"Vulnerability is not weakness, and that myth is profoundly dangerous."  -Brene Brown

"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."  -Carl Jung
 

One of the purposes of shame is to keep secrets hidden; a healing response is to look bravely at what happened until its power to restrict is gone.  -Constellation Journeys

In one of our recent seminars I was asked to represent toxic shame in someone’s constellation.  In addition to key family members, important phenomena that the client has inherited as part of the family consciousness are sometimes represented in order to have more of the energies of the family soul acknowledged and included in the transformational process.

Once I was placed in the constellation as toxic shame, I found I had little personal connection with the other people in the group.  Their presence was not that important to me. I also felt powerful, and sensed I wanted to make a movement winding between and around people.  It felt like my energy body was already moving that way even though I was standing in place. I wasn’t a snake exactly, more like a wide vertical ribbon that could slide easily around the others, but I felt the sinuous movements of a snake in my being.  

For a few minutes the representatives were given the freedom to slowly move and explore the space and their relationships without speaking.  I found myself calmly circling various representatives and noticed my power to make them keep moving away from me. Eventually we came to a stop, and I felt like I could have pleasurably kept stirring the whole constellation.

Kelly, as facilitator, began asking the representatives about their experiences and impressions of each other.  Things began to shift between them as they began to report what they sensed from the field of the constellation.  They began to look more openly at each other and to have authentic sharing about some things that had probably never been spoken about in the actual family.  As the level of honesty arose in the group and new connections gradually began to form I felt my own energy began to wane. My sense of power dissipated, and I felt less and less a part of the process.

By the end of the constellation (which likely took close to an hour) I had experienced in my body a shift of the false power that shame carried at the start, to the true power that resides in openness, authenticity, and bravely naming and looking at what has been hidden in the family system.  Many times there is one person in a generation who chooses on the soul level to be attuned to what’s been denied, avoided or rejected in the larger family system. Through their strength and perseverance, which sometimes can look like confusion or alienation, they walk a path that seems unusual to other family members while they care deeply about restoring what has been disconnected.  While this account is a necessarily brief sketch, leaving out the gradual nature of the changes and the subtlety of each representative’s inner movements, it matches what we often see in constellations that involve secrets.

One of the powers of a constellation is in the opportunity to explore difficult family patterns and practice saying things using representatives, without being in the presence of actual family members.  In a longer seminar, as participants take turns standing for each other, a deep sense of trust can be evoked in the group. We all see that even though we come from unique stories and backgrounds, the experience of coming to life through a family lineage is something we all share.  As we each come to more peace, we contribute to more peace in the world. May all families be reconciled.

[Permission from the client was granted for the sharing of this experience.]