Family and systemic constellations are like a unique dining experience for the soul. They uncover hidden dynamics in our lives—within family systems, relationships, work, or even our inner world. One of the most common questions is: “How long is a session, and how much can I explore?”
Think of constellation sessions like a meal. Some are quick snacks, others are full banquets. And just as with food, the flavour, pace, and portion depend on your appetite, energy, and readiness.

• Dip / Snack: A lighter, shorter session is like a small tasting plate. You might explore 2-4 dynamics or focus on a theme such as your relationship with another person, or money, emotions, or a work situation. These sessions are about noticing, sensing, and feeling—less about resolution, more about insight. For some people, even a small snack is deeply nourishing—and that’s enough. Honouring your limits and what your system can hold is part of the work. These sessions can be self-guided.
• Starter / Main Course: Medium-length sessions allow for deeper exploration. You may touch on family or ancestral dynamics while balancing the energy levels of both seeker and representatives. These sessions usually require an experienced facilitator who has studied constellation principles in depth.
• Full Banquet/Intensive programmes: Longer sessions are suited for in-depth family and ancestral work, exploring generational patterns, hidden loyalties, and systemic connections. These immersive sessions demand skilled facilitation (often multiple facilitators) to manage energy, participant numbers, and integration periods safely. 
  
  

Self-Guided vs Facilitated Sessions
Some lighter sessions can be explored safely in a self-guided way through reflection, journaling, or guided prompts - allowing you to notice patterns, feel sensations, and gain insight at your own pace. However, larger or more complex sessions, especially those involving multiple participants or deeper family/ancestral dynamics, require an experienced facilitator who has studied and applies the systemic constellation principles, ethics and phenomenology. Facilitation ensures safety, supports integration, and helps participants navigate the energy and emotional intensity that arises.

Flavours and Cuisines: Themed Constellations
Constellation workshops can also be themed, offering different “flavours” to explore. Examples include addictions and mental health, success and money, missing fathers, absent mothers, unsettled settles, or abstract internal dynamics such as “you and your inner critic.” There's even past-life, business, astrological, and collective constellations. Each theme brings its own intensity and depth, allowing participants to experience patterns from a new angle. Some people are nourished by a light tasting plate, others may be ready for a full banquet—and both are perfectly valid.

Other Considerations

• Client pace: Some are ready for a full banquet; others are nourished by just a snack. Both are valid.
• Representatives’ capacity: Energy levels affect what can safely be held in the session.
• Insights vs. resolution: Not every session aims to fully resolve a dynamic; sometimes noticing, feeling, and sensing is enough.
• Integration time: Particularly for newcomers, the body-mind system may need time to digest sensations and insights before deeper sessions.
• Stage-wise approach: Start small, explore deeper in another session, and savour insights along the way.

Whether it’s a light self-guided tasting plate, a comforting main course with facilitation, or a full banquet of ancestral exploration, constellation sessions offer nourishment for awareness and transformation. And sometimes, the simplest flavour is all you need to feel fully nourished!

​What have you experienced?

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Family Constellations & Bert Hellinger
What the heck is PHENOMENOLOGY?
The Hidden Wisdom of the Orders of Love
Other Guiding Principles in Constellation Work that are just as important
The Different Roles in Constellations
​When is helping is not helping?
​The Lores of Life: Belonging, Balance, and Order
Perpetuating the Victim Perpetrator story
What Family Constellations is Not
​Where Family & Systemic Constellations Can Be Applied

🌿 Where Family & Systemic Constellations Can Be Applied
​Family and Systemic Constellations can be used in many contexts where human systems, relationships, and patterns are at play. At its heart, this work helps reveal hidden dynamics and restore balance — whether in personal life, family systems, or organisations.

​1. Personal Growth & Healing

• Exploring recurring life patterns or feelings of being “stuck.”
• Understanding relationship difficulties, family tensions, or repeated conflicts.
• Uncovering hidden loyalties, guilt, or burdens carried from previous generations.
• Gaining clarity around life purpose, belonging, or direction.
• Resolving inner conflicts and integrating disowned parts of self.

