Family Constellations Quotes
Love, Trauma, Healing, and Family System Dynamics
Introduction
Family Constellations has evolved through the work of Bert Hellinger and many practitioners who have expanded, refined, and applied systemic principles in therapeutic, educational, coaching, and healing settings.
The quotes on this page reflect a wide range of perspectives on family systems, trauma, belonging, healing, relationships, illness, reconciliation, and personal transformation.
Together, they offer insight into the systemic principles that continue to shape Family Constellations today.
Healing and Transformation
Marine Selennee
“The healing path of Family Constellations is one of taking ownership of your life. Its healing as an act of supreme agency. Healing is saying, “I am an adult; I am responsible for my life. I’m in charge.” Healing is finally knowing what you want and what you don’’t want—and being willing to do what necessary to get rid of the latter and bring the former into reality.”
Connected Fates, Separate Destinies: Using Family Constellations Therapy to Recover from Inherited Stories and Trauma (2022), p. 173
Marine Selennee
“Healing means freedom. The freedom of creating the life that you truly want based on your own terms, beliefs, and values. Not being afraid of pleasing everyone, of being rejected or abandoned because you think or feel differently. Healing is self-love. Healing is falling madly in love with yourself, secure with yourself, especially belonging in your soul.”
Connected Fates, Separate Destinies: Using Family Constellations Therapy to Recover from Inherited Stories and Trauma (2022), p. 175
Dan Cohen
“Constellations succeed by diminishing the unconscious impluses that drive destructive behaviors. In a heartbeat, the pattern is released, opening the heart to reverance for life and compassion for others.”
I Carry Your Heart in My Heart: Family Constellations in Prisons (2009), pp. 18–19
Dan Cohen
“When we set up Constellations with men serving life terms in prison, and look at what emerges, first we see that our hearts carry everything a human heart can hold. Then we find a way to heal the trauma so life can continue in a good way. We agree to it all, to carry it all… with compassion.”
I Carry Your Heart in My Heart: Family Constellations in Prisons (2009), pp. 18–19
Integration, Change, and Realistic Expectations
Ilse Kutschera & Christine Bruder
“There is a real danger in family constellations that people may use this form of therapy superficially. ‘I think I will do a constellation on my family of origin’ – ‘I guess I’ll do a constellation on my present family now.’ Using constellations as the fad of the moment degrades a powerful method to a market product. Such an unserious attitude towards family constellations does not serve the clients, but it does contribute to the unrealistic expectation that a constellation can somehow magically solve all problems.
I inform all my clients at the beginning of a group that a constellation is nothing more and nothing less than a step in ones development. I am fond of the image of a sailing boat changing its course by one degree and landing in a completely different place than was originally intended. A constellation can contribute to a tiny course correction that may lead to a major change.
As I have already said, the essence of this change rests in the inner stance and attitude of the client. A constellation is neither a miracle formula nor a magic trick and in no way guarantees that a problem will be solved permanently.
I warn people that under certain circumstances they may feel even worse following a constellation, particularly if the work goes very deeply. This is due to loyalties within the family system that are stirred by any resolution of entanglements. The unconscious provokes a bad feeling and a guilty conscience in order to preserve unconscious loyalties, and it is important for clients to understand the connection.”
Ilse Kutschera & Christine Bruder, What Is OUT of ORDER HERE? Illness and Family Constellations (2006), p. 42
Trauma, Illness, and Symptoms
Ursula Franke-Bryson
"The symptoms and problems that clients complain of, their inappropriate behavior, and the puzzling emotions that cause such a disturbance, can all be regarded as meaningful symbols. They are 'right' and in the right context it is understandable why a person behaves or feels this way. We see the negative, as in a bronze casting of a relief, and extrapolate what the positive must have looked like. In this sense, the symptoms are the key to the missing data.
Symptoms are distressing and weigh on our clients, who feel responsible for them and are self-critical when they can't get themselves under control. It is an enormous relief when these symptoms finally make sense, or take on meaning through a systemic understanding.
When a symptom or feeling that has been taken over from the family system appears in another situation, we assume that it is 'right' in its quality and quantity, but it is not in the right form or time frame. It seems as if it belongs to another person. The important questions towards a new understanding of the symptoms are: How is it to be interpreted? In what context does it make sense? What situation and person in the family system does it fit with?"
