Case Study One: A Husband and Wife Estranged

It is a Saturday in Columbus, Ohio.  Fifteen (15) of us are gathered together for a day of personal and family constellations. 

One woman is particularly nervous when she walks into the room.  I greet  her and she says to me, “You terrorize me.  Look at how your hands are.”  I knew we were in for a go of it.

I told her that I hoped she could tolerate staying, hearing others, watching others and then asking for whatever she wanted in hopes that by asking for something for herself she might experience  less terror in her life.  She promptly told me that she already knew what she was coming for and it wasn’t about terror.

I began the day by talking about the lens through which we would be viewing our longings: time, space, belonging, give and take and conscience, the Orders of Love.

Once introduced to the concepts, I asked if anyone was ready to have their constellation done, their issue known and hopefully resolved. 

Our terrorized woman began.

I asked her what it was that she wanted.  She began to talk to me about her twelve children and her fear that the children had been molested by her father.  She wanted to ramble on and on about her worries.  It wouldn’t help if she kept this up. 

I asked her to tell me for what longing she really came.  I told her clearly that by the way she was talking, she already knew that her father had molested the girls.  So that didn’t need to be known – she already knew.  She wanted something else.

She began to tear up and said, “My husband and I don’t get along well.”

I suggested that she tell me facts about her husband. 

Was he in a war? Was he Catholic? Did anything ever happen to him? Did he have an illness? Had he had other lovers before her? 

I wanted just facts about her husband.  Nothing seemed to have happened, at least factually.  I asked her the same things about herself.  To her, nothing seemed to have really happened to cause this “not getting along well”.

I suggested that we just start with something simple, her and her husband. 

I asked her to, respectfully; ask someone in the group to represent her husband and someone in the group to represent her. 

She looked around the circle and picked two people.  I asked her to “set” them up; place them in the circle, without talking, facing in any direction or standing at any distance she wanted from each other. 

Once placed, I asked her to sit down and really watch what was happening. 

She placed each of them far apart and with their backs to each other.  A husband and a wife who have their backs turned and have no interest in looking at each other are clearly not “getting along well”.  There is no relationship possible if they cannot even look at each other. 

I waited to see what they might do, phenomenologically.  What he did was look at the floor. 

What she did was look at the floor.  To a ‘constellator’, one wonders about whether someone is dead.  I go to each of them and ask if they are looking at something or someone.  He replied, “It is someone”.

I turned them to face each other and placed another representative on the floor as the dead “someone”. 

When in this position, when they could see each other if they wanted to. Each of them just stayed riveted on the floor. While looking at the representative on the floor (the dead “someone”, who turned out to be a miscarried child, tears began to roll down the face of her husband’s representative. 

I asked him what he felt and he replied, “Grief”.  I asked him, “For whom?”  His reply startled the woman, herself.  He said, “ It is for our miscarried child”.

The woman’s representative looked up at the husband’s representative and said, “I thought you always blamed me for his loss”.  I changed the statement to: “I have always blamed you for his death”.  What the woman said made her a “victim” to him; it was truthfully a projection onto her husband. 

When the representative for the husband heard her say, I have always blamed you for his death, he looked at her for the first time and said, “Thank you for acknowledging that, it helps a lot”. 

She was then able to say to him, “We both lost him.  Will you help me grieve?”  To that he replied, “Yes, I have missed you a great deal.”

Everyone in the system relaxed and began to smile.

It was done.  The restoration made possible.

As a therapist, in an office, I might have made the mistake of conducting interesting forays into the molestations.  I may have believed her story about her husband being distant from her.

I may have never seen the “systemic” problem and therefore missed the “systemic” solution.  I may have had a client for years who would have not gotten better and more able, because we were dealing with non-issues.