I’ve been often ask by my trainees if clients who are suffering of a severe mental disease which causes a psychosis or who are schizophrenic, can be helped with family constellations . There is no short answer to this. In this blog post we try to explore the dynamic that causes mental diseases in the family system with the tools given by Bert Hellinger. This is off course not a discussion from the view-point of the mental health care and is not meant to replace an ongoing therapy.
Firstly, family constellation is a healing modality that looks not only at the individual, but at the whole family system. Bert Hellinger said, the cause for schizophrenia is always systemic and not individual. That being said, it doesn’t mean that a mental illness can be healed by healing the family system, so that it is completely gone, he only said that it makes no sense to only work with the person who is experiencing psychosis when the cause of it lays in the family system.
This is the different to classical psychology, where only the patient who is diagnosed with a mental illness is treated. And here it is also taken as a fact that Schizophrenia cannot be healed, only managed with medication. But does that not seems to be true for most diseases from the perceptive of the professional medicine practitioners, i.e. for heart disease, diabetic etc?
Family constellation is a modality that heals on a soul level: every disease (dis-ease) is the result of the soul not being ‘at ease’, which allows an energy blockage to manifest in the physical body that will lead eventually to what we call an illness or disease. When looking at a disease in a family constellation one can find the event that has caused this blockage (mostly a severe trauma) back 7 generations and lift it by finding the Order of Love for this family system and allow the souls to move towards it.
Is this also true in a case of schizophrenia? In one of the earlier videos (watch it on youtube here) you can see Bert Hellinger working with the parents of a schizophrenic child. Both parents are entangled in their own family system. The child is twist and torn and entangled with both, mother and father. This situation is like a cat biting its tail to go round and round without end. We can see this behaviour when a participant, representing a family member, is going in circles. There is no way out. This is how schizophrenia looks in a family constellation. What is the healing movement here when one family member is entangled with 2 different family members with opposing dynamics?
I have yet not seen a solution to this. Often a family constellation has to be broken up when it comes to this point, as everything is going in circles and no healing movement is taking place. But that being said, there is always a first time for everything. And who knows, maybe some day in a family constellation an unexpected movement will bring the relief from this dynamic, and a new field has opened: the healing field of psychosis. And through the connection with the morphogenetic field of family constellation facilitators this information will be available for all helpers.
And the good news is, there are no side effects of a family constellation that doesn’t have an impact on the family system. It just keeps on going with what has always been. Until one time..
Love, Maia