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What Is Systemic Family Constellations?

Systemic Family Constellations is a powerful experiential approach for exploring personal, relational, and ancestral dynamics. Developed by psychotherapist Bert Hellinger and colleagues, this solution-focused method examines how unresolved experiences, unconscious loyalties, and systemic entanglements within families can influence our lives in the present.

The work attends to patterns that are often felt rather than consciously known, including transgenerational trauma and relational imbalances. By bringing attention to what has been excluded, overlooked, or carried out of love, constellations allow hidden dynamics to come into view and support movement towards greater clarity, balance, and resolution.

Constellations access what is sometimes referred to as the systemic field (also described within the constellation tradition as the ‘knowing field’) — a relational field that holds information beyond individual memory or personal story. By working within this field, participants are able to sense and respond to dynamics that are usually hidden from conscious awareness. This makes constellation work particularly helpful for issues that feel entrenched, confusing, or resistant to change through talk-based approaches alone.

Constellation work is guided by principles referred to as the Orders of Love — including belonging, place, hierarchy of time and space, and balance of exchange. When these systemic principles are disrupted, difficulties may echo across generations. When they are acknowledged and restored, individuals often experience relief, reconnection, and a sense of flow.

These principles echo relational worldviews found in many indigenous cultures — including those Hellinger encountered during his time living among the Zulu people in South Africa — where the living, the dead, and those yet to come remain in active relationship, and where ancestry, belonging, and place within the family and community are deeply held values.

Engaging body, emotion, and awareness alongside reflection, constellations help shift entrenched patterns, release burdens that do not belong to the individual, and open new possibilities for relating to life with greater steadiness and vitality.

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