Category Archives: Counseling

Counseling, Family Constellations, Training, Uncategorized

Understanding Your Family Inheritance

heart on stone wallAt the Inner Arts Institute, we focus on a mixture of methods to help a person release trauma from his or her body. One major concept behind our work is the transgenerational transmission of trauma.

Studies on epigenetics confirm that our ancestors, grandparents, and parents pass down wonderful traits like our gifts and talents, strength, and our body type. What our family also passes down is unfinished trauma.

But how do unfinished trauma transmissions work? How do we inherit our gifts and long-passed traumatic experiences from family members we may have never even met?

1. Through our DNA

As seen here in a PBS video
about the children of Holocaust survivors
Epigenetics, as written beautifully
within the Atlantic Monthly, Oct 2018
And revealed in Emory University’s
2013 mice and cherry blossoms experiment

2. In Family Dynamics

Through our family constellations
And through family loyalties and the morphogenetic field
We repeat experiences and burden sharing

3. Through Our Culture

In collective and cultural shadow structures

Getting in touch with these three areas help us to become aware of the root of many of our personal issues. Although talking to a supportive person is helpful, talking keeps us in our higher brain functions and does not allow us to access our unconscious or transgenerational issues.

To connect with these issues, we need to stay in tune with our bodies and become highly attuned to our breathing patterns and physical states. When we are triggered, our mind and our logic is of little help. Our nervous system goes into fight, flight, or freeze.

These instinctive states are so deeply ingrained in our bodies and move faster than conscious thought. Fight, flight, or freeze overrides any logic or thought in the moment. Continue reading Understanding Your Family Inheritance →

Counseling, Events, Family Constellations, Training

Collective Trauma Work… Mine and Yours

8 Comments

“I don’t think this has much to do with me.”

I heard this from a number of people at the Celebrate Life Festival, a dynamic annual European consciousness event that was held for the first time in the U.S. this summer.

reflection in broken mirror, representing trauma and fragmentation

Racial division, white supremacy, and white privilege were words that we invited into our midst. They dropped into a sea of discomfort that quietly built, even though many of us could not identify with these words…

“It’s not me!”

Continue reading Collective Trauma Work… Mine and Yours →

Case Studies, Counseling, Family Constellations, Training

Family Constellation Case Study: The Concussion

by Samvedam Randles, LMHC, Dipl. Psych.

Blue butterfly emerging from cocoon, a metaphor for family constellation for physical illness.Our bodies are wise, and they are also deeply connected to our soul as well as the field that we move in and through. When we receive sudden or unwelcome messages from our bodies in the form of illnesses or accidents, we usually react with shock and annoyance. Most of us just want to get rid of painful symptoms as quickly as possible.

But these events tend to come with teachings and purpose. Constellations are a great tool to understand the learning that might be brought through physical symptoms.

Here is a recent example of listening to physical symptoms in Constellation Work.

One of the senior students in our Constellation Learning Circle, Chloe, suffered a fall on the ice in January and ended up with a concussion that left her quite incapacitated for some time. She had been a busy practitioner with a full private practice, and had to take a break from seeing people after her fall. She simply could not handle any stimulation.

Chloe had been on her own journey of personal growth and change through the constellation work and had been amazed at all the positive changes in her life. As a result of so much change, however, she felt unsure of her identity now. She seemed to be reconsidering much of what she liked (or did not like), even down to the simplest things, like foods she had once dismissed but now found appealing.

In the midst of this unfolding process of re-discovery, Chloe had the accident.

When she still could not fully re-engage in her life three months later, she became nervous and asked if we could do a constellation about this concussion.

I don’t like to disturb movements that are in process, so I felt cautious about setting up a constellation in this case, but I also attuned to Chloe’s anxiety and wanted to be helpful. We talked about what might be the right framework and checked in to see if we had permission to explore.

As I listened deeper, the field opened to a yes, and informed me, as it so often does, about how the constellation needed to be set up. I chose to keep it blind.

In blind constellations, the representatives are not informed about whom they are representing. They receive a piece of paper with the name of their representation, which they then put it in their pockets. They do not get to see what is on the paper. This removes from the constellation dynamic the possibility of interference from mental interpretations, allowing the representatives to completely immerse themselves into the felt sense of the relationships we are exploring.

So I wrote four papers and handed them out to representatives, whom Chloe then placed into our circle:

Continue reading Family Constellation Case Study: The Concussion →

Case Studies, Counseling, Family Constellations

Family Constellation Case Study ~ Perfect Loyalty

by Samvedam Randles, LMHC, Dipl. Psych.

Children of divorce often feel torn between their parents. Unconsciously, they look for ways to be loyal to both. But sometimes, these unconscious expressions of loyalty come at a high price.

Susan, 28 years old, was in the final stages of her second advanced degree program when she came looking for help. In her first program, she could not finish her dissertation and abandoned her studies, feeling like a failure.

Now, she found found herself nearing the end of her second graduate degree, once again seemingly unable to complete it.

In frustration, she talks about self-sabotage. She wants to understand why this happens and how she can change it. She has explored the issue in traditional psychotherapy, but has not been able to change her behavior. Now she has heard of family constellation work and has decided to give it a try.

As we discovered in her family constellation, Susan’s question was a perfect example of a child’s loyalty to both parents, enacted completely unconsciously, and at the high cost of hindering the success of the now-grown child.

Background

Susan’s father worked as a bricklayer all his life. Susan describes him lovingly as warm and funny, and it is obvious that she loves her father. Her mother is well educated, with two degrees, and was Susan’s main caregiver after the couple divorced when Susan was four years old. Neither parent ever remarried.

While Susan had much more contact with her mother, whom she loves, she never forgot her father either.

“Just Like You!”

We proceed to set up a constellation with three representatives standing in for Susan, her mother and her father; then we wait to see how they position themselves. As we often see in divorces, the child representative stands between the parents, attempting to find a way to belong to this now-broken system.

Susan’s representative then proudly turns to the mother and says with great feeling, “Dear Mom, I am just like you!  I, too, worked through two degree programs!”

Both smile.

Then she turns to her father and happily says, “Dear Dad! I am just like you too! I don’t have any degrees!”

While the daughter feels good being loyal to both parents, there is both love and un-ease in the representatives for her parents.

It is difficult to describe the feeling-tone within a family constellation, wherein complete strangers (the representatives) are expressing emotions that don’t belong to them, but to the family members they are representing. Working with these representatives in the constellation, healing and balance can be restored so that it reverberates into the living family system. This is where family constellation work impacts differently than traditional talk therapy.

At this point in the constellation, I invite the representatives to speak the words that the child, Susan, needs to hear from her parents.

Healing Words and a Felt-Sense of Acceptance

Using healing sentences, each parent gives Susan permission and blessings to love the other parent. Additionally, Susan’s father gives her his heartfelt permission to be as smart as her mother . . .  and collect her degree.

The father’s love and blessings move both Susan and her representative to tears. A healing movement begins as Susan takes in her father’s love. It is this kinesthetic experience of receiving what she has missed, this “corrective experience” felt in her body, that becomes the seed for possible change.

Susan left with these blessings in her heart; and proceeded to finish her degree.