Family Constellations:

How our ancestors shape our future

Family Constellations helps to make sense of the legacy previous generations leave for us: both the traumas and the gifts that pass on too. Growing up I had gradually become aware of my “family” being a bit different from those around me. I also became aware that despite sometimes talking about my family, those differences didn’t change. I felt different from others and sometimes even behaved and reacted differently. I grew up, studied and went into the world as an adult who functioned well and was pretty successful. But something was missing. I felt as if I was watching life from the sideline, rather than fully participating in it.

Family Constellations Therapy

In 2001, I was introduced to Family Constellations Therapy. A friend encouraged me to look for Family Constellations Workshops and I signed up to one locally. It was a two-day event and huge – there were about 30 participants. I very nearly didn’t take part, and I was finally given space to do my own piece of work right at the end. I experienced an unusual sense of peace afterwards.

What Happens in a Family Constellation?

In a Family Constellation, an “issue holder” is invited to say a little about the issue they want to explore. The exploration is done through the lens of a family system – typically grandparents, parents and children. The facilitator invites the “issue holder” to choose from amongst the whole group, individuals to represent key family members, and at times will ask these family representatives to repeat “healing sentences”. The work when done with care, feels utterly safe.

I talked to my sister about my experience, and it turned out that quite independently and about a year earlier – she had also taken part in a Family Constellations Workshop – and to our surprise – her piece of work had been uncannily similar to mine and had ultimately come to the same conclusion as mine.

For a family that didn’t really talk to each other about feelings or much else – our personal Family Constellations reflected something that both of us had inherited from the same ancestors.

How Might a Family Constellation Help?

A few years later I was drawn to look again for Family Constellations Workshops, and I signed up to do another one – this time with a different facilitator. Suddenly everything seemed to connect and back in the outside real world, there were huge shifts quite quickly in the way my mother communicated with me, and in how I responded to her. My feelings began to change – instead of the persistent sense of distance and sometimes anger I had felt growing up, I began to see that my parents and before them my grandparents, had all been entangled in the same web of silence. They too had been unable to feel much.

It was as if each generation was cut off from the next. Traumatic events had taken place, but each generation had been too close to the trauma to acknowledge and process what had taken place, so the grief had been simply passed down the line and effectively buried. This inherited trauma was playing havoc with future generations of one family. In fact, “scientists working in the emerging field of epigenetics have identified the mechanism that allows lived experience and acquired knowledge to be passed on within one generation, by altering the shape of a particular gene”

The big idea: can you inherit memories from your ancestors? “The science of epigenetics suggests we can pass on trauma – but trust and compassion too….” and “… the more we learn about how our body and mind work together to shape our experience, the more we can see that our life story is woven into our biology. It’s not just our body that keeps the score but our very genes.”

Family Constellations and Emotions

One day - having experienced the end of a significant relationship and the grief that unfolded for me - I sat in a Family Constellations Workshop and the floodgates opened. The traumatic events that had engulfed my grandparents’ generation but had never been fully acknowledged, came to be represented within the group and the tears poured from one generation to another, from one representative to another.

As the tears flowed, each of the representatives in turn described an “opening up” and they were moved to connect with others in my family system. The tears finally reached me. I was invited to stand in the place of my own “representative” and I too cried. I realised that I was crying for all those who came before me in my family but who had never found the tears themselves.

Family Constellations and Healing sentences

Working in a group, with others representing me and other key members of my family, allowed me to simply watch. In Family Constellations, the facilitator invites the representatives to repeat Family Constellations Healing Sentences. When the sentences “land” safely and feel just right to the representative being asked to repeat them, the impact often produces an emotional movement towards another representative or towards “life”. The feelings and movements were all there and came out in ways that did not surprise me at all. But had I been asked to express these deeply buried feelings, I would have struggled to identify them at all.

The effect of working in a safely held space with a group of strangers all working in my service, was that unacknowledged traumatic and dramatic events that had taken place in earlier generations of my family were brought out in the open and acknowledged emotionally, perhaps for the first time.

Periodically over the next few years I signed up for more Constellation Therapy sessions. In some Family Constellations Workshops I was touched emotionally in ways I had not experienced before. In some I could feel myself fill up with love and joy. In others, the representatives felt the emotions for me. Some produced a more cathartic impact on me than others – but each one brought me new knowledge, better understanding or emotional processing and release in ways that simply talking had never achieved. With each emotional release came a lightening of my spirit.

I had finally found a way to bring the emotional material, which was sitting deep at the core of me, to the surface, and once there my emotional inheritance could be put to rest with care. With each of these experiences I could step into my own life with more ease.

Being a Representative in a Constellation

With my own emotional release, came a shift in what I was being asked to represent for others during Family Constellations. Where I had previously tended to be asked to represent the “unacknowledged”, I was now being asked to represent people who had been more fully alive in life. The energy I was now carrying was changing. I was no longer sitting on the sideline watching life go by.

Bert Hellinger - Recommended Book

Bert Hellinger was the father of Family Constellations Therapy. He was ordained as a priest and later trained as a family therapist. His work and theory were developed in Africa where he worked most of his life. There are many Bert Hellinger books available to read but perhaps the most instructive one is Love’s Hidden Symmetry: what makes love work in relationships.

But as in my experience of being “stuck in my head” – and the challenge of accessing my emotional life, it was not reading the books that helped me – it has always been the experiential work that has brought emotional movement and release.

Healing Family Constellations

In 2017, with a change of direction in my working life I had the chance and space to train as a facilitator myself in Family Constellations. I now work with individuals and with groups.

Click here to book a one to one session with me

https://www.abiberger.com/book-a-consultation

Upcoming events

Here’s a link to my upcoming groups

https://www.abiberger.com/events-2025

With groups, I enjoy working with a colleague Rose C Jiggens, and together we co-create Family Constellations https://trueselfsystems.com/therapy-east-london/.

We specialise in creating small, safe and intimate Family Constellations Workshops and we enjoy exploring issues that may arise from family systems going back several generations. We have found each other by taking very different roads, but we respect the shared values of consent, respect and safety in our work.

More Recommended Reading:

It didn’t start with you: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle by Mark Wolynn.

The Body keeps the score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk