Issue 39, January 2022
£ 15.00
Contents
Barbara Morgan: Editorial
Bert Hellinger: Major Conflicts
Hunter Beaumont: Open Letter to the Editor & Readers
RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
Sarah Peyton: Every Moment Matters: The Relational Neuroscience of the Facilitator-Client Relationship
HISTORY OF NATIONS, CULTURES & RELIGIONS
Anngwyn St. Just: Graveyard of Empires
Nikki Mackay: The Silent Legacy of ‘Not Enough to Keep the Children Safe’
CONSTELLATIONS
Dr. Undine Whande: The Disconnection is Everywhere – a systems constellation in the context of school transformation work after apartheid
PERSONAL REFLECTIONS
Julie Wevill: The Dynamics of Betrayal
Ricí Ní Chléirigh: Clean or Dirty Pain
Patricia Cleary: The Interrupted Reaching out Movement (IROM)
Martin Paine: Fatherhood in the Field
Stuart Walker: Emptiness & the Phenomenon of Enantiodromia
Lorraine Tolmie: Creativity and Constellation
Maria Gorjão Henriques: Systemic Solidarity
CONFERENCES & INTENSIVES
Francesca Mason Boring: Remembering Place – Honouring Mother Earth
Rafael Ruiz-Amdal: Honouring the Angel of Death
TIPS FOR FACILITATORS
Stephan Hausner: Health & Trauma and other themes
BOOK REVIEW
Katherine Curran: Whole Systems Design: Inquiries in the Knowing Field by Diana Claire Douglas
IN MEMORIAM
Mark A. Johnson (27 Sept 1956 – 16 Jan 2022)
POETS’ CORNER
Alison Strandberg: This Land is My Land; Ancestors; I Honour You
Angus Landman: One Ordinary Moment; Sunshine and Birdsong; In the Way of Words
Poppy Altmann: The Taste of Death
Extracts
Bert Hellinger: The Will to Annihilate
…Displacement of the will to destroy
Within a legal system that protects the individuals from their own destructiveness and that of others, we can still see groups living out their destructive tendencies through displacement on to other levels. We see destructiveness at work in political confrontations, but also in many scientific and ideological arguments.
We can see destructiveness at work wherever the objective level is abandoned. Instead of searching together for the best solution and observing and examining issues in an objective manner, the members of the other party or school of thought are attacked with words of abuse, slander, defamation. Aggressions breaking through like this are at times not too different from physical destructiveness. They both have the same emotional base and intention to destroy the other, at least morally, by declaring the other an enemy of their group, with all of the ensuing consequences. Can individuals protect themselves from this? They are exposed to this conflict, even without participating in it at all. But even then such individuals are themselves in danger of responding to such aggressions with their own destructiveness, which they may have great difficulty keeping at bay.
Sarah Peyton: Every Moment Matters: The Relational Neuroscience of the Facilitator-Client Relationship
My mission of re-watching the Zoom recordings of my Constellation Work came out of a fascination with attachment researcher Beatrice Beebe’s four decades of work with close videos of mothers and their four-month-old babies. In looking at three minutes of video of mothers playing with their babies, with one camera aimed at the baby’s face, and one aimed at the mother’s face, Beebe discovered that by the age of four months the baby has modified their facial expression vocabulary to match their mother’s (which means they have modified their emotions to match what their mother can easily reflect). She also discovered that each moment is a fractal of the larger attachment experience – specifically revealing one of the four patterns of human relationships: avoidant-attachment; anxious-ambivalent attachment; disorganised/traumatic attachment or secure/earned-secure attachment.
If it is true that each moment of the mother-baby experience reveals their attachment patterns, might it also be true that each moment of our adult interactions also reveals our attachment patterns? Beatrice Beebe says yes. She says: “Each person’s action is constituted in coordination with that of the partner; each person’s behaviour is affected both by his own immediately prior behaviour (self-contingency), and by that of the partner (interactive-contingency). Since attachment is always a two-person system, one that we co-create, could this information be part of the key to the riddle of the interview in Family Constellations and the evolving relationship between facilitator and client? Could this way of looking at things bring insight into the feeling of instant connection, or of missed connection, that is a foundational part of the facilitator-client relationship? This article takes Beebe’s work, specifically her book: The Origins of Attachment: Infant Research and Adult Treatment (2014), and puts it into the context of the facilitator-client relationship in Family Constellations.
Patricia Cleary: The Interrupted Reaching out Movement (IROM)
After our birth, the next decisive moment is the movement towards the mother, now as one facing us, who takes us to her breast and feeds us. With her milk we take life outside of her. We take her as the source of our life, with everything that flows from her to us. With her we take our life. This taking is active. We need to suck to make her milk flow. We must call for her to come. We must rejoice in what she gives us. She makes us rich. Later in life, it becomes clear, whoever succeeds in taking their mother completely in this way will be successful and happy. Just as a person rejoices in their mother, so they rejoice in life and in their work. Just as the mother gives them more and more, if they take from her with love, so their life and their work give them success to the same extent.
For a child, the entire world is initially comprised of the relationship to his or her parents or caretakers. When a child’s movements towards relationship are not responded to, and when all attempts at closeness lead repeatedly to rejection or helplessness, the child takes that to mean that the environment cannot be relied on to provide what is needed at that moment. Even a child not yet capable of speech becomes physically distressed and turns away when this occurs. The memory is held in the body, not the mind. The turning away is a physical action. For many people, taking the mother is prevented by an early experience; they experienced an early separation from their mother. Such separations would include: a caesarean birth, a period in an incubator, being left in a baby care group or in hospital, a mother’s hospitalisation (perhaps for the birth of another child), a mother’s illness meaning she had to leave for recovery, or when we were ill and she was not allowed to visit us. Also, sometimes parents leave their children in the care of relatives or friends because of work or travel and the child may be unable to feel the same degree of trust for the parents afterwards.
Just as a physical separation can have after-effects, an early emotional separation between mother and child may also result in similar effects. Emotional separation can even occur during the pregnancy. If it is a high-risk pregnancy and the mother fears for the health of the child or if the mother has previously lost a child or children, she no longer feels free to turn totally to the child-in-utero. This experience results in a deep change in our later behaviour. The pain of separation and the helplessness without her, the despair of not being able to go to her when we would have needed her so much, leads to an inner decision: “I’m giving up on her, I’m staying by myself, I’ll keep my distance, I turn my back on her.”
Francesca Mason Boring: Remembering Place – Honouring Mother Earth
In Constellation Work, through the experience of ‘representative perception’, we have observed consistently, how connected to each other we are as human beings. Hidden dynamics in a system can be reflected in the felt sense of a person representing some aspect of any system. Family systems, natural or environmental systems, organisational systems, social systems, all collective systems can be represented in a constellation. A representative may experience a ‘knowing’– a statement, a concept, a sentence which illuminates previously unavailable understanding regarding vulnerabilities and solutions within a system.
Being influenced by my own indigenous roots, a member of the Western Shoshone tribe, through my mother’s line, when I first encountered Family Systems Constellation, I marvelled at the remarkable reconnection with family and historical roots that was possible through Family Constellations. Reunions at the level of the soul had the capacity to free individuals from trans-generational pain and lightened the burden of carrying ancestral trauma that did not belong to them. In Family Constellations, I missed the container that held it all – the horrors and the healing. The land, the trees and the water all have the capacity to contribute to healing.