The healing power of family constellations

The following article of mine about family constellations has appeared in the Dutch Online Magazine 'The Optimist' of July-August 2019: The healing power of Family ConstellationOsho: “It is what all the great doctors of the world know: their medicines are not capable of giving you health. The power of healing is within you. All they can do is remove the obstacles so that the power of healing begins to flow.” Osho, The New Dawn #8 Eight years ago, for author and physician Modita van Zummeren Family Constellations crossed her path during her search for the essence of healing from within. It was, and still is, revolutionary in its essence. She explains why.

“Great is the disillusionment during my medical studies to notice that as a doctor I do not know the cause of any disease. What is labelled as a cause is only the description of that which is found at the onset of such a disease. It says nothing about what is behind it. Why does this person get sick and another who has been exposed to the same factors does not? Family constellations has broadened my field of view to something much larger than the individual and extending to the connection with many generations that have lived before us. Our health appears to be directly related to our family history and to the history of the people we belong to.

Family constellations is a working method and a way of looking, which was discovered, or rather found by Bert Hellinger. He found that we lose touch with the order and harmony of existence, when we take a wrong role in our family system or when we want to carry something that belongs to someone else in our family. I myself carried the pain of my mother.

This happens in a completely unconscious way; it remains unknown until it is seen in a family constellation. The only thing you notice is that it starts to wreak havoc in your daily life: you can't get into relationships or you lose money all the time, you want to die without knowing why, or you keep getting accidents or get seriously ill again and again. Or you behave excessively aggressively, without being able to find a reason for it.

When someone in the system is not seen - for example there is never any talk about a child who died early, an aborted child, or someone who killed another person or took another's life is kept silent - then someone from a later generation will start representing this person. For example, by wanting to die without knowing why or by getting a serious illness. Or by becoming a criminal to expose a murderer from a previous generation.

The person she chooses to represent her grandfather is looking at the ground. The person who facilitates the constellation asks a number of people to lie on the floor in front of the grandfather. They represent the Jews who died. Opposite these dead people, the people are lined up who represent the Nazis.

Transcending

The representatives of the dead Jews are now visibly relaxing. Then the facilitator asks the representatives of the Jews and Nazis to face each other and look into each other's eyes. They look at each other for a long, long time and then: slowly, very slowly, the victims move towards the perpetrators and finally they fall into each other's arms, crying.

Healing power Family constellations do not always provide healing in the sense of curing a disease or preventing death. They also provide healing on a completely different level: the ability to peacefully cope with the illness or the prospect of death and the feeling of being whole. This is also the beauty: it is not about a value judgment regarding illness or death; it is about the place of sickness and death within the whole of life, as part of the soul of which we are all a part. It is healing on a level that cannot be achieved with drugs.”