Family Constellations West

Mary Johns Blackinton, great grandmother

March 3, 2009

Welcome to Family Constellations West.

Since being introduced to Family Constellations in 1998, I have been compelled by the depth, mystery, and reliability of this approach. My experience has been that this work finds us, rather than we find it.

This work was developed and introduced by Germany’s Bert Hellinger over thirty years ago. It has significantly contributed to healing for descendants of the Holocaust. At the peak of its’ popularity in Europe, audiences of several hundred people gathered together to experience this work’s healing effects for individuals, families, and social groups.

Living with African Zulu tribes was an important context for the development of this approach. Family constellations are innovative, but its roots are ancient. We are all in a movement of honoring that tribal wisdom came first; Western institutions and teachings came second.

In the United States, constellations offer us great insight and healing around our immigration experience, history of First Nations’ genocide, and slavery. The effects of these historical events – the guilt, suffering, and grief -- live on in our families and broader culture. This approach shows us how descendants can honor the past without carrying on the trauma which has been frozen in our souls.

Adedunmola Adio-Moses and her ancestors

Family Constellations offer us wisdom about the depth of our loyalty to family functioning like no other approach from western culture. While each family has its own story that makes it unique, there are universal truths that connect us to one another. By restoring balance in our ancestral maps, our personal suffering and unhappiness can be transformed into a force for healing. Hellinger offers us a bridge to these understandings about family universal truths.

In our culture that so deeply values self-reliance, yet experiences such distraction, compulsivity, isolation, and disassociation, this approach shows us that there is simply no replacement for ancestral connection, honoring truth, and acknowledging what is.

Current fascination with DNA testing and genealogy may reflect this deeper longing for connection with our ancestors. Family is in our DNA. They are also in our soul. We carry in us, in our bodies, the whole of our families. Our parents, our grandparents, our great-grandparents, our great great grandparents, and so on, and so on, and so on.

This work is not about trying to change or fix anything. It’s also not about blaming or pathologizing. Its’ power and depth lie in simply honoring what is, especially in those places of loss, pain, or tragedy which have remained unacknowledged. When we do so, love and life can flow more freely in individuals and families, and our rightful place of belonging is restored.

There is much that wants to be honored and integrated in us as individuals and in our families. Not only have we been longing for restored relationship with our ancestors, but they have been waiting for us.

Our contemporary culture names a website’s first presence a “homepage”. I hope that you'll join me in exploring how we can experience these healing truths as a true homecoming with our ancestral maps.

If we listen together, we can help each other hear the Ones Who Came Before Us whisper, “Welcome Home.”

Lisa Iversen, MSW, LCSW

Orders of Love photograph by kind permission of the Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, WA
Web Site Design and all other photographs unless otherwise noted : © Sarah Clarke
Content: © 2003-2007 Lisa Iversen