Ursula Franke-Bryson, In My Mind's Eye: Family Constellations in Individual Therapy and Counseling (2003), p. 43
Mark Wolynn
“What I’ve learned from my own experience, training and clinical practice is that the answer may not lie in our own story as much as the stories of our parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. The lastest scientific research, now making headlines, also tells us that the effects of trauma can pass from one generation to the next. The ‘bequest’ is what is known as inherited family trauma, and emerging evidence suggest that it is a very real phenomenon."
Mark Wolynn, It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle (2016), p. 1
Mark Wolynn
“A life completely devoid of trauma, as we’re learning, is highly unlikely. Traumas do not sleep, even with death, but, rather, continue to look for the fertile ground of resolution in the children of the following generations.”
Mark Wolynn, It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle (2016), p. 52
John L. Payne (Shivasti)
"Often, when individuals who are entangled with the fate of one who has died tragically, unlawfully, or has been forgotten, it is the drain on their physical organism that leads to the development of illness and disease. When we are identified with one who has died, we have one foot in the grave so to speak, and therefor we are not fully present in physical life."
The Healing of Individuals, Families and Nations (2005), p. 31
Stephan Hausner
"Whatever the underlying reasons for a disruption in the early child-parent relationship, the consequences are that the child is often caught between an unfulfilled need for closeness to his or her parents and a sense of having to hold a line of demarcation and protection. In the context of a constellation group, if the background of this relationship disturbance is brought to light and the patient’s emotional splitting resolved, there may be an end to this ambivalence in the soul; there may be a sense of peace, and often healing at the physical level as well."
Even If It Cost Me My Life: Systemic Constellations and Serious Illness (2011), p. 67
Stephan Hausner
“Systemic constellations demonstrate clearly that many problems, particularly health issues, may have a connection to one or more excluded family members, or to hidden or repressed events in the family history. Conscious or unconscious exclusion usually originates in the emotional overload during a traumatic experience or painful disappointment. When there is an overwhelming flood, damming it up is a first, life-saving step. Often, however, these mechanisms become conditioned patterns of response and are maintained in unconscious projections onto others.
Many painful, core experiences later lead to criticism, blame, and demands. They reinforce the bonds of relationship, but also serve to separate at the same time. A disease is often the catalyst that brings someone to a halt and facilitates change.
Contrary to the binding, entangling, life-limiting effects of exclusion, we experience agreement, recognition, and harmony as resolving and healing, despite the difficulties they may present us.
Only someone who is in harmonious agreement with the past is also free for the future. One who struggles against the past remains bound to it. This holds true whether it has to do with the person’s own life—in the sense of early loss, an early separation from parents, or a particular decision—or whether it goes beyond the individual to the history of the family.
Systemic constellations involving health issues suggest that simply looking at one’s own life is insufficient to provide real relief and healing. Illness must be viewed as embedded in the cross-generational context of a family and not reduced to a personal phenomenon.”
Stephan Hausner, Even If It Cost Me My Life: Systemic Constellations and Serious Illness (2011), p. 64
Bill Mannle
“Unresolved issues from the past may cause the heart to shut down. If left unattended, this disruption in the flow of love carried across generations, ripples into the shadows of the family landscape, often emerging as illness, emotional difficulties, and broken relationships."
Tanja Meyburg
"What we know about systems is that symptoms always make sense and are an attempt by the whole to find a solution. When we can see an illness or difficult relationship within this context, we can drop out of the cause-and-effect model of treating symptoms. If we treat symptoms without understanding the systemic context, it wil reoccur or come out elsewhere as other symptom. When we hear and see what the message is of the symptom - What it is trying to resolve - then we are empowered to act. Sometimes this action requires stepping out of a position of carrying the ‘scapegoat’ role in the family. The scapegoat is the one who tends to manifest the problem or have negative behaviours or speaks the ‘truth’ of the system in different ways as rebelliousness, addiction or estrangement."
Reclaiming Ancestors: A Modern Path to Ancient Ways (2024), p. 18
Rage, Pain, and Emotional Defenses
Bertold Ulsamer
“In constellations we often experience different layers of feelings, some covering others. Above all, we protect ourselves from rage and cover it up with indifference, or coldness or in an arrogance from which we look down on others with scorn, even though it is sometimes barely discernible. Pity also has a component of devaluing because it also implies looking down on someone from a superior position, rather than respecting who the person is and what they have to carry.
When rage grows and comes too dangerously close, confusion helps to keep it a bay. The person moves away from feeling, preferring confusion to the experience of other emotions. A reversal to the opposite pole also occurs, and someone may feel small and frightened than furious.
