Free-Form Constellations

A group for trying things out. For people who facilitate constellations themselves, and for people who have never come across the format.

There are many schools of constellation work, and each brings its own rules. What interests me is what happens when you drop nearly all of them and leave only what is necessary. What still carries then? That cannot be worked out in advance. It has to be done.

What stays

The frame comes from Franz Ruppert’s Identity-oriented Psychotrauma Theory, the work with the intention. Three things from it matter to me, and they hold here without exception:

The intention is formulated by the person bringing it, and by nobody else. Not by me. Not by anyone in the group. It is not improved, not rephrased, not “made more precise”. An intention may be a sentence, a single word, a question. Even if it sounds unclear, it stays exactly as it is. The vagueness belongs to it, and is often the essence.

As little as possible comes from outside. We interpret nothing. We observe, we witness, we sense. We move nobody. We put no sentence in anyone’s mouth and propose no solutions. What the resonance givers perceive, they say in their own words, or not at all. Advice, too, lands as a blow.

There are no notions of where this should end up. No resolved picture, no good ending, no relief that would have to be there at the close. Sometimes it stays open. That is not a failure but one possible outcome.

Whoever brings something meets not a family system but their own intention, and whatever hangs from it.

A growing stock of suggestions, not a program

A collection of forms from very different traditions that I have come across over the years.

The stock is not a menu I choose from. Nobody is assigned a form. They are there as suggestions. Whoever brings something decides whether one of these forms fits or whether it goes without — and can turn it into something else halfway through. Precisely this trying out is what the group is for. I would not presume to claim expertise in any of these formats.

Examples:

Beliefs. Three poles: head (knowledge, insight), heart (feeling, trust, love), hand (action, order, result). Plus the focus and an element for change or movement. The sentence shifts over the course of the constellation until the focus says one that feels right from every position.

Head, heart, belly. The same three, framed differently, along core needs.

Inner parts. The inner team as a constellation: the voices that talk to each other inside a person each get a place in the room.

I and self. Only two elements, sometimes a third for the topic. The only instruction: “Find yourselves a good place in the whole.” And: “Be free.”

Ego and heart. Two positions, nothing more needed.

Goals. What is to be reached gets a place — and beside it the resources that are already there, waiting to be discovered.

Fundamental needs. After Manfred Max-Neef: subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, idleness, creation, identity, freedom, transcendence. Ten needs that cannot be traded off against each other.

Public matters. Constellations on political and social questions.

Origin and love. The moment of conception: what matters from the past. Love constellated not as a feeling between two people but far outside, as a force of its own. And the theme of boundaries: me, the others — and a place in between.

A love story from one’s own family. Told in pairs, then constellated. For instance: the self, the one who loves, the one who is loved. Or: mother, father, love. Or: the two sides of the family, and love.

Decisions and opposites. The tetralemma: the one, the other, both, neither — and then “none of this, and not even that”. Plus a place for the focus, meaning the person themselves. The four positions are not there for weighing up; the jump between them makes room for what lay outside the question until now.

The wish to change. Me as I am now. Me as I would like to be (or think I have to be). The qualities I would need less of to get there. The ones I would need more of.

Language instead of explanation. Poems and lines of songs, quotations from books, sentences that move you personally.

Silent constellation. Without words, only gestures and movement. Can touch very deeply.

The sources for these suggestions are listed below.

How a meeting goes

Roughly like this, or else entirely differently, and open to change as soon as the group wants something else:

Arriving. A round in which everyone briefly says how they are. Not an introduction round with a curriculum vitae.

Becoming quiet. A few minutes in which nothing is said.

Constellating. Whoever brought something chooses the resonance givers themselves and says what they stand for — or has them chosen for them. Then it goes quiet, and it takes a while before anything comes. That silence is to be borne.

Sensing into yourself. Participants, observers, anyone assisting, the person who brought it: everyone attends to their own bodily perception, and keeps returning to themselves.

Stopping. The person who brought it says when it ends. Not me, and not the clock.

Letting it settle. A break in which nobody talks about what was seen.

The circle. At the end, whoever wants to says how it was for them. From their own position, not as an interpretation for others.

What this has to do with peer supervision

Whoever would like to accompany a constellation offers to do so. We take turns, and whoever is not bringing something is a resonance giver like everyone else.

Afterwards there is room for the questions one usually carries around alone: what did I feel and not say? Where would I most have liked to intervene, and why? What caught me in this constellation? This is not a case review with an expert verdict. It is an exchange among people who do the same thing.

Who it is for

You need no training. Someone who has never constellated is as welcome as someone who has been leading groups for years — being a resonance giver takes nothing more than being there and perceiving.

What it takes is a willingness not to know. Especially if you already know the format.

This is not the right place if you are in an acute crisis and need holding. A group without fixed leadership is the wrong setting for that; please speak to me directly and we will see what else helps. My accompaniment is not a substitute for medical or psychotherapeutic treatment.