Reports from workshop participants
I suppose I’ve taken part in half a dozen Family Constellation workshops now, though it’s hard to remember exactly: for some reason they seem to belong in some alternative universe and when I return to daily life I find myself forgetting much of what has taken place.
But not everything.
The first scene: though my real-life mother (who died in 1968) was a slender blonde from London, my mother in this constellation was, a lady from Mauritius, probably less than half my age. She was delivering a verbal flaying to the person representing the teenage me, crouched in misery and tears in a whimpering slump. Incredible; the words and the stance from the woman from Mauritius were precisely my mother’s. But from where? Who told her? Equally, the person representing me was responding – in a heightened, dramatic way – with exactly the feelings I suddenly remembered. A genuine epiphany. I sat on the sidelines entranced, hardly able to believe the rightness of what these two pulled out of the bag. It was more than real, more than surreal, and tears poured down my face. But they were good tears. I’m grateful to them both for putting full weight into the tableau they enacted for me. Good sorts, as I think we tend to be in such a palpably benevolent psychic environment.
At another workshop, I watched ‘myself’ and ‘my father’, who died when I was 12 (and whose own father died when he was two) desperately in need of masculine support. (Hm, that’s two broken men, said the leader. Bracing language is definitely part of the deal). She called me back into the constellation to be myself. She gathered two men from the group to be my grandfather and great-grandfather. As they took their places behind me and my dad, the sense of cavalry-to-the-rescue relief was massive and fundamental. Strength, the sense of a long-hidden family backbone, flooded in. How much development such resolutions have produced in my day-to-day life is probably not for me to say, but I suspect quite a lot, probably at a deeper level than I ordinarily live. I do know that the relationship between my brother and myself improved enormously after a constellation in which he figured.
My own constellations have amazed and moved me. Equally, being a representative in other people’s is wonderful: it’s great to feel such deep and (temporarily) authentic emotions, to get such a close and privileged experience of what goes on behind the secret doors of other people’s lives. In one particular constellation, I was chosen to represent, with a lot of apprehension – why did she choose me? – a father who had had regular, violent sex with his young daughter. On the face of it, a monster. But behind the facade, as it turned out, was a terrified emotional starveling. How often in life do you get a chance to be a man like that? Valuable insights for me and the group; and more moving was to see the abused girl – now a grown woman – enter the constellation and make at last some kind of atonement with a father that she of course could not help loving. I never saw her after, don’t know how she got on, but in the context of the group she was visibly transformed, transfigured.
After such heavy stuff, I should also say there are times when you’re standing up representing some guy in Texas who may not even have existed, bored out of your mind, feet aching, feeling zilch. Sometimes you want to make a dash for fresh air, suffocating, but that’s quite possibly in keeping with the person you’re representing. Sometimes constellations simply don’t work out. Sometimes the air is leaden and it’s all very hard work – particularly for the facilitator, and I have to pay tribute here to the extraordinary insight and tenacity I’ve seen time and time again from Barbara Morgan as she tries to get things unstuck. Just remembering who everyone in a constellation is demands mental energy of a high order, especially at the end of the second day. I suppose for this reason it’s no bad thing that when a constellation is over, slate wiped clean, it is returned to the realm of such things under the waves. Or wherever it is.
There are hysterically funny bits too. I remember a very subdued young immigrant woman saying in a small voice that she was forever torn between this and that, always indecisive then unhappily impulsive. Her heart’s desire was to not be. The facilitator thought for a while and then got up and chose two people from the group. OK, she said to the first, you can be England, and you, to the other, a rather pale girl, you can be India . Gales of laughter, total collapse. It’s hard to convey on paper just how funny it was. But still the constellation, the real woman finally sitting at the feet of India and England grinning like a fool, worked out, her two halves back on terms.
When lots of people are all pouring their attention and energy into such a supercharged space, strange currents and eddies are certain, all part of the general thing. The magic is undeniable and for me it’s priceless. There’s the additional bonus that you don’t have to be schooled in any theoretical or doctrinal background in order to feel the benefit and play a full part. You don’t have to sign up for any bullshit superstructure, you don’t have to ‘believe’. You just have to be there and willing. It’s as if the design of the thing fits some very deep and universal matrix, some structure that is somehow already there and waiting to be activated.
So – if this is being read by anybody who isn’t sure whether or not to get involved I just say go on, do it. Come on down to a magic theatre where, unlike Hermann Hesse’s, the price of entry is not just your mind. You need a body too.
Rick Sanders, Caucasian male, aged 56. Married, two daughters, writer and musician
21/5/2002