Rage is itself often taken on from somewhere else and may have been passed down through several generations. Under the anger, at its source, lies pain. When I am hurt I become angry. There is strength to be found rage and I can still maintain contact with others. In pain, I lose my strength and feel alone.”
Bertold Ulsamer, The Art and Practice of Family Constellations: Leading Family Constellations as Developed by Bert Hellinger (2005), p. 153
Love and Relationships
Hunter Beaumont
“The point is not that you must have a traditional family in order to be happy, but if you want love to flourish, you must identify the Orders of Love that constrain and support love in your particular life situation, and you must follow them with love.”
Bert Hellinger with Gunthard Weber and Hunter Beaumont, Love's Hidden Symmetry: What Makes Love Work in Relationships (1998), Preface by Hunter Beaumont, p. xvi
Ilse Kutschers & Christine Bruder
“A love that is awake sees the other as he or she is and loves that person as a complete individual. Love leaves room for the other person and that person’s fate. That loved one is strengthened. I always ask my clients, “Does this love strengthen you or weaken you?” When such questions are understood and taken seriously, the answers are spontaneous and reveal the essential quality of that particular love.”
Ilse Kutschera & Christine Bruder, What Is OUT of ORDER HERE? Illness and Family Constellations (2006), p. 23
Francesca Mason Boring
“In constellation work, we recognize "blind love" and "enlightened love." Blind love is the heady hormonal love that is characteristic of the euphoria of new love or adolescent attraction. This is characterized by such an infusion of emotion and pheromones that judgment and critical thinking are rarely at the fore.
Enlightened love is the steady choice to bond, respect, and appreciate each other after the initial flood of the blinding rush of initial attraction has diminished.
Love, in terms of family constellation, is supported by respect-respect for the position of each person within a family system and respect for many unique destinies of everyone within the system.
Love, in family systems constellation, may involve passion, attraction, or the magnetism in life that pulls two people together. The remembrance of this love, a celebration of this enchantment, may be a healing movement in a constellation when a couple has experienced difficult stressors in life: job loss, death in the family, natural disaster, war, etc.
The love of parents for their children may be lifelong (and beyond), uninterrupted by circumstance or changing fortunes. When this is the case, the child has a foundation that is a gift from life. Honoring that one has the right parents, one cannot choose differently, and nothing will ever change what is true. These people passed life on and had a capacity for love that made dark days lighter.
Francesca Mason Boring, Love in Family Systems Constellation: An Invitation to Life (2025), pp. 19–20
Indra Torsten Preiss
“If a partner nonetheless tries to provide what one of the parents could not, a shift in the relationship occurs. The partner who gives ends up in a place not conducive to love in a couple relationship. He or she become a kind of substitute parent instead of a partner. Meanwhile the partner on the receiving end winds up in a subordinate position. This means the partner relationship shifts into a child-parent relationship. If the couple does not realize this in due time, the partner who enters into the position of the child ‘enters puberty’ and will eventually leave the parent-child relationship.”
Indra Torsten Preiss, Heal Your Relationships: A New Way of Improving Your Relationship Skills (2015), p. 81
Indra Torsten Preiss
“It emerges from many constellations that relationships that do not end peacefully continue to have negative influences on one or both partners. To conclude a relationship in peace does not mean a person simply gets over resentment, pain, and anger with ease. It means rather that the people involved have respect for one another, can speak courteously with each other, and look each other in the eye. Where children are involved, it means they are able to make the necessary arrangements in a respectful and fair manner.
If a former partner is not honored, than that will find expression in the new relationship—usually through the new partner feeling unsafe. Subconsciously he or she feels he or she could easily be the next casualty of the same unprocessed predicament.”
Indra Torsten Preiss, Family Constellations Revealed (2015), p. 137
Guilt, Innocence, and the Need to Belong
Barry Krost
"In Family Constellations, we often see that many clients unconsciously blame themselves for not feeling safe in their family or system. Bert Hellinger referred to this feeling as 'guilty.' To feel safe, he observed that children will try to do whatever they perceive as 'good' in order to belong and feel secure within their family. He called this a need to feel 'innocent.'
Guilt and innocence in these terms are not moral judgments. They are the feelings a child experiences in relationship to belonging and survival, and may have little to do with actual behavior or responsibility.
