“The Constellations Reveal How The Traumas Of Our Ancestors Influence Us”

Stephan Hausner (Munich, 1963) is a naturopath who knows “systemic constellations”. Hausner travels around the world investigating how family dynamics or what happened in other generations can play a role in the development of disease and in the healing process.

Trained as a naturopath, he was originally interested in traditional Chinese medicine and ancient Greek medicine. He liked how they both try to figure out what is wrong with the body and try to restore order by putting in place an appropriate stimulus.

In 1988 he opened a homeopathy practice. Five years later he attended a conference by Bert Hellinger and immediately connected with his idea that a disorder in the family system can create difficulties in daily life
and that the work of the so-called family constellations can bring it to light.

Applying it to diseases and symptoms, Hausner has focused his work on addressing the family background of sick people, so that this helps activate their self-healing resources.

He tells it in his book Even if it costs me my life (Ed. Alma Lepik ) . Hausner gave us this interview at the Institut Gestalt headquarters.

The meaning of family constellations

– For those who do not know anything about family constellations, could you summarize what they are?
– It is not an easy question. In fact, I prefer the term systemic constellation because, beyond the family, in a constellation one has the possibility of showing a system of relationships.

The constellations bring to light how the traumas of our ancestors survive and influence us in life. Many problems can only be understood when they are viewed in a broader than personal context. With a constellation you have the possibility of staging important aspects and making them visible.

In family constellations, a client chooses from a group of people gathered a representative for himself, another for his father, another for his mother, another for his siblings, etc., and arranges them in the space of the room related according to their inner image. The strange thing and that nobody has been able to explain is that the representatives begin to feel the same as the real people they represent. In this way the constellation brings to light contexts of systemic relationship of which the person was not aware.

–Even if there is no explanation for what happens, how do you interpret it?
– I have made constellations in more than thirty countries in five continents and everywhere similar dynamics are shown. I think it has to do with the fact that deep down we all have the same needs. But the way in which the information is transmitted in detail, I do not know. And it does not matter. Because the constellation is one thing and the experience of the constellation is another.

The constellation is used as a tool but much more is worked with how the person feels about it.

The constellation does not end there properly, but the work continues later. The constellation reveals a momentary context of the system and opens the gaze to things that are not usually aware but that are essential to answer the question that each one asks.

“Is there always a question?”
“The way I work, yes.” The essential phenomenon of any constellation is the perception of the representatives: that they feel the same as real people. By not being emotionally attached to them, they can express it freely.

Anchor in life

– How was the experience of your first constellation?
– I had a homeopathy consultation and when I returned from a Bert Hellinger course a patient called me who was very ill. He felt suicidal because his wife had abandoned him overnight and gone to Greece with another man and his son.

My patient had entered a vital crisis that was beyond him. He came to my office and when I offered him the homeopathy granules he asked me if I really thought that was going to help him.

I had to admit that I didn’t believe it. I proposed a family constellation as an experiment.

He was willing to do anything. He mobilized some friends and that same night we met in my living room. In the constellation it came to light that his mother had committed suicide. I knew that he had died young, but not that he had left his father, he had lived in Italy for a few years and there he had committed suicide.

“And he didn’t know?”
-He does. But when this dynamic emerged, it became clear that my client’s wife had not been able to stay with him because he was closely linked to his mother and tended to follow her. That is why he was not available on a practical level for his wife or his son. That was the background to why his wife had left him and thus his tendency to suicide came to light.

When he recognized him and was able to respect his mother’s life and, above all, his decision to leave life, he separated his life path from that of his mother. Suddenly he could understand his wife, understand that she was leaving, and was able to anchor himself back into life.

–How can we stop these mechanisms by which we are reproducing tendencies of our parents or ancestors?
– What moves us the most, in general, is the child’s primary love for the parents. We are willing to do everything to be close to our parents. We follow them blind to their destination and we feel good that way because we feel linked to them out of love. But it is a blind love.

Because the child in that love does not see his parents and does not see that the parents do not want the child to fail in the same matters as them.

An important part of constellation work consists of creating a contact between the child or the child and their parents, and in making visible the blind love that leads to tragic destinies and illnesses. Because if the child recognizes that the mother could not do anything else but that of course she did not want him to follow her, he is respecting the mother’s destiny and can let her go and stay with himself: that would be the love that he knows how to see, that he carries towards health.

– What makes us sick and what heals us is the same, love, but understood differently?
-That’s how it is. Blind love can make us sick and love that knows how to see, the love that is in contact with the person in front of us, is the one that allows us to abandon the dynamics and heal ourselves.

– What other things make us sick? Or is it always this loyalty to parents?
– There are many things. There is the environment, the food … Our system is subjected to many demands to achieve balance. But at the same time, behind many diseases, family, systemic contexts act, which also have their role.

The desire of the child

–Are the constellations a support for other medicines or are they already useful in themselves?
–I always see diseases as a multifactorial event, which means that there is a physical, emotional and spiritual component, and probably also a family component. Where the family systemic factor is strongest, the constellation has a greater effect. But that is not a substitute for body care or good nutrition or whatever.

