Secrets hold hands with shame. When secrets that have affected a family come out it is possible to neutralise the shame that the secrets, and one or more family members, have been inadvertently shacked up with.. Often secrets are sealed for the supposed protection of one or more people, but secrets are not suited to protecting people, rarely do, and almost always cause harm to someone, sooner or later.
Dani Shapiro opens each episode of her wonderful podcast series, Family Secrets, in part with these lines. '...secrets that are kept from us, secrets that we keep from others, and secrets that we keep from ourselves.' These secrets are pieces of intensely consequential information, stored as untellable truths or terrors, flattened by the shame that always accompanies them until the breath of exposure revitalises them.
I'm hooked on each episode from her guest's first utterance. I have gasped, I have cried, and frequently speak out loud, at home alone, to a perpetrator who is part of the story. Listening to many seasons worth of podcasts has confirmed for me that secrets are pervasive, deeply lodged in the very fabric of family life: something is off, but you don't quite know what. You can't grasp it. These niggles living beneath our awareness are what Dani often refers to as 'the unthought known'.*
The frequency of easily imaginable secrets such as biological fathers who are discovered late or even later in life, as in Dani's own story, in her NY Times bestselling Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love (Alfred A. Knopf, January 2019) or the variety of previously unimaginable family histories, eventually make anything possible: flickering and glimmering, even waving and shouting on the outskirts of someone's ostensibly quiet life, getting ready to dump a few facts that will have dramatic impact in the present. Despite the apparent simplicity of the details, they are the source of often serious wounds of the heart and soul. The liberation of a secret may also release an avalanche of emotion, or less so, a simple 'ah, that's what's been bothering me' response.
In these peripheral phenomena - the impactful forgotten unacknowledged child, previous partner, disguised or hidden mental ill health, just for example - comes the realisation that so much pain and trauma is avoidable, if only we just told things as they are, and passed the facts on down the kinship lines. Instead it's widely believed that telling facts or the truth within family systems is harmful.
Family systems are hotbeds of all sorts of tensions, issues, and trauma, not just secrets - parentified children; adoption, miscarriage and abortion; abuse of every kind; the lingering effects of colonialism, war, and displacement; relational problems in couples, and so on and on. Constellations provide a straightforward way of cutting to the essence and offering ways to attribute, to gift, to give back the weight of whatever kind of trauma to the person who needs to hold it, though or she is not present and may have died as much as generations ago.
Family constellations is a modality that taps into universal human experience in a way that enables revelation and easing or ending embodied trauma of the client/participant/issueholder. The power of the trauma can be annulled in one session or, sometimes more, or open the person to further therapeutic exploration from their now much stronger and steadier place. Constellations rely on innate collective sensitivity to dynamics and blockages which occur across generations, multiple cultures, belief systems, and the sub-culture of family .
Once a person has worked with and resolved an issue, there are often consequential changes in the family system: just one stone tossed into the lake makes ripples. In this way, one person doing a constellation can be highly beneficial to others, without any further action, or any explicit communication with them about the issue the participant worked with in constellation.
As noted, Constellations work for a wide range of systemic and family issues. The modality is suitable for the normal range of well adults who may want to resolve an issue which feels important to them. Family constellations work is not indicated or suitable for minors, or for people who live with mental health diagnoses such as schizophrenia or similarly complex conditions .
Drop me a line at karensole@manawafamilyconstellations.com or book a session at www.manawafamilyconstellations.com
Copyright Karen Sole 2024
Karen Sole is a member of the Internatonal Institute for Complementary Therapists, and of the International Systemic Constellations Association (isca-network.org). She took her first training from Yildiz Sethi yildizsethi.com of familyconstellations.com.au . Karen's profile can be found on all three organisational sites.
For more information about Family/Systemic Constellations go to www.ulsamer.com www.yildizsethi.com www.ANZCI.com www.shavasti.com
For Dani Shapiro's podcast series, Family Secrets go wherever you listen to podcasts. www.danishapiro.com
*'Unthought known '- In terms of system-centred therapy, the concept refers to the boundary between apprehensive knowing (non-verbal) and comprehensive knowing - what we can allow ourselves to formulate in words. The expression was coined by Christopher Bollas.
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