2. Family & Ancestral Healing

• Addressing transgenerational trauma or family secrets.
• Healing disrupted bonds with parents, siblings, or ancestors.
• Acknowledging losses, exclusions, adoptions, or abortions within the family system.
• Restoring flow and order in the family lineage.

3. Relationship & Couple Work

• Understanding dynamics between partners beyond the surface issues.
• Seeing how family-of-origin patterns influence intimacy and attachment.
• Supporting couples in recognising inherited patterns that affect connection.

4. Health & Wellbeing

• Exploring emotional or systemic contributors to physical symptoms.
• Understanding patterns of illness, addiction, or depression within family systems.
• Supporting personal alignment and inner peace alongside medical or therapeutic care.

(Note: Always presented as complementary, not a replacement for medical treatment.)

5. Organisational & Professional Settings

• Revealing hidden dynamics in teams, leadership structures, or workplace conflict.
• Exploring alignment with organisational purpose, vision, or roles.
• Supporting conscious leadership and healthy systems in business or community organisations.

6. Education, Coaching, & Facilitation

• Helping educators or coaches understand group dynamics and learning blocks.
• Using systemic mapping to clarify goals, resources, and obstacles.
• Bringing awareness to wider systems that influence clients’ experiences.

7. Social & Collective Systems

• Exploring community, cultural, or societal patterns — such as migration, colonisation, or historical trauma.
• Working with collective fields where groups seek reconciliation or understanding.
• Deepening social awareness and compassion across generations and communities.

✨ In EssenceConstellations can be applied anywhere there are systems of relationship, belonging, and exchange — from the deeply personal to the collective.
The approach helps illuminate what’s hidden, restore what’s excluded, and open the way for more flow, love, and life to move freely.

🌿 What Family & Systemic Constellations Is Not

1. Not Role-Play or Acting
   
   • Representatives do not pretend to be anyone else or act out stories.
     
   • They tune in to sensations, emotions, or movements that emerge from the systemic field — a phenomenological awareness rather than imagination or performance.
     
2. Not Talk Therapy
   
   • There’s minimal analysis or storytelling.
     
   • The work relies on embodied awareness, spatial relationships, and direct experience rather than dialogue or interpretation.
     
3. Not Psychodrama
   
   • Although both use space and representation, Constellations are not re-enactments of past events.
     
   • The focus is on observing and allowing what emerges, not dramatising or rehearsing interactions.
     
4. Not Family Therapy (in the traditional sense)
   
   • It doesn’t require family members to be present.
     
   • The approach looks at systemic dynamics rather than communication patterns or behavioural interventions.
     
5. Not Channeling or Mediumship
   
   • While representatives may sense information beyond conscious knowing, this is not spiritual channeling or trance work.
     
   • It’s grounded in phenomenology — attending to what can be observed and verified within the group experience.
     
6. Not About Finding Blame or Fault
   
   • The work seeks to bring understanding, balance, and compassion to all members of the system.
     
   • Every person has a rightful place; the aim is inclusion and restoration, not judgement.
     
7. Not a Substitute for Therapy or Crisis Support
   
   • Constellations can complement counselling, but they are not a replacement for sustained therapeutic support, mental health treatment, or medical care.
     
8. Not Controlled or Scripted
   
   • The facilitator doesn’t impose outcomes or “fix” issues.
     
   • The process unfolds organically through observation and respectful guidance.
     
9. Not About Quick Fixes
   
   • Even though insights can be profound, integration takes time.
     
   • The work invites deeper shifts in awareness rather than instant solutions.
     

RELATED BLOGS:
​The Lores of Life: Belonging, Balance, and Order
​The Different Roles in Constellations
Family Constellations & Bert Hellinger
What the heck is PHENOMENOLOGY?
The Hidden Wisdom of the Orders of Love
Other Guiding Principles in Constellation Work that are just as important

 I’ve been exploring the dynamics of victim and perpetrator over the years-  themes that feel especially charged in our world right now. These patterns are not just out there in society; they also live in our families, our histories, and even in our bodies.

