What is constellation work, and
how does it serve reconciliation?

Constellations are a practice that, in its advanced form, has been developed by the german philosopher Bert Hellinger. In the beginning, he applied constellations in the frame of family therapy.

Participants in constellation seminars come forward with their items, usually problems in couple relationship, family, or health problems. Then the facilitator choses others whom he denominates as “the father” and “the son”, for instance. These representatives get no information about the real father and son or. Still, inwardly these representatives sense emotions or physical sensations or a knowing that does not belong to them personally but to the other person they represent.

We call this the representative phenomenon. To experience that, no particular giftednes is needed, no courses of instruction. Everybody can experience himself that he can connect to any other person, group, or animals on a spiritual level. And such experience leads the whole of constellation work beyond the borders of conventional therapy.

By doing constellations we experience again and again, that seemingly personal problems most times have to do with our ancestors, but also the great historical flows.

We remember a constellation for a man of greek origin who is now living in Germany. His problem was, that recurrently we found himself taken by rage even at the slightest reason, and he tended to get violent. His representative in the constellation had the suggestion that he was a child standing among a lot of dead people laying scattered around him. He felt the urge to bury all these dead and he had to put things to order – but he was just a child.

Later we were told that the greek home village of that man many decades ago had been raided by bulgarian soldiers who massacred a great lot of the village’s population. Like this, the spiritual energies of historic events that happened many years ago, sometimes centuries ago, have their effects on the life of people who are living today, unaware of such connections.

How can constellations cause effects towards reconciliation and peace? Generally, they make the forgotten victims and their suffering visible. So they finally are recognized and observably they come to rest. However to get there, the constellator has to abstain from taking party in any way.

Setting up groups of victims and perpetrators we often see that both groups are propelled by a very similar energy. Both appear as parts of a greater movement or flow. As Hellinger puts it, both are “taken into service by a higher force”. This movement now apprehends also the representatives in the constellation, and in the end it takes them all onto another level of consciousness. Even those who recognized each other as sworn enemies before, they now recognize each other as equal.

Thomas Gehrmann

Download as PDF: 2 On Constellation Work