What Are Family Systems Constellations?
Family Systems Constellations is an experiential approach that helps people explore the hidden patterns and dynamics that may be influencing their lives, relationships, and choices. Constellations can help identify factors causing relationship and financial challenges, illnesses, areas of stuckness, and other mood challenges. The basic idea is that we are part of larger systems—especially our families—and that experiences from previous generations can sometimes continue to influence the way we relate, respond, and cope in the present. Constellation work can be used to explore concerns that may be difficult to understand through conversation alone.
It is therapeutic in nature, but it is not psychotherapy. Constellations offer a different way of looking at a situation by bringing aspects of a person’s system into view, creating an opportunity for new awareness and perspective.
How It Works
A constellation begins with a question, concern, or area of life you would like to explore. With the guidance of a facilitator, people, relationships, or other elements of the situation are represented in physical space. This may be done with people serving as representatives, or through objects, figures, papers, or floor markers.
As the constellation unfolds, the arrangement and movement of the elements can reveal patterns, tensions, loyalties, or relationships that may not have been consciously recognized. Rather than imposing an interpretation, the process invites you to observe what emerges and discover what feels meaningful for you. This experiential process can offer a fresh perspective on situations that may have felt confusing, repetitive, or difficult to change.
How Family Systems Constellations Can Help
Constellation work can create space to look at familiar challenges from a different perspective. It may help bring greater awareness to relationship dynamics, family patterns, unresolved experiences, questions of belonging, or situations in which you feel stuck. Some people experience increased clarity, compassion, a sense of resolution, or greater freedom to make different choices.
Constellations can be explored in many areas of life, including:
- Family: Explore family relationships, generational patterns, belonging, loss, and unresolved experiences.
- Relationships: Look at dynamics between partners or other significant people.
- Parenting: Explore family roles and relationships between parents and children.
- Personal challenges: Bring perspective to inner conflicts, transitions, decisions, or recurring patterns.
- Career and work: Explore professional direction, purpose, workplace relationships, and challenges.
- Organizations and teams: Examine roles, leadership, communication, belonging, and systemic dynamics.
- Financial concerns: Explore your relationship with money and possible patterns or dynamics surrounding financial challenges.
The Origins of Constellation Work
Family Constellations was developed and brought into wider awareness by German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger (1925–2019) in the late twentieth century. His work grew from his observations of family and group dynamics and his interest in how experiences such as loss, separation, conflict, and exclusion might continue to influence family members across generations. Contemporary practitioners draw from Hellinger’s work in many different ways, and the field has continued to evolve.
My Training
In 2021, I completed a one-year facilitator training program with Francesca Mason Boring of All My Relations Constellations in Altadena, California. My training informs my approach to creating a respectful, grounded, and compassionate space in which you can explore the questions and patterns that matter to you.
Below, you will find an interview that offers an introduction to Family Systems Constellations and a perspective on how this work can help.
Heal yourself & your family baggage! Constellations Work w/ Francesca Mason Boring & Davina Kotulski
Contact me via email for a session. Davina @ DavinaKotulski .com