If you haven’t heard of Family Constellations yet, you likely will soon. It has become an increasingly popular therapeutic modality worldwide, especially in Europe, Asia and South America, where, in some places, it is even integrated into public healthcare systems. Over the last 25 years, it has also become widely practiced in the U.S. through the dedication of the first generation of American students who studied with Bert Hellinger, its founder, in the 90s, along with the generations of practitioners that followed.

Simply put, Family Constellations is a participatory process arranged around a client, that explores the hidden patterns they’ve inherited from their family lineage. For decades, Family Constellations has helped people gain insights into some of the deepest concerns and issues of their lives and allowed them to find a renewed sense of inner peace.

From the 1960s through the 1980s, Hellinger was trained in a variety of modalities, including psychoanalysis, Gestalt therapy, family systems therapy and others, but his ideas were also deeply influenced by the 16 years he spent as a missionary in South Africa. There, he learned the language and customs of the Zulu people and was exposed to their traditional ancestral practices. He also attended ecumenical and interracial trainings in group dynamics offered by Anglican priests, which were very progressive at the time. These trainings were a turning point for him and led to his leaving the priesthood.

However, as he worked with clients and families over the years, his focus on observing what blocked or supported the natural flow of love and life force made the biggest impact on his methods. Many of the early German therapists who worked with him were strongly opposed to the way he worked, but over time, they saw that what he was doing was effective and eventually began to accept his methods and even study with him.

The approach of Family Constellations is solution-oriented, yet the process is personal. Guided by a trained facilitator, the experience allows participants to gently discover what they’ve unconsciously “carried” for others in their family and empowers them to dissolve many core limiting patterns and beliefs they were born into. As a result, people often feel as if they’ve come to peace with their relationship with their family and themselves.

What’s a Constellation?

Family Constellations can take one of two forms. The first is a group process in which people sit in a large circle and take turns as the focus client in order to address a challenge. The client briefly states what the trouble is and what positive outcome they are seeking. The facilitator asks for some information about the client’s family history, looking for a potential starting point to find the origin of what remains unresolved in the family memory field. The facilitator’s intention is to help find and release what has been stuck and to rejoin what has been separated.

The facilitator and the client then ask others in the group to stand as representatives for family members playing key roles in the family dynamics. The client lets each representative know who they are representing and gently moves them to a place in the circle where they feel they should go. This is the setup and the beginning of the exploration of the ancestral energy field.

Family Constellations can also be done in a “tabletop” version in which the facilitator and client connect either in person or online. To choose family representatives, the client chooses objects such as wooden figures, stones and crystals from the facilitator’s collection or from their own things. Neutral objects are best. The client enrolls each object as a representative by holding it in their hand, bringing the person to mind, saying their name and then placing it on a table to set up the Constellation.

In these individual sessions, unresolved material in the family lineage is explored through the energies held by the representative objects. The facilitator guides the client to sense the dynamics between the representative objects, and the client speaks for those family members who are invited to participate in healing. Respect is always given for each person’s truth, and nothing is forced that is not ready to move.

Resolving What’s Unresolved

In the group process, once the constellation has been set up, the facilitator begins exploring the family system to discover what remains unresolved. In the group setting, they’ll ask the family representatives questions, such as how they feel when they look at others in the constellation. The process unfolds slowly, with respect and without judgment, as the facilitator looks for an origin point of the client’s issue. Starting with the oldest generation—up to four generations back—traumas, issues, wounds and challenges are brought to light, addressed, and the energy moves.

For example, family ancestors who had suffered traumas of different sorts typically weren’t able to heal their unresolved wounds when they happened; life just went on. Yet, through Family Constellations sessions, we find that residues of the energies of those experiences, along with the family’s values and beliefs associated with them, are carried through to those born into the family later. Science is seeing more evidence of this pattern as well, as studies in epigenetics continue to suggest that stressful environmental factors can show up in offspring in later generations.

