the healing power of family constellation work

[REGINA SEWELL]

Michael,

I'd like to put a different spin on the impact of Family Constellation work.  Before doing so, I think it's important to know that I haven't read any books on the topic and have only participated at a limited level, once in a constellation directed? faciliated? by Donna Little.  Also note that I do not know the vocabulary, so will probably use psychodrama vocabulary.  In the constellation directed by Donna, I was an auxilliary, cast as a dead person and really tapped into the sensation of not quite being able to be there becauase of the burden I faced and yet not quite wanting to leave.  At that point in my life, I was not quite suicidal but if a truck would have run over me, so much the better.  At the end of the workshop, Donna noted that it looked like I couldn't decide whether to stay or to go.  In Moreno's terms, I would call the protagonist's casting me in the role of that person "tele" and will add that along with Donna's comments, (and the miracle that I got stuck in
 a a traffic jam in Toronto with 3 hours with no where to go but inside) and realized that I really had to decide, "should I stay or should I go?"  I chose to stay and really focus on living and following my dreams.

Since then, I have participated in a couple of all day workshops lead by Andy Stuck who also trained in Europe and is also a Gestalt therapist and seems to be quite respectable in the field.  I have been both auxilliary and protagonist.  (Her approach seems to be that anyone who wants to do work gets a shot, even if there are 18 people who want to work.)  There again, it was somewhat transformative.. not so much in the auxillary role but in the protagonist role.  I will add that for me, what was transformative was more about the energy and in being able to see very basic bits of my perpetrator mirrored back to me in a way that I could feel some compassion for him.  My experience is that psychodrama is a more powerful modality for this because the words that the auxillaries tap into sometimes don't resonate at all or only slightly resonate.  

But the wierd thing is that family constellation does seem to tap into some sort of wierd energy thing.  Andy and I talked about it.. to really start to grasp the energy thing that happens you have to really start looking into the new physics and trust that that energy happens.  As a scientist, this feels a bit "woo woo" but I also know that there has been an energetic shift somehow, not  just in me but in my relationships with my family and that shift is not just a cognitive behavioral response.  Nor is it because I believe that my brother hurt me in the way that he did to save the family system.  This may well be true, but this is not a concept that I can cognitively "swallow."  I also suspect that if we attended more to group dynamics, the healing potential would be much greater because there is something very powerful that happens in the sharing process as well as in attention to the process of tele and thinking about who gets chosen for what roles and why (something tha
t Donna did attend to).   

Hope this helps in your exploration.  

Regina Sewell
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