About Constellation Work
A bit of history
Constellations were shepherded into being by a German thinker, Bert Hellinger. He worked closely with the Zulu people in South Africa for many years and saw their living relationship with their ancestors. He also studied European and North American therapies and integrated his own discoveries into them. His insight is deep and startlingly original. Although he died in September 2019, the work he created continues and is evolving.
What the work means to the people who do it
Constellation work has been a significant gift to anyone who’s discovered it. For me (and other people I’ve worked with), it is an unprecedented way to resolve hard personal issues—a kind of resolution that is not easy to come by.
Hellinger said that this work is on the level of the soul. Beyond the fact that this work helps us solve critical issues, it also changes the way we look at life and death. It offers us a way to be less blind and stuck in our lives.
This work is mysterious but somehow also familiar
Constellation work is tough to explain, but you recognize it when you see it, as if it’s a language you already speak. Although they are mysterious, constellations express some universal human function.
What kind of issues would you use this work for?
A constellation is an incredibly flexible tool—so the short answer is that you can work on any question that’s important to you. As you would expect, people often work on relationships, emotional struggles, or mental and physical health issues—because those issues can connect to family patterns. Looking at practical questions like money or direction in life is also common. And you can do constellations for organizations or businesses, to examine key questions they face.
Why this work matters
Constellations give us a new language that allows our inner lives to speak. This brings great relief, but more importantly, it allows inner suffering to move or resolve. It is a completely astonishing tool—almost nothing else I’ve found has as much transformative power.
“The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.”
— Carl Jung
What is Representing?
When the “client” explains their question, we talk about it until we find the heart of the matter. Then, we “set up” their question. That means they choose a person (if they’re working in a group) or an object (if they’re doing an individual constellation) to represent each part of the problem. The representatives could be a parent, child, or partner, or something abstract, like an addiction.
Each representative gets an inner sense of how to relate to others in the constellation. This is the mysterious, significant thing about this work—the representatives speak or move on behalf of the person or thing they represent. No one understands what that phenomenon is, but it is beautiful, consistent, and compelling. I always feel reverence in the face of it.
Any person can represent—I’ve never met anyone who can’t. It’s part of an innate capacity we all have. Representing is a tremendous service to the person for whom you do it—and it’s also incredibly healing and interesting. If we work one-on-one rather than with a group, you choose objects, and they show the qualities of what they represent in a surprisingly precise way.
In a workshop setting, this is shared healing
When we work in a group, this work is deeply shared and collaborative. When one person works on an issue, it touches everyone. There’s almost always a surprisingly deep sense of harmony with others in the room (which is part of the healing power of this work).
Choosing a Practitioner
Take some care finding the right person to do this work with. It’s deep work and practitioners do it quite differently. It’s important that the practitioner be a good fit for you—and I don’t mind if I’m not the right person. You can often ask for a phone conversation to help you decide if you want to work with someone.
“It seems to me that people’s private and personal lives have never mattered as they do now. It is a matter of extreme urgency. When we have lived out our private and personal problems, we can turn to the next, the collective step. Then it will be easy, but before it will not even be possible.”
— Ingaret Giffard on the importance of doing our own personal work.