is a therapeutic approach that explores how unresolved family issues and dynamics can affect individuals, aiming to bring awareness and healing through physical representations.
Family Constellation is a therapeutic approach that explores the hidden dynamics within a family system to reveal patterns that may be influencing your emotional well-being, relationships, or life decisions.
Often, issues we face in the present, such as anxiety, relationship difficulties, a sense of being stuck, or incomplete, are connected to unresolved traumas, losses, or disconnections within the wider family system.
Rather than focusing solely on the individual, Family Constellation takes a systemic view, acknowledging that each person is deeply connected to their family and ancestors. The work helps bring clarity, healing, and resolution by restoring order and balance to the system.
In Family Constellation therapy, the “system” refers to the family system, a network of people who are biologically, emotionally, or relationally connected across generations.
The system includes your immediate family (parents, siblings), but also extends to grandparents, great-grandparents, ancestors, and others who may have influenced your family’s story, such as former partners, adopted children or excluded members, victims or perpetrators of significant events.
Family Constellation was developed by Bert Hellinger, a German psychotherapist and former priest, in the late 20th century.
His insights were influenced by his time working with the Zulu people in South Africa, where he observed their deep respect for ancestors and community healing rituals.
Hellinger combined elements of psychodynamic therapy, existential philosophy, and phenomenology to create a method that could bring to light unconscious family loyalties and transgenerational trauma.
Systemic entanglements can happen when someone unconsciously takes on the burden or fate (as carrying unresolved grief, guilt, or shame from a parent, grandparent or another family member. These entanglements often show up in us in the form of anxiety, anger, depression, feeling “stuck”, not able to finish your projects, not finding the right partner, addiction, lack of self-esteem and many others.
The goal in Family Constellation is to reveal, gaining awereness through insights and restore balance and belonging in the system, honoring each person’s rightful place and allowing love to flow more freely.
A Family Constellation session can take place in a group or one-on-one setting.
In group sessions, participants may stand in as “representatives” for family members or aspects of the issue being explored. In individual sessions, objects or visualisation may be used to map out the constellation.
The facilitator helps the client set up a representation of their family system, allowing unseen dynamics and entanglements to surface. Through the process, participants often experience emotional insight and a felt shift—what many describe as a deep inner realignment.
The work does not aim to change the past but to create space for a different relationship with it, one that supports healing, freedom, and greater connection.
