Family Constellations Sydney
Internal Family Systems Therapy
Family Constellations therapy is a form of counselling focusing on discovering the hidden dynamics in your family and how they shape your perception of the world and your behaviours. Insight into dysfunctional patterns in your interpersonal and ancestral history can be life-changing.
A foundation at the heart of many therapeutic models is that many of our damaging or limited beliefs stem from our family of origin. Recognising outworn or faulty beliefs and then changing them is the means of every form of healing.
Bert Hellinger was a German psychotherapist. During his late 20s he traveled to South Africa where he learned the customs of the Zulu people and a particular ceremony they used to understand one another. In Zulu tradition, ancestors are sacred, and healing ancestral wounds is a key to strong family ties. He saw family members speak to one another candidly, without being passive-aggressive or becoming frustrated. He examined the ways our family narratives influence our personal identities. In time he created the Family and Systemic Therapy more commonly known as Family Constellations.
The Scale of Positive and Negative Experience (SPANE) measures the frequency of positive and negative affect. Many of us regard love as being the feeling with the highest vibration, but the SPANE model regards authenticity as being the highest.
Constellation Therapy
Hellinger captured how Familial Constellations can lead us to authenticity, saying:
“Resistance is loyalty to the old and prevents development. Every expectation is thus linked to something already known. Only what shakes me to the core leads me onward. The rigidity breaks, growth follows. In the end we can only marvel at where we find ourselves. The new may be new to us, yet it has been there all the time."
In his research into trauma, Dr Gabor Mate discovered that when authenticity threatens attachment, attachment trumps authenticity.
So if we are to attain the high watermark of authenticity we need to work through family conditioning and dysfunction which Family Constellation healing facilitates.
Abraham Maslow likened us to a tree. We're designed to grow straight and tall, effectively realising our potential. When a tree is planted in poor soil, or doesn't receive the nutrition, sunlight or rain required for growth, then it will become stunted in its development. In the same way, toxic beliefs and behaviours passed on by our families become entanglements that limit our thriving.
"The greater soul moves in only one direction: and that is to bring into union that which has been made separate." - Bert Hellinger
Family Constellation Session
Some Family Systems Therapists do constellation therapy in a group setting, typically using drama therapy with the other people in the group to create the family constellation. This type of role play is also known as psychodrama.
The approach I take is individual family constellation therapy. Instead of role playing with others, you and I work together over time to map out relationships and uncover patterns.
Terry Real once said, "Family dysfunction rolls down from generation to generation, like a fire in the woods, taking down everything in its path until one person in one generation has the courage to turn and face the flames. That person brings peace to their ancestors and spares the children that follow."
Perhaps you feel like you are that one person who is compelled to break generational patterns and if you have children yourself, help ensure you pass on only the healthiest qualities and beliefs.
Constellation Healing
For those who have experienced a particularly difficult or dysfunctional upbringing, the challenge is finding the gold among the rubble.
Anais Nin was heartbroken after her father left the family. In time, she found a way to transmute her pain through her creative endeavours. Being able to look back on her childhood with greater perspective she wrote:
“We cannot always place responsibility outside of ourselves, on parents, nations, the world, society, race, religion. Long ago it was the gods. If we accepted a part of this responsibility we would simultaneously discover our strength. If they [our parents] gave us handicaps, they also gave us their courage, their obstinacy, their sacrifices, their moments of strength.”
In, Cradles of Eminence: Childhoods of more than 300 Famous Men and Women, the psychologist Victor Goertzel found that many people who went on to achieve great things in life tended to dislike school and grew up feeling different from others.
Linda Gray Sexton is the daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton. Linda wrote a memoir, Searching for Mercy Street. She titled the second chapter of her memoir, In Exile. In it, she describes her trying experience of growing up to discover she had a suicidal mother:
My story as a daughter and my mother’s story as a mother begins in a Boston suburb, back in the 1950s, when I was exiled from my childhood home to make room for someone else: Mother’s mental illness, which lived among us like a fifth person.
On one hand, her mother's mental illness made for a tumultuous childhood. But then, on the other hand, there was much to value in growing up in a home filled with books and words and an attention to language. The influence of her mother caused her to write at an early age. Afternoons were sometimes spent together with her mother, reading aloud from Anne’s favourite poems. By the time Linda was an adolescent, she had begun to write poetry and short fiction seriously, going on to have a successful career as an author.
Some of us grow apart from our parents, some have to switch roles and parent our parents. Then there are those who feel greater separation when their family unit breaks down due to divorce. Others again experience this exiling when they lose a parent, or parents during adolescence.
The Internal Family Systems Model is designed to bring about reconciliation and healing as we glean the giftings as well as the woundings and traumas that typically arise during our upbringing and time spent in a family model that is rarely idyllic for anyone.
Family Constellation Therapy Cost
$140 for a one hour session
