When I was preparing for my first marriage, I read a lot about marriage, bonding with families and the tools necessary to create a healthy family unit with a healthy support system. In doing my usual research, I can across this interesting article, “An Unconventional Tool for Healing Family Baggage’,“ which talks discusses a method of healing I’d never heard of before: using your family tree.

Have a quick below (introduction to the article) and click ‘source’ below for the entire article:

Marine Sélénée was in Paris studying to be a psychologist when she suddenly felt uninspired. In a bit of a malaise—not happy, not unhappy—she left France and started dabbling in the world of spirituality. That’s when one of her mentors told her about a form of therapy called family constellations. She was pretty skeptical: “I was really French.”

Still, she set up her own session. She had some unresolved issues in her love life that she had been trying to tackle. Forty minutes later, Sélénée thought, Oh my God, here it is. “It” being the answers Sélénée had been searching for but had not found in psychology. She spent a year working through her family history before training to become a family constellations counselor. Eventually, she opened a private practice in New York.

Family constellations is the creation of a German psychologist named Bert Hellinger. Hellinger traveled to South Africa as a missionary in the 1950s. He became interested in the customs of the Zulu people and a particular ceremony they used to understand one another. In Zulu tradition, ancestors are sacred, and healing ancestral wounds is a key to strong family ties. He saw family members speak to one another candidly, without being passive-aggressive or becoming frustrated. It wasn’t quite how he was used to seeing family matters play out back home.

This was not the family constellations method in its final form but the birth of the idea. Hellinger returned to Germany and spent the rest of his life examining the ways our family narratives influence our personal identities. Family constellations advocates tend to be devout: It’s not just therapy; it’s a life philosophy to them. It’s seeing people with a different perception—and accepting what you see (for example: learning to see your mother as a human being).

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