Difference between PD and Constellation work

Fri Mar 16 06:05:38 CDT 2007

Dear Barnett,
You don´t know me and it´s the first time I´m writing here. I´m from Brazil, São Paulo. I read your email and could feel your suffering. I´ve learned about bipolar disorder as a Family Psychotherapist using the Psychodrama as reference method for 5 years researching the family relationship  and bipolar disorder (it was a research work that I still didn´t finished), and later learning how to recognize bipolar disorder in my own relatives.
 What I could understand until now is: the  specialized communities work can help a lot, but essentially the family needs a pedagogic and psychotherapic support, learning to recognize symptoms, managing situations and interpersonal relations can cause bipolar episodes.
There is a professional (he is not Psychodramatist) in USA  specialized in bipolar disorder, his name is David Miklowitz. he and Michael Goldstein wrote a book entitled: "Bipolar Disorder: a family focused treatment".
I hope that information can help your son, you and your family.
Good luck,
Luis Russo

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: BARNETT WEISS 
  To: list at grouptalkweb.org 
  Sent: Friday, March 16, 2007 1:31 PM
  Subject: Difference between PD and Constellation work

  Dear Michael:
  First let me thank you for the beautiful heart felt response to my request similar to that of Ron Anderson's.  This kind of sharing personal wounds and pain is so powerful for me. It is the kind of thing that we all know from well run sharing sessions after a pd and it is probably the most powerful healing aspect of psychodrama. It is after all why we do it in groups and is part of the vision that JL had of having pd forums in every community. 

  So here are some of my preliminary thoughts about PD and Constellation work having been involved in around 20 constellations with Susy Tucker and John L. Payne and having read all of John's books and some of the papers on the Internet from various constellation practitioners and trainers. 

  In my view, pd usually is ab-reactive with role training being the main aspect of healing.  To my mind, this is insufficient for deep healing and leads too often to some relief and even some opening in the energy field for the person or persons involved and is still incomplete and tends to justify everyone's story rather than move it to the next level of the meta community to which we all belong. 
  Most pd directors whose sessions I have witnessed including JL and Zerka do not often get to the next stage that the orders of love addresses. In empty chair portions of pds or empty chair sessions, I have seen Zerka and some few others move to that level often and because of her  and their vast life and pd experience, they had available so many sentences which I imagine were just there for them and not cataloged as many of the healing sentences have been in constellation work. I encourage people to research these and have them available for use in pds. 
  To continue re orders of love;  no matter how mean spirited cruel or, even in someone's view, evil a perpetrator is, at a deep level, they are loved by and love their parents and siblings and grandparents and on and on. This needs to be concretely experienced and in the context of a constellation it happens and healing sentences, that are common sense when you review them, said at the right moment are exactly that; they are the words we all long to hear from those we long to hear them from and to hear them said to others in our extended and ancestral social atom.  This allows for a completely corrective experience which can reorganize our internal beliefs. It allows for true forgiveness and the process of achieving wholeness for the protagonist and all those participating. If your father or mother raped you for example and you are not able to forgive them in a meaningful way and thank them for your existence, then some part of you will remain subject to an open wound and hate and you will never be able to totally own yourself. Without them, you would not exist and on and on through the totality of your ancestors back to Africa for us all. 

  Another central aspect is what is called the "knowing field" which everyone experiences in constellation work well done. This process brings in counter spontaneity as well as the blessing of connectedness between us all. It also gets away from simply retelling our story which is often what happens in psychotherapy of every kind where we go to get acknowledgment of the rightness of our story.  It often as John Payne says comes down to being right or having peace and love in your life.  Discovering that a total stranger can bring forth specific details of a loved one or an essential adversary without having been instructed or modeled in a reversing role ritual is a healing of itself.  We are all so connected.  In a way, it is a confirmation directly in experience of some of what Jung spoke about as the collective unconscious.   

  In addition there is such a wide range of healing that takes place in those who are participating in the protagonists constellation that goes beyond that achieved usually in the process of being an auxiliary ego even when you are deep into that role in a pd and have the chance to share your experience afterward.  Partially that is because those healing sentences do not get said spontaneously in pds anywhere near as regularly as they might be useful. In constellation work, they are supplied at those right times and make all the difference. I think that very experienced PD directors with flexible well trained auxiliaries could incorporate much of the healing sentences and use the knowing field more there as well. After I am far more experienced in learning about constellation work, I intend to write a paper about my thoughts in all of this. 

  I look forward to the promised paper by Ron and Karen in the near future. 
  Blessings and again thanks to all. Bud
  Indigo9142 at aol.com wrote:
    Bud -

    Thanks for your post. It's remarkable, isn't it, knowing what we each carry in our hearts and that we are still able to move through the day with love and (some semblance) of peace?

    My 15 year old daughter, who has survived a diagnosis of terminal liver cancer and a subsequent liver transplant, drug addiction, self-mutilation and years of severe anxiety and depression related to the PTSD from her incredible medical history, is (it seems) about to be diagnosed as bipolar. What a relief and what a sadness...to finally have psychiatric help from someone who truly gets it (after a decade of searching) and also to have the knowledge of what this diagnosis reflects - the "brilliant madness" of it. As a parent, I have learned over the years that I cannot keep my child alive, no matter how deeply I love her, no matter what a skilled advocate I might be, no matter how much (or who) I know. It seems, as you appear to know only too well, that the challenge for each of us, our children included, is to hold what we are given with open, cupped hands, finding the ways in which the grief and loss, fear and despair, can be redeemed; turned into something fragile and beautiful, in its own way.

    I'm interested, for my own sake, in the responses you're getting. And I am particularly curious about the difference between psychodramatic work and "constellation work" that was indicated in a recent response to you. Can someone clarify this for me?

    My thoughts are with you.

    Michael Kennedy

    "I had the idea that the world's so full of pain, it must sometimes make a kind of singing"....Robert Haas

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  Barnett J. Weiss, MA, LCSW
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