As each generation is addressed in this way, the healing effects can move down the generations to the present. And as the client sees that what happened in the past wasn’t their responsibility to fix or change, they end up having more compassion for those who came before them. No longer carrying what isn’t theirs, they usually feel much more at peace with their own place in the family.

Yet the process doesn’t only address what has been inherited through the family line, it explores what one absorbs from one’s family of origin as one develops emotionally and energetically. Even before a child has language, they instinctively pick up environmental energies and cues that help them learn and conform to the family’s expected behaviors in order to strengthen their sense of belonging to the family system and increase its chances of being fed and cared for. Later, as we grow into adolescence, we begin to explore our unique preferences and identities and test the boundaries of belonging to our family. Family Constellations help uncover the hidden consequences we took on as we either forged our own path or chose to safely align with the family beliefs. “The process was more healing and created a more lasting transformation than any other modality I’ve done,” says Chelsea Craig from Tennessee. “It helped me transcend beyond the sorrow of my past into a place of genuine acceptance, love and harmony with a pain I now realize I no longer need to carry.”

A child born into the family might develop loyalty to the family’s values in order to strengthen their sense of belonging and survival, even if those values constrain the child’s natural flow of love and life force, and even if they are counter to the child’s soul purpose. The resulting inner conflicts can become burdens that influence decision-making and cause frustration, resentment and dissatisfaction with life.

The Knowing Field

One of the mysteries of this process is that representatives, who often don’t know the client, genuinely begin to feel like the family member whose presence they are embodying, sometimes to the point of accurately feeling discomfort in the same area of the body where that person had an injury or illness.

This surprising resonance has come to be called “the knowing field”; it’s the energy field that all of the family members are born into. It contains shared memories that are inherited and passed down through the generations, and it can give access to buried emotions and uncover hidden resentments and wounds. These, in turn, restrict what would otherwise be a more natural flow of love in the family. For example, long-held grief can be given a voice and stuck emotions can finally be allowed to flow—these experiences are often felt not only by the designated client but by some of the representatives in the constellation as well.

Family Constellations are holographic; they represent not just the entire family system but the whole human experience. Participants may be called multiple times during a Constellation to the same role—brother, for example—giving them a nudge to look more deeply into their own relationship with their brother for what might not be resolved. Because the roles of parent, child, and sibling are archetypal, the experience of being a representative in someone else’s family can bring insight into one’s own family dynamics. Thus, representatives are often deeply touched by what they experience when standing in for another’s relation.

Family Constellations also helps people recognize and uncover the common, subtle, unconscious wish that something had been different when they were growing up. While it’s a natural defense that worked to protect the child, that kind of wishing can keep people entangled with their parent(s) or other family members if left unexamined. Essentially promising what cannot be, the wish delays people’s ability to come into their adult strength and full responsibility for their lives. Thus, to search for and release this wish is a key goal of the healing. “In the weeks and months following my Constellation, I had a feeling of openness, a sense of freedom and a capacity for movement I had not experienced prior to the Constellation … The work we did shifted the collapsed place I had [and] I felt a restoration to resilience I had not had before,” says M.E. from Asheville, North Carolina.

A Family Constellation can open the door to a deeper understanding of the behaviors and patterns one’s parents, grandparents, and others down the lineage have dealt with. As a result, people usually gain greater compassion for those in their family lineage. “A Constellation actually can allow you to stand with your family again and see the place you were in at the time,” says Vicki from Atlanta. “It’s hard to put into words, but it gets to the core of what it is you’re struggling with. It’s like coming from the inside out, instead of the outside in, is what I experienced.” ❧

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Chuck Cogliandro has been facilitating individual and group Family Constellations with his wife, Kelly, since 2011, both in the U.S. and internationally. They live in Lithonia with two cats, 19 chickens and “quite a garden.” For more information, visit ConstellationJourneys.com.