What are Family Constellations?
By Barry Krost
Family Constellations were developed by Bert Hellinger, a German psychotherapist, who felt that many of the problems that cause our suffering were actually entanglements within our family system. He developed a therapeutic process where hidden family dynamics, often ages old, could be revealed, understood, and repaired.
Family Constellations help us discover how we can be entangled with the suffering that belongs to family members or ancestors. These connections are a source of emotional issues, trauma, illness, and problems in relationships, work, and career paths. During a typical Family Constellations session or workshop, we can identify how we are entangled with another’s unresolved pain and discover how to separate from it using a mysterious energy called the "knowing field."
In a Family Constellations workshop, the facilitator asks participants to volunteer to stand in or represent family members, ancestors, events, or even illnesses for the client. Standing in the knowing field, the representatives can give us information about what has happened as they begin to take on the essential qualities, emotions, movements, and words of whom they are representing with little or no prior knowledge. In an individual session between client and facilitator, objects can be used as representatives.
Hellinger found that every family system has natural laws that govern the health of the system. He called these the “Orders of Love.” When these laws are violated in some way, love and relationships can be damaged, leading to entanglements. Family Constellations can enlighten where this order is broken and help repair the source of the entanglements.
One of the most important natural laws is that all members of a family system must belong and have a place. If someone in the system is not given a place, then younger members can become entangled with the issues surrounding the one who is excluded or even take on the excluded member’s difficult fate. This is particularly true with ancestors who have been forgotten or shunned or became a secret. In a Family Constellations session or workshop, we can reconcile the issues around exclusion so that everyone has a place in the system, and no one needs to be further entangled.
As a Family Constellation reveals the past through the representatives, the facilitator uses a disciplined way of seeing to gain insights about how to repair the system. With the help of the knowing field, the facilitator suggests sentences and movements that support the reconciliation of past conflicts, the repair of broken relationships, and the restoration of order to the family system so that it can feel more whole and loving again. This makes it easier for the client to separate themselves from burdens that were never meant for them and to receive new support. Often the client feels lighter and more at ease afterward.
Family Constellations can also uncover the hidden dynamics around many terrible and challenging situations and events, including war, natural disasters, immigration, genocide, racism, incest, and social unrest. Their effects can be experienced long afterwards as their entangled descendants reenact responses to these previous events as if they still occurring. Sometimes these responses show up as physical illness or conditions such as schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, and narcissism. By pinpointing these issues, we can support changes to the system that benefit all its members who are entangled.
By the conclusion of a Family Constellation, the client, freed from entanglements, can come into a different relationship with their family and ancestors and a new image of their place with them. As the system is repaired and made more whole over subsequent sessions, the client can further separate what was troubling them and let go of the past. They can step into a healthier connection with themselves, the people in their lives, and the future before them.
Copyright © 2022 • Barry Krost
Family Constellations help us discover how we can be entangled with the suffering that belongs to family members or ancestors. These connections are a source of emotional issues, trauma, illness, and problems in relationships, work, and career paths. During a typical Family Constellations session or workshop, we can identify how we are entangled with another’s unresolved pain and discover how to separate from it using a mysterious energy called the "knowing field."
In a Family Constellations workshop, the facilitator asks participants to volunteer to stand in or represent family members, ancestors, events, or even illnesses for the client. Standing in the knowing field, the representatives can give us information about what has happened as they begin to take on the essential qualities, emotions, movements, and words of whom they are representing with little or no prior knowledge. In an individual session between client and facilitator, objects can be used as representatives.
Hellinger found that every family system has natural laws that govern the health of the system. He called these the “Orders of Love.” When these laws are violated in some way, love and relationships can be damaged, leading to entanglements. Family Constellations can enlighten where this order is broken and help repair the source of the entanglements.
One of the most important natural laws is that all members of a family system must belong and have a place. If someone in the system is not given a place, then younger members can become entangled with the issues surrounding the one who is excluded or even take on the excluded member’s difficult fate. This is particularly true with ancestors who have been forgotten or shunned or became a secret. In a Family Constellations session or workshop, we can reconcile the issues around exclusion so that everyone has a place in the system, and no one needs to be further entangled.
As a Family Constellation reveals the past through the representatives, the facilitator uses a disciplined way of seeing to gain insights about how to repair the system. With the help of the knowing field, the facilitator suggests sentences and movements that support the reconciliation of past conflicts, the repair of broken relationships, and the restoration of order to the family system so that it can feel more whole and loving again. This makes it easier for the client to separate themselves from burdens that were never meant for them and to receive new support. Often the client feels lighter and more at ease afterward.
