I’ll admit it took awhile for the penny to drop on this one. A long drop with gentle thud at the end. Even my brilliant brain couldn’t piece together the obvious quickly right up until it did. Did I ever tell you that the Systemic Informs the personal and the personal Informs the Systemic. It seemed highly impersonal that Family Constellations are also know as Systemic Constellations and I didn’t fully recognise the connection until much later on. To this day I have never done a Corporate Systemic Constellation. I feel to do so might risk my own suicide. Somebody once asked me if I might consider doing corporate “Wellbeing Workshops”. To this day if I was ever to do such a thing I’d take the fee and then give everyone the afternoon off. Like fuck them, fuck corporate power. Fuck the System. LOL. I don’t get triggered much I promise.
Anyways so yes systemic constellations are a way to find out exactly how fucked up your world is. The way I do them is entirely centered around self. They’re more like an ‘Emotional Map’ than a standard constellation and god only knows how my work has morphed over COVID. I barely do floor maps anymore and it seems to deepen my clients experience in much the same way.
I’m a way ahead of myself here. I think this is supposed to be some kind of useful and directive explanation of a systemic constellation. Let me back track…
A Systemic Constellation is a process used to understand either family or system dynamic and how they impact on the individuals involved. The process was appropriated by Bert Hellinger from IsiZulu cultural healing practices. The process relies on people taking on the varying roles of a family system and playing them out as part of a catharsis healing that allows us to alter patterns and dynamics within the family system. It allows for the pre-verbal and unseen thinking of family members to be explored in non-threatening ways.
As I have said, the way I work with this process is largely through creating an emotional map of a client’s interior innerscape to unlock relational aspects of their emotional field. It’s really cool. I use bits of paper and it’s really easy. What is also really cool is that you get to see how you feel in a physical map that’s all laid out on the floor. You also tend to realise that you have complete control over your feelings and indeed what you feel and how you think. That you have the power to break the pattern and indeed the cycles within your own behaviour and the family system. That you can become and observer of your feeling that you don’t have to embody them. It’s a lot easier said than done though. It takes practice, before practice comes awareness and that is what Systemic Constellations are all about.
There are loads of different methods as to how to do a family constellation or indeed a systemic constellation is done. Emotional Mapping is the method that works best for me and my trauma-informed practice. What I love about Emotional Mapping most is that it is entirely fluid and allows you to express and feel fully. It also allows for a deep personalisation of the process especially when I work with creative practitioners and healers. (yes I work with healers) It’s really cool. What I often find by the end of an Emotional Map is that creative practitioners have created the basis for a body of work or even created a body of work. This is either through a collection of their words and/or a visualization of what has arisen while working with me.
Healers also get deepening insights into their own healing practices. As my sessions often form a fusion healing unique processes that may only occur through healing collaborations in a singular time in space of these sessions.
Guided entirely by intuition very little of what I do is replicable. Very little of what I do is replicable because it is centered around your own very unique experience of both trauma, healing and self-expression. Very recently I was described as a Master of Soul Retrieval and I have to say I loved that description of my work.
From a young age, I have always considered my life to be a circle that I operate from the centre of. This has informed a lot of what I do and how I behave in the world. Even before I became a Life Coach. You can imagine my delight and surprise that when I started out on my coaching journey, that one of the first tools that I came across was something called a coaching wheel. Coaching wheels help people learn and assess what is happening in their life. That by assessing your life as a circle can allow you to get an incredible overview of what was actually going on in your psyche.