From the moment a child is conceived and born, the instinct to survive requires a place in the family that feels safe. If something in the system is out of order, a child may sense that something is wrong and unconsciously search for a way to restore safety by becoming 'good,' helpful, invisible, responsible, or whatever seems necessary to belong.
In families affected by psychosis, personality disorders, addiction, abuse, violence, or other significant disruptions, children may repeatedly feel unsafe, wrong, or guilty when they cannot find a solution to what is happening around them. Even when they have no power, control, or responsibility for the actions of others, they often continue looking to themselves for an answer.
The child unconsciously assumes responsibility for what cannot be solved.
When a systemic resolution allows greater safety, order, and belonging within the family system, the burden of constantly feeling guilty or needing to prove innocence may begin to soften. What once felt necessary for survival may no longer be required."
Barry Krost, Healing Body Therapeutics
Attachment, Trust, and the Interrupted Reaching-Out Movement
Dr. Ursula Franke-Bryson
"For a child, the entire world is initially comprised of the relationship to his or her parents or caretaker. Being recognized, cared for and touched, and having a feeling of belonging all contribute to a healthy development. The child lives within these relationships and exchanges, and experiences the assurance that his or her needs will be met when they are expressed, and that affection and attention are forthcoming.
When a child's movements towards relationship are not responded to, and when attempts at closeness lead repeatedly to rejection or helplessness, the child takes that to mean that the environment cannot be relied on to provide what is needed at the moment. As in the trials described above, even a child not yet capable of speech becomes physically distressed and turns away when this occurs. This can be understood as a basic pattern of secondary feelings. If it continues as a pattern through life, we describe it, in Bert Hellinger's terms, as an interrupted reaching-out movement.
If the disruption in the relationship occurs frequently and over long periods of time, a limit is clearly reached where resignation takes over and the child ceases to make any more attempts at contact. It is as if the child comes to the decision to never again submit to such a painful experience that results in that physical state, and never again to try to establish a close, deep relationship, but rather to do everything alone.
Particularly underlying depression and resignation, it is often clear that a person has been repeatedly subjected to situations and the associated feelings in which the reaching-out movement found no responding recipient. What this experience means for a young child is that no actions will have an effect on others. It is as if the child suspects that at the bottom line, he or she is helpless, and at the mercy of death itself. In therapy, as clients come closer to the primary feelings underlying the secondary coping strategies, they often describe feelings of fear, or general anxiety, deep dread, panic, fear of death, horror, indescribable outrage, existential danger, and the feeling, or the fear, that they will come apart, disintegrate, or disappear."
Dr. Ursula Franke-Bryson, In My Mind's Eye: Family Constellations in Individual Therapy and Counseling (2003), pp. 45–46
Ursula Maria Bell
"A baby always moves towards the mother. It reaches out to be loved, cared for, and nurtured. If the mother is not there to hold and love the baby, it will first try everything to express its distress. If mother does not respond, if the mother does not care and meet the baby’s needs, it will withdraw and become hopeless. Bert Hellinger called this an interrupted reaching-out movement.
This Interrupted movement is not limited to birth or the mother, but it can happen at any time during childhood when mother or father are absent physically or emotionally. The consequences in adult life can be anything from being unable to have stable emotional relationships to addictive patterns. We reach out for something we want or want to achieve - love, acceptance, belonging, success - but then we stop because of the lack of trust. This early interrupted reaching-out movement can influence all our future relationship experiences in terms of trust."
Ursula Maria Bell, In the Spirit of Love and Reconciliation: More Than Constellations (2024), p. 165
Family Systems and Hidden Dynamics
Ilse Kutschers & Christine Bruder
“Good medicine, like good psychotherapy, is based on recognizing what really is the matter with a patient. In my experience, family constellations in a therapeutic context are the most effective method towards clarifying what is essential for each individual. Here it is the unconscious mind that plays the most important role. Since systematic entanglements are unconscious, a therapeutic method is needed that can bring this to light. Bert Hellinger observed and described how invisible bonds in families may have effects over many generations, and in family constellations, he developed a method of making visible those bonds as well as the underlying basic dynamics. This process often allows healing to occur.”
Ilse Kutschera & Christine Bruder, What Is OUT of ORDER HERE? Illness and Family Constellations (2006) p. 8
Stephan Hausner
“Besides blood relatives, the system encompasses all those who have had a significant effect on the family, positive or negative, through their fate or death. For example, one of our parents or grandparents may have had a previous partner who vacated a place, leaving an opening for a new partner, or one who was forced to relinquish his or her place.