Family Constellations can also uncover the hidden dynamics around many terrible and challenging situations and events, including war, natural disasters, immigration, genocide, racism, incest, and social unrest. Their effects can be experienced long afterwards as their entangled descendants reenact responses to these previous events as if they still occurring. Sometimes these responses show up as physical illness or conditions such as schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, and narcissism. By pinpointing these issues, we can support changes to the system that benefit all its members who are entangled.
By the conclusion of a Family Constellation, the client, freed from entanglements, can come into a different relationship with their family and ancestors and a new image of their place with them. As the system is repaired and made more whole over subsequent sessions, the client can further separate what was troubling them and let go of the past. They can step into a healthier connection with themselves, the people in their lives, and the future before them.
Copyright © 2022 • Barry Krost
Issues that benefit from Family Constellations work
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Podcast on the Value of Family Constellations
Listen to an interview of Barry Krost on the Value of Family Constellations with Modita van Zummeren for her podcast, “From Pain to Being." The podcast ‘From Pain to Being’ can be listened via Spotify, Google Podcast, Apple Podcast, Stitcher and Podbean.
Testimonials about Family Constellations
Thanks so much Barry for a truly enlightening seminar! I now have a clearer understanding of narcissism, the core of current politics, what creates mass murderers, and the dynamics of murder in general. It will take a while to digest all of the information on perpetration both political and familial and the systemic solutions. IROm or interrupted movement is always at work. Your seminar was so instructive and valuable!
-- Vicki Santell
"Thank you, Barry, for offering your Family Constellation Facilitator Training Certification Program. Since I began attending about a year ago, I have noticed that my knowledge-base related to critical elements of Family Constellations has improved as has my confidence as a facilitator. I find that your program is extremely thorough and very well thought out, ensuring that each facilitator-in-training has access to mentoring (individually and in groups), clear instructions related to relevant materials, access to a wide variety of workshops and plenty of opportunities to practice our facilitator skills.
Once again, thank you so much for sharing your gifts, your knowledge and your experiences from the years that you have been facilitating in your own practice."
-- Jeannine Martins
“Life as I know it has been shifting in the most peacefully invigorating ways since my first Family Constellation Workshop with Barry Krost. Each time, no matter whether I’m the client, the representative, or the witness, I experience elements of my family and interpersonal relationships, as well as life in general showing up in incrementally improved ways.
Barry’s passion and enthusiasm for ancestral healing and personal growth is infectious. While respectfully honoring and communicating Bert Hellinger’s foundational teachings, Barry is a unique and masterful facilitator, teacher, mentor, and healer. He is continually implementing innovative workshops to address current life situations, working with energies in all realms, in addition to addressing foundational issues.
Barry often humorously tells us that he doesn’t know what the $#^@&* he’s doing. It is obvious to all of us fortunate to be in a therapeutic session with him, that Barry’s ability to be in the flow of the present moment informs his ability to tune into and execute exactly what is needed in each moment of healing”
-- Lisa H
"It took me many years to attend a Family Constellation Workshop with Barry Krost. I tend to lean towards evidence-based interventions that are logical and pragmatic. Eventually I found this approach to be limiting, and my conventional strategies of psychotherapy and medication were not working. I felt stuck, in a rut, revisiting the same past hurts again and again and living a day-to-day life haunted by a pervasive anxiety and chronic pain. One day, I took a what-the-hell it's only $45 attitude, and figured at the very least it couldn't hurt.
I was completely blown away. This form of therapy is so much more holistic than anything that I have tried before, and I have done the gamut (CBT, EMDR, MBSR, somatic-emotional release, client-centered psychotherapy, internal family systems, etc.) Family Constellation Workshops are physical, kinesthetic, emotional, and spiritual work. I grew up in a less than supportive environment and I tend to be highly critical of myself, and often unfairly of others. The unconditional and unwavering support of this group was truly profound. The people in the workshop helped ground me in knowledge that I began to accept at an emotional level rather than superficial intellectual understanding.
To give an example, at one point I leaned back into a line of about seven women who were standing there with the sole purpose of supporting me. As my resistance and need to be in control finally began to soften, the woman behind me spontaneously began to hum like a mother does to a child. Almost immediately, I melted and I began to weep, not in the half choked sobs I am familiar with, but a gentle catharsis of grief I had been holding on to for years. I had held so many others up in times of pain, given when I had nothing left to give, and now I leaned back into the steady strength of a literal line of women and a symbolic lineage of mothers. Their wordless, selfless compassion registered in my body and soul and lifted me up. Barry intuited that I was rushing myself, ashamed of taking too much time... and he told me "take all the time you need. This is for you," and he whispered to the woman behind me "she's never had this before." He was right. For the first time I truly *felt* that I was not alone. I was supported, I was cherished, loved, and safe. In the sacredness of that space I was finally able to *receive* and I will carry it with me always.
