Do family constellations show historic truth?

A remarkable thing that happens when you set up a representative for a family member, is that the representative begins to sense things in all levels of his awareness, physical, emotional and mental, that are similar to what this family member may have felt. Some representatives suddenly know situations and events that happened in the life of the family member. These promptings are not always entirely historically correct and so cannot be considered objective truth. But surprisingly often they provide us with information that leads to a solution for the client and the client's family.

Sometimes facts are shifted in a constellation. In his book The Art and Practice of Family Constellations (see literature) Bertold Ulsamer tells about a constellation in which a representative strongly felt that she had been abused by the father. The representative of the father felt the same. The client denied that there was any truth in this. Two weeks later Ulsamer heard from the client that she had visited her sister and had told about the constellation. Thereupon the sister broke into tears. It was she who had been abused by their father.

I myself facilitated a constellation where I had introduced a representative for "the shame of the grandfather". The representative of the mother looked at her and said: "She is my sister and my daughter", meaning a child of her, begotten by her father. Then the client told: "This has indeed happened in my family, however, it was my aunt (a sister of his mother), not my mother who got a child from her father".

A family constellation shows the energies that play in a family. In both examples there was no representative in the constellation for the actual victim of the abuse, and perhaps therefore the representative of a sister of the victim picked up the energy and felt it as her own.

But even if the entanglement is expressed by the "wrong" representative, still, if it is resolved in the constellation it will be healing for those involved and this is what counts.

A family constellation is an approximation of reality, that is usually accurate enough to allow a healing movement to be made that liberates. This is the essence, more is not needed. We cannot claim to accurately reconstruct the facts. Nevertheless, the information that comes out of a constellation is sometimes strikingly confirmed afterwards.