In this larger sense, victims of violent acts perpetrated by a family member also belong to the family group. A special connection exists between victims and perpetrators so that, in a family in which a member has been the victim of violent crime, the one who did this act also remains a part of the system.
All of these people comprise the family’s ‘community of fate.’”
Stephan Hausner, Even If It Costs Me My Life: Systemic Constellations and Serious Illness (2011), p. 23
Hunter Beaumont
“I am convinced that Constellation Work, with its systemic worldview and the gift of the opportunity to stand as a representative in a constellation, is one of the most relevant and important tools to support us as we navigate our evolution into our future. I am convinced because I have stood in powerful constellations, and I've had the felt experience of being guided to unexpected resolutions by some unseen hand, of knowing that we are parts of a larger whole, of knowing that, in one sense, we are not individuals, but rather human systems of relating, of knowing that the Here and Now contains both the past and the future, undivided. I have experienced deeply held beliefs transform in minutes and hate and fear and frozen hearts dissolve. Entanglements can be undone. Love can prevail."
Knowing Field Journal (September 2021)
Loyalty, Barriers and Self-Sabotage
Barry Krost
"Self-sabotage can feel like the only way to manage our deep distress when we come from a broken and fragmented family system. It can be both an unconscious attempt at escaping our reality and a way of being loyal to brokenness."
Barry Krost, Healing Body Therapeutics
Tony T. Gaillard
“Because of what Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy calls ‘unconscious family loyalty,’ children sometimes absorb these difficulties in the manner of a sponge, because nothing is told to them, nothing is humanized, transmitted or assumed in truthful speech. Events that are not psychologically integrated, that are not talked about, and cannot be mentioned without denial or discomfort, generate a pathogenic weight …”
Tony T. Gaillard, Transgenerational Therapy: Healing the Inherited Burden (2020), p. 58
Barry Krost
"Unresolved events from the past can create barriers to connection with our mother and father that are often difficult to overcome. Even when both parent and child long to reach one another, loyalties and entanglements to the past may stand between them, limiting the natural movement toward love and connection.
In some cases, these barriers appear connected to unresolved violence, murder, or traumatic loss from earlier generations."
Barry Krost, Healing Body Therapeutics
The Knowing Field
John L. Payne (Shivasti)
"In Family Constellations work we use representatives to stand in for members of our family and ancestors; this is when we engage the unseen presence that we have come to know as the Knowing Field. It is then that we meet the phenomenon that representatives have access to information and feeling of the individual they are representing. This, for the representatives, can be a powerful and life-changing experience in its own right as they step into another's shoes and 'become' someone else, with little or no knowledge of the personality and circumstances of the individual they are representing."
John L. Payne (Shivasti), The Healing of Individuals, Families and Nations (2005), p. 4
Francesca Mason Boring
“While working in a phenomenological manner, one must dare to listen, look, touch, smell and perceive in a way that may be outside of the norm of Western linear thought... The knowing field is part of the landscape of human beings, and warmly invites every facilitator and every family to walk there with humility and competence.”
Family Systems Constellations: And Other Systems Constellations Adventures: A Transformational Journey (2015), p. 19
Individual Family Constellations and Alternative Formats
Ursula Franke-Bryson
"You can visualize a constellation in your imagination and complete all the movements and rituals in your minds eye. Alternatively, using figures, dolls, or blocks to represent the family members allows the client and the therapist to look at the constellation together from the outside. Constellation using markers consisting of felt pieces or sheets of paper are also effective. The client or therapist can stand in the various marked positions, thereby gaining additional information about the dynamics in the family system through bodily sensations and any changes following interventions.
All of these methods can provide experiences of high intensity and awareness and serve well to test out hypothesis, develop resolutions, and create effective images of resolution."
Ursula Franke-Bryson, In the Mind's Eye: Family Constellations in Individual Therapy and Counseling (2003), p. 30
Ancestors, Resilience, and the Continuity of Life
Francesca Mason Boring
"When I facilitate family systems constellation, I often state that I offer full disclosure: I do not personally understand the ancestors as only allegory, archetype, or metaphor. For me, the ancestors are the people we come from, they support us, and their lives and resilience have an impact on us personally.
I appreciate allegory, archetype, and metaphor. As a writer, I would be nowhere without them.
