Issue 32, June 2018

£ 15.00

Contents

• Barbara Morgan: Editorial

• Bert Hellinger: Memories

• Tanja Meyburgh: Open letter to Bert Hellinger

IN THE SPOTLIGHT

• Tanja Meyburgh: Conversation with Lindiwe Mthembu-Salter

• Cathy Geils: Conversations with South African facilitators

HISTORY OF NATIONS, CULTURES & RELIGIONS

SOUTH AFRICA 

• Tanja Meyburgh: Hellinger in South Africa

• Tanja Meyburgh & Niall Campbell: Reverence & Dignity

USA

• Anngwyn St. Just: Enough

• Anngwyn St. Just: Columbine re-visited

CHINA

• Bertold Ulsamer: Constellation work in China

• Lap Fung, Cheng: Systemic Constellation work & Social Trauma in China

UK

• Lynn Stoney: Colonialism & Its Aftermath

CONSTELLATIONS

• Patricia Robertson: Blending Systemic Constellations with Genealogical Research

• Chuck Cogliandro: Community Constellation for the Healing of Gun Violence, January 31st 2016

• Diana Claire Douglas: Harvesting the Jewels

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS

• Rafael E. Ruiz y Nava: Reflections on the Attitudes and Forms of Representatives in Constellations

• Leslie Nipps: Orders of Love: What Seniority Is, and Is Not

• Alemka Dauskardt: Me(n) Too

REPORTS ON CONFERENCES & INTENSIVES

• Various Contributors: Australasian Intensive Feb/March 2018

BOOK EXTRACTS

• Francesca Mason Boring: No-one likes to talk about Castration in Family Systems Constellations: In the Company of Good People

• Barbara Morgan: Interview with Jurgita Svedienè in Reflections on Motherhood Vol. I

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

• Leslie Nipps

• Francesca Mason Boring

IN MEMORIAM

• Anutosh Boon Foo

INVITATION

• Invitation to ISCA Gathering

POETS' CORNER

• Angus Landman

Extracts

Bert Hellinger: Memories

…Then his companion guide takes him by the hand and opens the door that really matters.

Now he is there; he has returned. He holds the hand that brought him here and looks quietly about him to see how it really was, each of the pieces and the whole. Strange how different it appears now that he is centred and his hand is held; now that he can remember what was shut out and is now included because it belongs to the whole. He waits and keeps looking until he knows it all.

Eventually he is overcome by feeling, and behind what was superficial he senses the love and the pain. It feels as if he has come home, and he has found the depth of truth that reaches beyond justice and revenge. It is the place where destiny takes its course and humility brings healing and where defeat leads to peace. His helper still holds on to his hand so that he feels safe. He breathes deeply and then lets go. Thus, what has been accumulated falls away and he is feeling light and warm.

As it is completed, the other looks at him and says: “Maybe you took on a burden long ago which you should leave here, for it does not belong to you nor may it be asked of you. You don’t have to take on guilt as if you had to pay for what others have taken. Leave it here, and also everything else that must be foreign to you, although it may seem strange to let go of others’ illness, or their fate, or their beliefs and feelings. Even the decision that brought you harm, leave that here too.”

Interview between Tanja Meyburgh and Lindiwe Mthembu-Salter

Tanja: Lindiwe, we would like to know about your encounter with Family Constellations as a Zulu woman? How did it fit into your worldview and how did you make sense of it in relation to how you were raised and what you were taught in your family?

Lindiwe: Thank you for these questions… seeking my knowledge about my encounter with Family Constellations as a Zulu woman. For me, the belief in ancestors is rooted in the desire to preserve the memory of the known past generations and the unknown members of my family lineage. However, in my observation, when I first encountered Family Constellations, what resonated with me was that, more than any other therapeutic method I have come across, it emphasised the power of integrating all the elements that belong in the family system.

I have lived with some people who assumed that an African Zulu person’s belief in ancestors is like worshipping the dead. I have also noticed that in the West, the term ‘ancestors’ suggests forebears who have passed on, and as a result there is distance or a gap between the living and the dead. On the other hand, in Zulu people’s thinking process there is a close, intimate relationship and association “within the lineage between departed and their survivors” (Berglund, 1976). For instance, we speak of ‘the living dead’ where the departed are viewed as living realities even though they are not visible on earth. They belong in the invisible spiritual world and their soul lives in the heart of the living survivors. The combination of the extremes of the living and the dead seems exaggerated and has led to demeaning views about the harmonies of African indigenous wisdom.

Every Zulu person, educated or not, has this information and knowledge that to honour these departed senior relatives through rituals or ceremonies is an unending process. Ancestors are also believed to come through dreams or communicate in various ways with us. An example is my father, who, in 2015, died in hospital and not at home. Our family is preparing a ceremony to bring his spirit back to the family through slaughtering a cow for him. He will be presented with a spear and a shield to protect his family. I have grown up in a family where acknowledging the excluded in the family system was emphasised as the foundation for the cure of various ailments, such as bodily discomfort, spiritual discord or the common need to ward off misfortunes or a curse. My encounter with Family Constellations affirmed this area.