I recently joined an online workshop on this topic. In the past, I’ve looked at these roles through the drama triangle—victim, perpetrator, and saviour and also victim, victimiser and controller. This workshop, however, drew on Bert Hellinger’s Family Constellations work, where the facilitator (Barry Krost) shared both Hellingers insights and his own. It reminded me how entangled we can become in these dynamics, and how different things look when we can hold them with more objectivity.

In small groups, we each stepped into and represented the energies of these roles. Experiencing them directly - rather than analysing or judging them - was eye-opening. Here’s a glimpse of what surfaced for me when I stepped into these roles (NB. each person had a different experience of the roles):

• Perpetrator – a surge of rage, wanting everyone to go away, yet also a hidden longing for help. My head felt tight, and I couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes.
• Victim – an anxious, withdrawn state, caught in self-soothing and unable to look at others.
• Descendants – a surprising self-obsession, focused on my own image, even wanting to take selfies, aware of others but unwilling to truly see them.
• Consequences – a restless busyness, overwhelmed by endless tasks, looking everywhere but at others, my anxiety mounting with every new demand.
• What is needed for solution – here, the words presence without judgement arose. From this space, I could see everyone clearly and with ease.

It was fascinating, affirming, and a little unsettling—because what played out in our small group mirrors what we see in the world today, only magnified. These sessions weren’t about fixing or resolving anything; they were about feeling and witnessing the dynamics. Sometimes, insight itself is the healing: what was once hidden comes into the light.

We moved onto a deeper session with one selected person in the group so we got to observe the dynamics in a specific persons system. I was asked to represent a family member of theirs. We learn so much when we represent. Suspending our judgements and thoughts on the matter and only reporting feelings and sensations. I am grateful for this experience. The little I am allowed to share from this is the complexities involved. We can be entangled with someone else who is entangled with someone else and ...well you get the picture. 

I left with a reminder: thank goodness there are pathways to resolution in these dynamics. But they require careful holding—because, as we also see globally, the field is supercharged, and without skilled facilitation things can quickly become chaotic.

So I sit with what has arisen, letting it work through my system. And I wonder--
👉 Where do you notice yourself stepping into victim, perpetrator, descendant, or consequence?
👉 What might shift if you brought presence without judgement to that place?

Quotes & Teachings (Constellations perspective)
Bert Hellinger (founder of Constellations):

• “When great guilt is not acknowledged, it does not disappear. It passes to the descendants, who atone without knowing why.”
• “Victim and perpetrator are deeply bound together. Only when both are acknowledged, without judgment, can the descendants be released.”
• “A murderer and his victim are connected forever. When we take one side against the other, we deepen the split. When both are seen, the descendants find peace.”
• “In schizophrenia, a person often represents two excluded people at once. They carry both the victim and the perpetrator, torn between incompatible loyalties. Their soul is divided because the family’s history is divided.”

Hunter Beaumont (Hellinger collaborator):

• “Unresolved trauma in one generation often appears as entanglement in later ones, where descendants unconsciously identify with the excluded victim or perpetrator, living lives that are not fully their own.”

Ursula Franke (psychotherapist, Constellations trainer):

• “Children of victims often carry the pain of what happened, while children of perpetrators may carry the guilt. Both are innocent and both are entangled in something larger than themselves until it is acknowledged.”

Albrecht Mahr (psychiatrist & constellation facilitator)

• “Schizophrenic patients frequently show entanglements where they are simultaneously identified with perpetrators and their victims, especially in contexts of war and political violence.”

RELATED BLOGS
​The Lores of Life: Belonging, Balance, and Order
​The Different Roles in Constellations
Family Constellations & Bert Hellinger
What the heck is PHENOMENOLOGY?
The Hidden Wisdom of the Orders of Love
Other Guiding Principles in Constellation Work that are just as important

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