I also know that there are impactful constellations that can be done that help us to understand how an archetypal influence may hinder or help our life's journey. But I encourage facilitators to enlist the expanse of the ancestors' arms when there are difficulties in life that seem insurmountable.
Whether we were nurtured or not, abandoned or not, adopted or not, we all have ancestors. This is a matter of biology. We do have generations of histories and victories that are written in our family field, our genetic codes, and perhaps our cellular memory.
We may be in the dark in terms of being able to conclusively diagram the mechanisms that make these transmissions of fates occur within family systems. But we have now a plethora of experiences worldwide that have shown us that transgenerational trauma may impact those who are currently trying to live their lives. We have seen that this modality has the capacity to bring into focus the particular dynamics that create systemic pressure and activate unconscious loyalties or contracts that limit life in various respects.
In family constellations, we occasionally replicate the communal healing that followed human beings through centuries of continuation of the species and specific families. People, sometimes strangers, coming together—each with their own ancestral field-activates a healing space that is not bordered or limited by time.
Our ancestors stand behind us with love, strength, experience, wisdom, and perhaps a smile.
Being aware of ancestral fields and bringing to our awareness how many people it took transmitting life generation after generation puts life in perspective. We are part of a continuum. We do not exist in isolation, and to believe that we do is an illusion."
Francesca Mason Boring, Love in Family Systems Constellation: An Invitation to Life (2025), pp. 111–112
Presence, Surrender, and New Perspectives
Ursula Maria Bell
"The beautiful thing about constellations is that they help us let go of our expectations. We might come to a workshop with certain expectations, bu we quickly understand that it is not about fullfilling them. It is about going beyond and allowing new perspectives to come up by not making any difference regarding what happens. We allow to equally show up what wants to be there, honor it, and surrender to its guidance towards a new awareness, resulting in new actions and reactions. But still, it is our free will to embrace the experience and decide on new steps, or to go back to our old story."
Ursula Maria Bell, In the Spirit of Love and Reconciliation: More Than Constellations (2024), p. 85
Presence, Attunement, and the Facilitator's Role
Suzi Tucker
“When I sit next to someone, being in tune is not as easily described. It is a heighted state of ‘is … together.” Allowing the breath and body and the thinking, the story, the experience, the past, the present, the potential, the wish, the life and death, all to wash over me; that is being in tune with another. Inherent in it is being in tune with the person’s system. She is at once very young and very old and just where she is. Behind her is everything. Or he is a boy, a man, a father, a son. Before him, everything.
The thing about being in tune is that it is a seamless state. There is no room for contrivance. The observations that come out of this place are simple that, observations without intention or agenda. As a facilitator, one has the choice to name them or not, and this too comes out of being in tune. From this position one sees, or more accurately, feels what the system can tolerate, and what it will allow.”
Suzi Tucker, “The Weight of Words,” Messengers of Healing: The Family Constellations of Bert Hellinger Through the Eyes of a New Generation of Practitioners, edited by J. Edward Lynch and Suzi Tucker (2005), p. 12
Facilitating Family Constellations
J. Edward Lynch
“The family constellations method and process developed by Bert Hellinger is new and old at the same time. Hellinger took the concept of phenomenology and used this way of viewing the process to work with family constellations. The method required a different kind of therapist from the Moreno/Satir style, one who could be open and touched by life and death issues, be courageous in the face of despair and trauma, could trust the unknown, and remain engaged and present while waiting for a resolution to emerge from the client.”
J. Edward Lynch, “The Stance of the Facilitator,” Messengers of Healing: The Family Constellations of Bert Hellinger Through the Eyes of a New Generation of Practitioners, edited by J. Edward Lynch and Suzi Tucker (2005), p. 84
Bertold Ulsamer
“Certainly, in order to lead constellations, you need to have the courage to listen to your inner voice, even if it leads you into uncharted territory with no signposts and many surprises. On the other hand, constellations do require a basic understanding. The movement in the work is not purely dependent upon flashes of intuition and inspiration based on the experience of the moment. A large part of what occurs in a constellation rests on certain structures which can be explained and understood.”
Bertold Ulsamer, The Art and Practice of Family Constellations: Leading Family Constellations as Developed by Bert Hellinger (2003), p. 11
John Payne (Shivasti)
"As we experience within the field of a Family Constellation setup, healing sentences create a healing shift in the energy of the entire constellation. But will any sentence create a healing shift if it expresses truth? In reality, no. The nature of healing sentences needs to be a direct, distilled articulation of a deeper truth - in other words, the sentences need to emanate from the level of the Soul in order to be effective….
