Family Constellations: A Type Of (pseudo)psychological Therapy
The family constellations They are a type of therapeutic dynamic that is having a great boom in recent times. This psychotherapeutic process is carried out in a group and seeks to awaken the feelings and emotions that we have latent in our unconscious.
The theoretical support of family constellations is rather questionable.. They usually base this practice on the fact that people live with certain unconscious emotional conflicts that we have not known how to resolve throughout our lives. This unconscious burden can lead us to experience pain and other emotional problems, without us being able to get rid of the cause of the problem. These internal conflicts can lead to behavioral problems and be in permanent dispute with certain people around us.
Family constellations: family introspection therapy
But what exactly do the dynamics of family constellations consist of? The dynamic is carried out with several people gathered in the same room. They are people who do not have any family ties between them and who want to know themselves better and, perhaps, overcome some family and interpersonal conflicts that have been going on for years.
We must make a small clarification: although family constellations are carried out in a group, it is not considered a typical group therapy, since there are important methodological differences with respect to them.
The promoter of the constellation method is the psychologist, pedagogue and priest of the Catholic Church Bert Hellinger. This German developed the bases of family constellations in the 90s, and is considered the founder and its main author.
During his professional career of more than half a century, Hellinger researched, treated and collected data on the families he helped. He discovered that most people unconsciously reproduce patterns and dynamics within our family. They are patterns that, very frequently, lead us to have bad psychological experiences: anxiety, anger, guilt, contempt, isolation… In addition, we may be suffering from certain disorders as a result of our relationship with family members, such as alcoholism or emotional dependence.
Hellinger reflects and says that, as children, we are likely to sacrifice our own emotional balance to remedy the emotional problems of our parents or other close relatives. According to Hellinger, Family constellations can help discover and reinterpret these unconscious patterns so that we are able to live and relate in a healthier, more balanced and happier way.
In summary, the objective of family constellations is to detect and discover the unconscious dynamics of each family and the attitudes and behaviors that occur among its members. Through experimentation on siteparticipants in these dynamics can inspect their hidden feelings regarding their family members, being an opportunity to find solutions to these latent conflicts.
Family constellation sessions: how are they carried out?
So, How exactly do family constellations work? In a designated room, several people meet (normally between 5 and 12), including the constellator, who acts as a therapist and organizes the dynamics.
Sessions usually last several hours. In each workshop, 4 to 7 people are constellated, as the therapist sees fit based on the family they wish to represent in the dynamic. Each of the participants has a turn to constellate their own family, for one hour.
During the time in which a constellation passes, the rest of the participants stage and represent the unconscious experiences of the person who is carrying out the therapy. After each turn there is a pause of a quarter of an hour to take a breath and continue with the next person. In this way, the therapeutic dynamic is chained and each participant carries out their own personal therapy and participates in the therapy of the other attendees.
The people who participate in the dynamic do not have to know the characteristics or the theories on which this type of therapy is based. The way of working is totally experiential, although the therapist imposes a series of essential methodological elements. All attendees carry out their own therapy, but They also benefit from experiencing all the roles representing the family members of the other participants.and drawing similarities with their own personal and family stories.
A therapy… useful? More like pseudoscience…
The dynamics that develop in family constellations do not have any scientific endorsement. In fact, this practice is frequently related to pseudoscience and superstition. It’s one of the fashions new age that have acquired relevance among spiritual and pseudopsychological circles.
In any case, here we will limit ourselves to describing, or rather echoing, all the possible applications of this type of therapy based on the testimony of Hellinger and other prominent defenders of this therapeutic practice.
Family constellation therapists often point out that this type of therapy is useful for treating systemic issues within the family. It can help resolve entrenched conflicts and reinterpret family relationships.and by extension to find a new meaning in life.
Conflicts that are usually treated through this therapy
One more among existential therapies
existential therapies are based on a phenomenological vision of the human psycheand therefore the psychological conflicts that we suffer. The dynamics of existential therapies leave the therapist in the background, and focus on allowing the patient to carry out deep introspection.
This allows the person to detect latent conflicts and try to solve them, usually through reinterpretation and reconciliation with certain people and events from the past. However, its scientific basis is non-existent, so since Psychology and Mind We must warn that participating in this type of sessions can be useless and even harmful.