–What limitations do constellations have, for example with people suffering from mental illness?
–Working with constellations has a big problem: everything can be constellated and something always comes out. The decisive question is: Does the constellation help? Does it lead anywhere? And often this is not asked enough. In the case of mental illness, I do not work so much with the client as with his relatives, because they too can constellate the family system. And the backgrounds are often shown.

But it must be said that the effects shown with psychiatric illnesses do not seem to be that strong for the client. In any case, what I experience over and over again when I work with relatives is that relationships improve.

A new understanding

– Could you give an example?
–In families with psychotic children, suddenly there is a new understanding of what the child carries on himself for the whole family system, of what he does for that system. And that can be of great help. Because a tragic fate often acts as a separator from the family system.

And if you recognize how this is embedded within more serious contexts, that is, in the destinies of parents and even grandparents, then the understanding of each other increases. Although it does not have as much effect for the sick, it is a healing tool for families.

– What moves you the most about what you see in the constellations?
–What else, and Bert Hellinger has already formulated it, is that what moves us deeply is love. And we recognize this when we look into the eyes of another person. So we are not able to say anything bad about her. And what moves me is when it is recognized during the constellation that everything that family members do is nothing more than an expression of love.

By creating this field in which you do not look at the characteristics of people, their mistakes, what they have done wrong, but in which it is possible to connect with the love that is behind it, then a field is created in the one where healing occurs.

–Does this happen even with parents or ancestors who have acted cruelly, murderously?
-Yes too. Although naturally it is more difficult. But the real solutions occur beyond the level of blame and blame. If the client is able to go beyond this level, recognize that reproach and guilt take him away from the life force, then a peace that nobody could imagine before is generated.

This does not mean, of course, that anger, despair, and guilt are to be excluded. But you have to know that the real solutions always go further.

– Beyond justice?
-It is not about judging the family or changing the past but about asking: What attitude can I adopt in the face of that serious or painful thing that happened so that it is not linked to what happens to me now, and so that it does not limit me and does the future condition me?

Take care of the future

– Speaking of the future, can we do something so that future generations grow up healthier?
– Personally, through the constellations you can see how children are situated in the family system: are they in a place where they can develop? In a more general context, I think it would be important that the insights we have gained from this work could be brought back to school.

It would be interesting for children to learn from the beginning that there is always something that separates parents, because they are two people.

That the desire that children have for their parents to become one person is only achievable within themselves. And this is something that we live continuously in the constellations: how children strive to overcome the forces that separate their parents and unite them. In school it could be taught that there is only one place where parents can be united and that is in their hearts, regardless of the relationship between parents.

– Sometimes something serious happens in a family. How can it be treated so that it affects future generations as little as possible?

–In the constellations it is observed that the force in the system is related to excluded people or to events that have been excluded. Exclusion is a reaction to trauma, because at the time the resources were not available to integrate that serious thing that was happening. That’s why exclusions happen. And our experience is that excluded content is staged in future generations: the repetition of serious destinies happens where integration has not been achieved. But in the present, from a safe place, we have the possibility of looking at what was difficult and from there we can connect with what happened. What is integrated is at peace and no longer continues to act.

The end of a war

– Does what happened in the Spanish Civil War still affect us?
–The unresolved content is still active within us. And sometimes the trauma is so strong that a life is not enough for it to be integrated, it passes over a generation.

The grandchildren of the war generation seem more affected than the children. I believe that conflicts are always just as active but the grandchildren are further away from what happened and their body is more flexible so that this energy can manifest itself in a more powerful way than in the previous generation, in which they have experienced greater oppression and the silence could not be broken.

– Despite not having lived through the war, does today’s society continue to hide many things that will affect later generations?
– What worries me most today is that we are less and less able to establish contact with other people, even within our own family. Our children need a bit of guidance to be able to navigate personal communication.

Because for love not to be blind, for it to see, the ability to contact is necessary, even when emotions are very strong. That is where we should develop, and it is something that we are losing.

– Do you already detect it in the family constellations?
– The young people who come to the constellations are precisely those who are not afraid of contact. The potential for danger is more in those who are overcome by contact and who therefore escape to other worlds.

–For the constellation to help, then, is it necessary to be internally prepared?
–The most important thing for a successful process is the client’s willingness to assume responsibility with himself, with his life and with his current situation. Those who do not have this availability need support or previous work. I have worked in clinics and there I detect that the sick person places themselves in their sick role and expects others to do something for them.

And for the constellation to be successful you need to take responsibility, take care of your attitude towards life and be willing to work on this attitude.

Search in bad place

–The problems we have at work or with our partners, etc. Do they often respond to these unresolved issues with parents?
– Probably there is the most important cause. Unconsciously, what we lack from our parents we try to find elsewhere. If we look for it in the couple, we will have a couple problem. If we look for it in our boss, we will have the problem at work. The background is: we have all received something from our parents and we all lack something from our parents. And what we lack, we try to live it and we look for it in contexts where we cannot find it.

– Do we need to suffer to understand?
“Sometimes, unfortunately, yes.” Bert Hellinger said that real changes only happen at the limit.

“But is there always time?” Or is the disease sometimes too advanced?
“It may be too late.” But I am convinced that anything is possible. I have sometimes seen the body reorganize itself in minutes or seconds, and long-term discomforts suddenly disappear. So everything is possible but not everything is possible for everyone. It would be necessary to investigate more.