When you work with family constellations, you understand that there is a special connection between all family members. This includes and especially pertains to those family members who have been silenced, hidden, or given away.

And it goes even further: energetically, we are all connected to each other; even if we are not blood relatives, we are one because we all belong to a family, we are all born from a mother and a father, and we all know what it means to be a son or daughter. That's why we can also embody the role of a representative in a constellation for someone else.

You can read more about what it means to be a representative in my blog: What is a representative?

ALSO, UNKNOWN FAMILY MEMBERS HAVE AN IMPACT

Typically - especially if you have never experienced family constellations before - it is believed that only those family members with whom we have or had personal contact are important to us. The visible family members, in other words.

But even the invisible and unknown family members can have a significant impact on our lives. Family members we never knew and have never even heard of!

For a beautiful example, read Louise's story and how she could reconnect with her mother and grandmothers - women heavily traumatized by war - through a table constellation: Your inner mother as a key to connection, safety, and JOY

WHAT IS A FAMILY CONSCIENCE?

With family conscience, we mean, on the one hand, all memories and events related to our family history. On the other hand, it is the energy, the force that keeps a family together and seeks to maintain balance (you could also call it love). The family conscience is always and without exception seeking balance, harmony in giving and receiving.

The search for balance is, in fact, a law, a natural law, universal and unchanging; nature IS balance. If the family conscience (the flow of love) cannot find balance within one generation, it will seek it across generations. In other words, trauma continues to repeat until someone is willing to see it and heal it. Or, to put it differently, the family conscience keeps seeking love, wanting the flow of love to move and stay balanced.

TRAUMA REPEATS UNTIL SOMEONE IS WILLING TO SEE IT

So, if there are unprocessed traumas in earlier generations, such as (early) deceased children, (self)suicides, violence (war history), relationship issues, exclusions, abuse, etc., the family conscience will confront the following generations with similar problems until healing occurs. It is as if love itself says: "Hello?! You're just passing by this trauma? It's not that simple!"

The family conscience keeps knocking at your door and repeating trauma across generations until someone awakens and is willing to see, heal, mourn, and restore the connection, allowing the flow of love to move again.

WE ARE ONE: THE FAMILY CONSCIENCE OR THE RETURN TO LOVE

A family constellation is essentially nothing but a return to love. 

I am grateful for the life and work of the German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger, who observed this kind of regularity in family systems and dynamics and developed it into what we now know as the therapeutic methodology of family constellations.