the opposite.
I doubted my own truth.
It is necessary to remember that – the Whole Point and a huge Healing Component of family constellations is precisely – Belonging and Inclusion in the family system.
3. Family constellations can be open or closed.
In open constellations, workshop participants can hear information related to someone’s work.
Closed constellations imply that only the practitioner hears you.
Which was not my experience at one of the workshops where I was given that option and I chose the closed type of constellation.
4. If during your work you enter into sadness or deep mourning, the practitioner MUST give you space and time to cry.
And not to have them stopping or interrupting you, so you supress what your body was finally ready to let go of.
I was told that this is not in the spirit of family constellations ( although it is Not True ), and I also felt that the person who is ‘leading’ us is in a hurry because of too many constellations waiting to be done.
5. Your constellation is Important.
Do not let yourself be rushed, or think that you must understand and sympathise with the practitioner because they are overbooked.
Organizing the time and number of constellations for the workshop is the practitioner’s duty and responsibility, not yours.
6. At the beginning of each workshop, the practitioner’s duty and obligation is to Explain the modality which you will work with that day as well as their way of working.
I had the opportunity to participate in a workshop where nothing was explained, Bert Hellinger wasn’t even mentioned.
When a practitioner of family constellations does not mention and does not give due respect to their teacher, they put themselves in a superior position and set themselves up as God.
And let’s remind ourselves once again – this is work with our – Soul.
I wish I had known these things much earlier.
And I hope I helped at least one person to skip all sorts of projections and brutal abuses by practitioners who are unprepared and even dangerous for this type of deep work with people.
It’s incredible how much trust we have in those with whom we share the deep depths of our souls and to whom we give hundreds of euros for healing.
When we are not feeling well, it is so easy to forget that a real mastery is not just about knowing the technique, having completed education or having done the same or similar tasks a hundred times.
And that there are many apprentices, but true masters of their craft are super precious and rare gems.