Orders of Love Process

The process of family work utilizing constellations is based on simple and humbling tenets:

• Respect
• Humility
• Inclusion

There are no diagnoses.  There is no blame.  There are no judgments. There are no “stories”.  There are nouns not adjectives and adverbs.

This work is interested in facts not interpretations. 

Family Constellations are Brief Therapy at its finest hour.

Stage One: The Interview

One of the ways of this work begins is with ten to twenty people gathered in a room in a circle. 

A participant who is ready, meaning s/he knows what they would really like to address through the lens of a constellation, comes to sit on the right hand side of the facilitator/therapist. 

Once seated, the “client” or issue holder is asked what it is that s/he longs for in life, but to date has been unable to have. 

Many and all issues are addressed by constellations: transgenerational issues such as alcoholism, drug use and abuse, violence, incest, rape, depression, headaches, unusual deaths, the feeling of wanting to die and not understanding why, anxiety, eating disorders, wanting the love of a parent, the effect of abortion or miscarriage – anything that we normally address with therapy, with a DSM IV diagnosis and more.

The initial interview is a critical part of the process. 

What the facilitator is asking from the client is: For what do you long? 

Once that is known:  I long to be happy, I am worried about the health of my child, to name just two beginning places, we begin. 

As the facilitator, the constellator, I do not want to fall into the trap of asking why someone is unhappy.  If I ask that question, I have begun a long trip down a road of interpretive story telling.  And, I know the story that would be told could not possibly be accurate. If it was, the want or the problem would have already been solved.

Instead, facilitators would like to know, “if your life were happy, what would you be like”.  Shifting the interview from problem to solution is imperative.

At this point, the facilitator must be careful to not allow the client to seduce him or her into believing all of what is being said, or being recruited into a loyalty to the client versus the system.

The facilitator really wants to deal with factual information. 

Factual information, such as:
Who is in your family at this moment, a partner, children, no one, a lover and a husband, a lover and a wife;

• Has anything happened to any of these people, such as illnesses, miscarriages, abortions, participation in wars, multiple partners, immigration, jail time, adoptions. 
• Facilitators are always looking for who belongs to the family system and what has happened.  Facilitators do not want to be “seduced” by stories.   

The facilitator is joining, in contact, with the client, but refusing to become empathic with them as that draws the facilitator into the system.   

We, (facilitators), want to know who belongs, what happened and who is being left out or excluded.  We are not interested in judgments such as, “My mother was ruthless and uncaring.”  We want to know what happened to the mother.

Once data has been gathered, the client is asked to pick people from the circle to be in service to the client’s family system.  The client is asked to gather members of his or her family. 

We might need a current partner, the children of this person, the second partner, a mother or a father, an aborted child.  The facilitator is always trying to start the constellation with as few representatives as possible.

After the client has selected the representatives critical to the solution, s/he “places” them within the circle. 

S/he does so by going behind the representative, and without words, gently and respectfully moving the representative into place.  The representatives merely stand in the selected space. 

Unlike Satir, there is no sculpting of the arms or telling people how to act. 

Representatives stand in the ‘field of the family system at hand’. Distance from each other and direction of facing are the beginning clues for the client, the facilitator, as well as, the remaining people in the circle. 

For Gestalt therapists, this first look, the spaces in which people are placed, is the “fixed Gestalt” which inhibits or blocks the client’s longing. 

It shows everyone exactly how the client carries this issue, this problem.  Additionally, it shows everyone exactly why the client cannot free him or herself from the issue.

Stage Two: The Constellation Begins

Once placed, the representatives stand and the client takes a seat and watches these perfect strangers begin to act like, move like and sound like the actual family members. 

The “gift” of seeing, given by these perfect strangers who are representing family members is powerful and transformative.  The client is seeing and hearing exactly his or her “truth” about his or her family system with no one from their family save themselves even present. 

The constellation is the family energies, not the factual truth.  The constellation does not establish fact, rather it establishes family energies that inhibit or block the client from moving on well in life.

How? How can this happen? 

Scientifically, no one really knows.  Yet, there are many theories to explain or make meaning of what is taking place.   

Some believe that ancestral energies are always available and can be summoned at any time necessary. 
Others believe that is allowable through the lens of quantum physics. 

Still others believe that constellations create a three dimensional matrix of transgenerational lineage that is not generally presented to the conscious mind of the client (Cohen, 2006).   

Jung believed in the ‘collective unconscious".  Maya Angelou talks of standing on the shoulders of giants, of all who have come before us.  Rupert Sheldrake talks of the “morphogenetic field (Sheldrake, 1995 ).   Lynne McTaggart writes of, The Field (McTaggart, 2002). The definitive answer remains a mystery.

Once the initial formation is set, everyone waits in respectful silence and stillness. 

After the stillness has shown all present the issue at hand, the facilitator beings to gather information.  The information wanted by the facilitator is phenomenological in nature: what is happening to your body?

The facilitator is noticing all the phenomena available: downcast eyes and heads, swaying movements, twisting, the urges to see others, the lack of interest in anything that is going on, etc.

We are looking for the “open secrets” (Zerubavel, 2006), the Orders of Love (Hellinger, 1998) which are disturbed for this particular family system. 

We are ‘seeing’ “what is” versus utilizing projection or interpretations which guess about the root of a situation.  We, through constellations and the Orders of Love, are literally handed the current state of a client’s meaning making, thus their painful stuckness and the plausible path to a different way of seeing and being, a path to a plausible resolution.

Stage Three:  The Release and the Resolution

During this phase of a constellation, the tenets of the Orders of Love are the lens through which resolution is reached. 

We are looking at the inhibitions and blocks to belonging in the family, the paradigm of giving and receiving and the conscience of the family unit or the ways in which I know I belong to this very particular family.

By gathering the phenomenological data from the representatives and utilizing the three axioms from above, the facilitator begins releasing the inhibitions and blocks with very precise and concise language. 

These releasing statements are accomplished by having one representatives make a very clear, concise statement to other representatives.  The statement is received and felt. 

The representative who was spoken to now returns a statement and completes the act of giving and receiving, the dialogue is the relationship. Everything is relational and everything requires initiation and response. 

If the facilitator or constellator wishes, the constellations can be conducted in perfect silence.  This method of resolution is Hellinger’s Movements of the Soul.  During Movements of the Soul, the entire group of representatives moves at will until each person feels relief.  A systemic solution is only systemic if the ENTIRE system relaxes.  Every person in the family system must come to peacefulness or the resolution is not helpful to all.

It is the final configuration that gives the resolution opportunity to the client. 

When all things are said and done, when every person is in the ‘right’ place and the flow of love within the family is restored, the client both feels and sees the family in a very different light. 

It is this final image that the client embeds in his or her soul. This image, over time is the change agent.