Anngwyn St. Just: Columbine Re-visited

One of the issues that keeps trauma specialists awake at night, is the question of why some traumas repeat, as they definitely do, throughout individual lives, family systems and in larger groups of tribes, communities and entire nations. These often uncanny repetitions tend to happen on an anniversary of previous unresolved traumas. While dates of traumatic repetitions have often been dismissed as mere coincidence, my experience over nearly fifty years of working with trauma suggests otherwise. These temporal markers are important in tracking traumas that repeat throughout individual lives, families and larger systems as well as representatives of important clues that something serious is in need of attention and resolution.

In addition to dates of previous unresolved traumas, a second factor may be the location of a traumatic event, for as Rupert Sheldrake has suggested, places have ‘fields of memory’.

And thirdly, personal and systemic histories of those involved may also be a factor. The importance of these three factors, may be understood as ‘attractors’ within the context of chaos theory. According to John Briggs and David Peat (2000) the scientific term chaos refers to an underlying interconnectedness that exists within apparently random events. As chaos theory continues to emerge as a new cultural perspective, we are challenged to question our cherished assumptions about causality.

Early on, I felt that the apparent chaos surrounding the Columbine tragedy was worth examining, in the hope of bringing some insight to the possibility of an underlying order. Working within this paradigm was a speculation that this seemingly random event might be understood as part of a pattern which flows from the past, through the present, and into the future as a component in a still evolving system. Chaos theory suggests that if an event is part of a repeating pattern within a larger system, then this system will have one or more attractors which attract a tendency for behaviors or events to constellate and also repeat along the same or similar themes. Consequently, I began to search for these attractors by gradually assembling non-linear connections contributing to this tragedy. Gradually then, a gestalt of this event began to emerge as something like a collage with the dates April 19th and 20th and the Colorado location presenting the first two attractors.

Lap Fung, Cheng (Ah Fung): Systemic Constellation Work and Social Trauma in China

China implemented the one-child policy to control population growth in 1979. In the early 1980s, the policy was stringently enforced and the induced abortion rate was as high as 56.07% among married women aged 20-49 years old (Wang, 2014). In the 2000s, it has reached its lowest level (18.04%) due to the fact that the government has been relaxing the policy. In 2016, the government formally announced the introduction of the two-children policy. China’s population structure has changed substantially as a result and it will become an ageing society with insufficient children to support the social welfare programmes. Cultural preference for males effectively led to a boy to girl ratio of 120:100 in 2005 (Edlund, Li et al., 2013). The combined effect will cost Chinese society in a huge way; it will slow down the ‘miraculous’ growth; men will find it difficult to find a marriage partner. Furthermore, a study showed that with a 1% increase in the men to women ratio, the number of crimes will increase by 3.7% (Edlund, Li et al., 2013). It is generally believed that the Chinese government will let go of the birth control policy soon.

Again, hard statistics don’t give us any true feeling about the situation. In my SCW cases, less than 20% of women do not have abortions. According to Chinese internet news, there are still 13 million abortions annually in the country.

Hellinger used to say abortion meant the end of the couple relationship (Hellinger, Weber et al. 1998, Hellinger, 2001). From my observation and experience, the situation is much more complicated in China. When I scrutinise abortions case by case, it reveals different dynamics specific to each family. Abortion cases can be categorised into: compulsory, controversial, voluntary and systemic.

Compulsory abortion refers to cases where the government family planning agents captured pregnant women to abort their child by force. This is extremely  traumatic for women and they are usually full of anger and hatred towards those family planning officers. They mourn for their children and take them deeply into their heart, not letting them go. But there is no obvious ill-effect on the couple’s relationship in these instances.

Rafael E. Ruiz y Nava: Reflections on the Attitudes and Forms of Representatives in Constellations

Observing representatives in a constellation, I have become aware that there are different attitudes as well as various motivations for representing. Each of these is closely related to the needs of those who are participating in a particular role in the constellation. These attitudes and needs are unique for each person that is representing. With these attitudes and needs, that person/representative has the opportunity to integrate themselves and their own process in the field, as well as being in service to the person, and family system, for whom the work is being done. I believe that, in spite of the attitudes and postures all the participants in a constellation workshop remain in the service of the ‘knowing field’ and everything that happens is guided by this field, even when the participants may not be conscious of what is going on. The person facilitating the constellation follows the information bestowed by the field, wherein the personal processes of the representatives are included automatically. Each is a part of that field, without altering or perturbing the process of others – including the designated seeker. Whatever manifests is part of what the field can offer at the time, both for the person doing a personal piece of work in a constellation, and for everyone present. However, it is valuable to become conscious of what may happen with representatives in their own processes.

As constellation work has evolved over time, and our experience and procedures have developed, the value given to the representative’s word has also changed. Initially, in my experience, they had a more active participation in the constellation and later they seemed to have a more passive role. Originally, the word of the representatives was considered to be the direct manifestation of information from a field that displayed the seeker’s story in an accurate form and left its decoding to the person in the role of facilitator, although not as an interpretation of the mind but as the revelation of the next move in the field. This understanding of the importance of the representative’s word became more of an issue with the development of ‘movements of the soul’ constellations, where the level of participation of the facilitator also became freer. As the experience of constellation work developed further, the emphasis shifted to viewing the participation of representatives as more intuitive and centred on inward perception of the field’s forces. This procedure became less rational and conscious and more attentive to the inner guidance for the representative, especially in connection with movements related to the other representatives. In order for this to happen, the representatives were asked not to help in the constellation, but to only report their inner sensations and feelings and move according to inner guidance.