Issue 5, december 2004
£ 10.00
CONTENTS
Barbara Morgan: Editorial
Bert Hellinger: Dimensions of Illness & Health
THE BODY
Colette Green: Addiction: Scars of Attachment; Souvenirs of Love
Eva Madelung: Merleau-Ponty & the Phenomenon of Embodiment
POEM
Jen Altman: Poem: The Art of Healing
TRAUMA
Albrecht Mahr: Rwanda: Ten Years after the Genocide
Bertold Ulsamer: Trauma work: Complementing & Enhancing Family Constellations
Edward Lynch: Constellation: A Horrifying Incident
CONSTELLATIONS IN INDIVIDUAL THERAPY
Helena Arkoudis: Use of figures in individual therapy
Vivian Broughton: Review & Discussion of two books on constellations in individual therapy
MOVEMENTS OF THE SOUL
Hunter Beaumont, Eva Madelung, Wilfried de Philipp, Jakob Schneider: Discussion on Bowing
Bubula Lardi: Newspaper article Greying, in Black and White
Bert Hellinger: Integrating Excluded Persons and Events (Further Thoughts on Illness)
Extracts
Bert Hellinger: Dimensions of Illness and Health
…Two years ago in Hong Kong there was a woman who had eleven illnesses and we set up the eleven illnesses in a circle around her and they all behaved like people; some falling to the ground with great pain, others crying. The person who had the illness looked at all of them and took them into her heart. One year later she came to another workshop and she felt much better. She said she wanted to tell me something about her family, what had happened. Her parents gave away about five or six of their children. They sold them because they were too poor to bring them up. They had also aborted several children. I asked how many altogether and she said eleven. Then we set up all these children, the eleven children and we placed them in a circle again and placed the parents outside. She was standing in the middle like before and she looked at each of her brothers and sisters and there was deep emotion between them – a very deep love. The parents were standing outside and weeping. We opened the circle, the parents entered with the client; they held each other’s hands, looked at one another and were united with deep love…
Colette Green: Addiction: Scars of Attachment, Souvenirs of Love
…This paper provides a new contribution to the understanding of the dynamics of addiction, by linking object relations theory to Bert Hellinger’s family systems approach. Hellinger brings to awareness the part of addiction, which is the result of a dis-ease within the family: an unconscious, inter-generational dynamic operating out of blind love and loyalty and calling attention to a loss or exclusion within the family system.
The paper starts by defining addiction and its issues through the language of Object Relations. It discusses Hellinger’s empirical findings, his observations on addiction and his methodology and how they contain the issues of an oral stage disruption. This is followed by a case example of a family constellation of a couple whose son struggles with addiction. The case demonstrates the effect of hidden dynamics and Hellinger’s particular contribution in noting the importance of’ the absence of the father within the addict’s family dynamic…
Bertold Ulsamer: Trauma Work: Complementing and Enhancing Family Constellations
…Despite all my enthusiasm for family constellations, I have always been aware that this approach addresses only a certain area of problems, namely those that are rooted within our families. Although this is an important area, not all our issues stem from this root: many problems result from life experiences unrelated to our families and therefore cannot be resolved with family constellations. I perceive constellations work as one wing of the bird. In order to fly we need the second wing and I see the body-oriented trauma work developed by Peter Levine as a way of providing this second wing. But most of us with some experience of constellation work are well aware that trauma plays a large part in creating entanglements and so is central to much of systemic work. Here, I compare how trauma is approached in constellations and in body-oriented trauma work and discuss how the insights and techniques developed by Levine may profitably be applied in constellations…