People who have attended Family Constellation workshops might wonder if a Family Constellation is as effective online as in person. Today, we’ll explore how Family Constellation generally works and evaluate its potency online.
The short answer is yes, Family Constellation works fantastic online and offers unique advantages over in-person sessions. Let’s delve into the reasons behind this conclusion in this blog post.
First, we go back to the roots of Family Constellation: In the 1980s, Bert Hellinger, a psychotherapist and former Catholic priest in Germany, began experimenting with supervision groups of therapists. They gathered in workshops to discuss challenging client cases. During these gatherings, participating therapists sat in a circle. Hellinger guided them to understand their client’s issues by placing representatives inside the circle to visualise the family dynamics related to the cases.
As the representatives stood in for family members, they began to sense emotions and felt compelled to move and speak, addressing specific individuals within the circle. This process often led to a sense of relief for the client being represented. Therapists reported after the workshop improvements in their clients’ issues. From these experiences, Hellinger developed Family Constellations and his groundbreaking ‘Orders of Love.’
Over time, Hellinger extended these in-person events to a broader audience beyond therapists. He facilitated Family Constellations for all participants, using representatives to uncover Family System dynamics to help them find relief from any issue they have suffered.
In the past 40 years, this approach has spread globally, with trained facilitators offering Family Constellation workshops for various issues, including depression, financial problems, infertility, relationship conflicts, and health concerns. Health practitioners, systemic coaches, and therapists have also integrated Family Constellation into their individual client work. In these one-on-one sessions, objects are used to represent family members, and remarkably, this method produces similar results to using human representatives. The objects appear to ‘communicate’ by expressing emotions, gestures, and movements necessary to restore the Flow of Love within the Family System.
Then, in 2020, the world changed dramatically due to the pandemic. People found themselves isolated at home, unable to attend in-person events, but still – and more than ever – in need of support. During this time, Family Constellation VIRTUAL was born to offer worldwide the soul-healing modality of Family Constellation without the necessity to leave the house.
We started by gathering a group of clients and friends, all locked up at home in different places, countries and time zones and scheduling a Zoom meeting to see if Family Constellations would work online. To our surprise, it was so powerful and created such amazing results that I started to look deeper into the difference between in-person and online Family Constellations. I compared the in-person and the online Family Constellations and found many reasons why Family Constellation works even better online. Here are just 7 of those reasons that make a strong case for virtual workshops and online sessions:
- The participants are less self-conscious when staying in the comfort and security of their own homes and don’t need to get physically close to strangers.
- They save money by not spending it on travelling and accommodation to a location where a family constellation workshop or one-on-one service is offered.
- Individuals who live remotely, are physically immobile or have to attend to children or animals can now also benefit from Family Constellations, which they couldn’t before as they couldn’t travel to an in-person event.
- The facilitator can offer a more frequent schedule for the events without taking time off from their daily routine to organise, travel and facilitate full-day workshops away from home, making it more flexible to participate in any of these events at a convenient time.
- At virtual Family Constellation workshops, people from different countries, cultures and belief systems participate, sharing their unique family history, customs or religions, and the representatives can resonate with and experience them for the first time – a highly valued opportunity to broaden the perspective and foster compassion for different cultures.
- The Morphogenetic Field (the informing field) can be accessed anytime from anywhere; therefore, the participants can easily access it from home, sitting at their computer or device: it makes no difference where in the world they are.
- By using a headset or speaking into the computer’s mic, the participants can hear what’s being said clearly, eliminating a common problem in in-person workshops, where participants intend to whisper rather than speak up, making it hard for others to understand what’s happening.
On the other hand, a few downsides have been reported when meeting virtually for a Family Constellation. I have heard on occasion comments like:
- I prefer to meet in person because I come for the hugs.
- I’m not too fond of technology and don’t have a computer or device.
The use of virtual techniques to span distances and times has also enabled a more accessible training program for many. While before, facilitator training was in one place, taking up weeks of travel, commitment, and a considerable investment to attend, online courses now allow broader access for coaches and facilitators to learn about Family Constellations. The success of the family constellation VIRTUAL training courses speaks for themselves.
In conclusion, online Family Constellation has far more positive resonance than negative remarks. But we haven’t even scratched the surface of discovering this work’s potential in the virtual realm. Since the use of online sessions was accelerated, and practitioners have successfully delivered Family Constellation through digital platforms, we have just started to unfold its ability to reveal hidden family dynamics and allow intergenerational healing on a deep soul level.
Time will reveal all its potency as life will never be the same as it was before the pandemic, and allow us to discover new ways to live life joyfully and interact with each other with compassion by including the digital means at hand to overcome distance in both, the world and the hearts.
I look forward to the opportunities new technologies entail with the intent to use them to make the magic of Family Constellation available to more and more people worldwide in need of healing old family wounds.
Have a light and bright day!
Maia