When the language of the Soul is used, there is more often than not a feeling of 'there is no more to say.'"
John Payne (Shivasti), The Language of the Soul: Healing Words of Truth (2006), p. 21
The Living, the Dead, and Unfinished Goodbyes
Jacob Robert Schneider
“In constellations, the living and the dead have an opportunity to say goodbye in a way that was perhaps impossible in reality. Many of the dead seem to need some sign of peace and release from the living, and many of those alive need some assurance of release from someone who died. There appear to be dead people who have to be reminded that they are dead before they can let go of the living. Often the dead can only find peace when they are allowed to lie in peace next to others who are also dead, for example a mother who died prematurely, or a twin who died at birth, a first love, a murderer, or perhaps a fallen comrade.”
Jacob Robert Schneider, Family Constellations: Basic Principles and Procedures (2007), p. 66
Reconciliation and Collective Healing
Jacob Robert Schneider
“Reconciliation between the decendants of victims and perpetrators is perhaps most durable when they are able to mourn together for the dead on both sides and hold all in respectful memory. In the soul, the deceased victims and the deceased perpetrators need the love of the living long after the actual events. One consequence of the deeds that have been perpetrated is that victims and perpetrators can only be loved in conjunction with each other. If a perpetrator had many victims on his or her conscience, it may be more than the love of a single person can carry. Resolutions may only be possible through the love of many, that is at a societal level.”
Jacob Robert Schneider, Family Constellations: Basic Principles and Procedures (2007), p. 74
Indra Torsten Preiss
“If a person in a family has committed murder, then he or she is bound to the victim through the heavy shift in the balance between giving and taking. This connection is stronger than family bonds, and the perpetrator is obliged to follow his or her new bond and leave their family. If he or she does not do that, a serious risk arises—that family members in following generations will have to share the fate of the perpetrator. They often do so by leaving the family in acts of penitence for the perpetrator. An example would be committing suicide. The perpetrator must voluntarily undergo the same fate as the victim by going to prison or some similar manner of taking distance from normal life in order to relieve future generations.”
Indra Torsten Preiss, Family Constellations Revealed (2015), p. 115
Barry Krost
"Perpetration begins with murderous rage and a deep emptiness. It often escalates into violent and terrible acts that are justified by grotesque, distorted projections onto their victims and themselves. When this rage transitions into a cold hatred the perpetrator often hides what they have done and makes it secret. It is common that they use magical thinking about their actions that appears rational, religious (or even justifies continued perpetration). They place themselves in a dark place where they avoid comprehending what they have done and its consequences."
Barry Krost, Healing Body Therapeutics
Parents, Reconciliation, and Healing
Mark Wolynn
“It is essential that we make peace with our parents. Doing so not only brings us inner peace, it also allows for harmony to spread into the generations that follow. by softening toward our parents and dropping the story that stands in the way, we are more likely to halt the senseless repetition of generational suffering.
While this might seem challenging (or even impossible), I have witnessed again and again the unexpected rewards of healing our connection with our parents, including experiencing positive outcomes in our health, relationships, and productivity.
You can’t change your parents, but you can change the way you hold them inside you.”
Mark Wolynn, It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle (2016), pp. 108–109
Stephan Hausner
“Without a doubt, we have all received from our parents and we each also lack whatever it was we did not get. It is up to each individual to decide where he or she remains attached.
Those who look at what they received feel the beneficence and usually have something to pass on to others. Those who have unmet demands and are attached to what is missing may feel cheated by their parents and by life.
Such a person does not usually do well; he or she has an ongoing sense of deficit, and may be unable to give to others. It is an attitude towards life that contributes to depression in many people.”
Stephan Hausner, Even If It Cost Me My Life: Systemic Constellations and Serious Illness (2011), pp. 49–50
Jacob Robert Schneider
“When adult children take care of their elderly parents, love requires that they treat their parents with the respect due to them, even if the parents become more child-like in their behaviour and demands as they grow older. A son or daughter can never really satisfy such child-like demands. It is often helpful for the caretaker child to imagine that the deceased grandparents give the elderly parents what they need to satisfy these childish demands, and children can lovingly give only what is actually needed and what is justified and appropriate.”
Jacob Robert Schneider, Family Constellations: Basic Principles and Procedures (2007), p. 87