-- E, (Madison, WI)
"Barry's distinctions of the Barely Dead and the Radiant Dead and how to work with them in the Constellations context are enormously helpful to my own healing process and in my work with others. Through two visualization processes, I was able to support ancestors who didn't know they were dead on towards their Peace and Loves on the other side. Barry works in a way that is very respectful of the Dead and their role in support of the Living. He is also very conscious of bringing to awareness and healing what has held these ancestors in our field."
-- Marianne Connor
-- Vicki Santell
"Thank you, Barry, for offering your Family Constellation Facilitator Training Certification Program. Since I began attending about a year ago, I have noticed that my knowledge-base related to critical elements of Family Constellations has improved as has my confidence as a facilitator. I find that your program is extremely thorough and very well thought out, ensuring that each facilitator-in-training has access to mentoring (individually and in groups), clear instructions related to relevant materials, access to a wide variety of workshops and plenty of opportunities to practice our facilitator skills.
Once again, thank you so much for sharing your gifts, your knowledge and your experiences from the years that you have been facilitating in your own practice."
-- Jeannine Martins
“Life as I know it has been shifting in the most peacefully invigorating ways since my first Family Constellation Workshop with Barry Krost. Each time, no matter whether I’m the client, the representative, or the witness, I experience elements of my family and interpersonal relationships, as well as life in general showing up in incrementally improved ways.
Barry’s passion and enthusiasm for ancestral healing and personal growth is infectious. While respectfully honoring and communicating Bert Hellinger’s foundational teachings, Barry is a unique and masterful facilitator, teacher, mentor, and healer. He is continually implementing innovative workshops to address current life situations, working with energies in all realms, in addition to addressing foundational issues.
Barry often humorously tells us that he doesn’t know what the $#^@&* he’s doing. It is obvious to all of us fortunate to be in a therapeutic session with him, that Barry’s ability to be in the flow of the present moment informs his ability to tune into and execute exactly what is needed in each moment of healing”
-- Lisa H
"It took me many years to attend a Family Constellation Workshop with Barry Krost. I tend to lean towards evidence-based interventions that are logical and pragmatic. Eventually I found this approach to be limiting, and my conventional strategies of psychotherapy and medication were not working. I felt stuck, in a rut, revisiting the same past hurts again and again and living a day-to-day life haunted by a pervasive anxiety and chronic pain. One day, I took a what-the-hell it's only $45 attitude, and figured at the very least it couldn't hurt.
I was completely blown away. This form of therapy is so much more holistic than anything that I have tried before, and I have done the gamut (CBT, EMDR, MBSR, somatic-emotional release, client-centered psychotherapy, internal family systems, etc.) Family Constellation Workshops are physical, kinesthetic, emotional, and spiritual work. I grew up in a less than supportive environment and I tend to be highly critical of myself, and often unfairly of others. The unconditional and unwavering support of this group was truly profound. The people in the workshop helped ground me in knowledge that I began to accept at an emotional level rather than superficial intellectual understanding.
To give an example, at one point I leaned back into a line of about seven women who were standing there with the sole purpose of supporting me. As my resistance and need to be in control finally began to soften, the woman behind me spontaneously began to hum like a mother does to a child. Almost immediately, I melted and I began to weep, not in the half choked sobs I am familiar with, but a gentle catharsis of grief I had been holding on to for years. I had held so many others up in times of pain, given when I had nothing left to give, and now I leaned back into the steady strength of a literal line of women and a symbolic lineage of mothers. Their wordless, selfless compassion registered in my body and soul and lifted me up. Barry intuited that I was rushing myself, ashamed of taking too much time... and he told me "take all the time you need. This is for you," and he whispered to the woman behind me "she's never had this before." He was right. For the first time I truly *felt* that I was not alone. I was supported, I was cherished, loved, and safe. In the sacredness of that space I was finally able to *receive* and I will carry it with me always.
-- E, (Madison, WI)
"Barry's distinctions of the Barely Dead and the Radiant Dead and how to work with them in the Constellations context are enormously helpful to my own healing process and in my work with others. Through two visualization processes, I was able to support ancestors who didn't know they were dead on towards their Peace and Loves on the other side. Barry works in a way that is very respectful of the Dead and their role in support of the Living. He is also very conscious of bringing to awareness and healing what has held these ancestors in our field."
-- Marianne Connor