Family Constellations
Family Constellations explores recurring patterns in your family and how you experience their influence in your life and relationships.
When family members lead unhappy lives or suffer an extremely difficult fate, it’s often easier to reject them than to feel the pain of loving them. Anger is often an easier emotion to feel than sadness.
Some of what you carry didn't start with you. Family Constellations looks at the system you were born into, and at the job you were quietly given inside it.
This might be your door if
- The same pattern keeps repeating across generations of your family, and nobody talks about it.
- You feel loyal to something you can't name, and stepping out of it feels like betrayal.
- There's a person, a loss or an event in your family that was never spoken about and its absence is loud.
- You've worked on your own history and something still feels like it belongs to someone else.
What actually happens
We map your understanding of your family: significant people, relationships, events and things that were left unsaid. Together, we explore the patterns and responsibilities you associate with that history. In individual sessions, we use markers and imagination rather than a group. The aim is to understand your experience and explore which responsibilities or expectations you want to carry forward.
What this isn't
This isn't a ritual, and it isn't a way of receiving messages about your relatives. It's a way of working with the story and structure of your family as you carry them. If that framing doesn't sit right with you, one of the other approaches will serve you better, and I'd rather say so.
Common questions
- Do I need to bring my family?
No. I offer individual sessions, where we explore your experience of your family and the patterns you notice in your life.
- What if I don't know much about my family history?
That is common, and it does not prevent us from working together. We can explore what you know and how uncertainty affects you, without assuming what happened in the gaps.
- Is this a one-off or ongoing work?
It can be either. Some people come for a focused piece of work on one specific pattern. For others it becomes one thread inside longer somatic therapy.
- Do I have to forgive my family?
No, and I won't ask you to. Seeing clearly what happened and what you took on is the work. What you decide to do with that afterwards is yours.
Before we start, one important thing
This therapy is not a substitute for crisis or safety intervention. It isn't appropriate if you are currently in an unsafe or dangerous situation, or if you are at immediate risk of harming yourself or ending your life. In those circumstances you need crisis, emergency or specialised support first.
Somatic psychotherapy is also unsuitable for people who have recently faced, or are currently facing, legal allegations.
You might also be looking at
Somatic Counselling
Compassionate Inquiry
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy — Pat Ogden
Gestalt Psychotherapy
Ready to start?
Book a first session, or write to me if you'd rather ask something before you do.