{"id":33,"date":"2026-09-28T14:48:59","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T14:48:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/constellationjourneys.com\/blog\/?p=33"},"modified":"2026-09-28T14:52:04","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T14:52:04","slug":"honoring-diversity-in-the-united-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/constellationjourneys.com\/blog\/honoring-diversity-in-the-united-states\/","title":{"rendered":"Honoring Diversity in the United States"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Andre lives with his mother and 2 siblings.  His sister has a 2 year old baby.  He\u2019s never known his father; his mother graduated from high school and works part-time as an aesthetician.  He works after school at a car wash and has just started the tenth grade.  \u2018Dre hangs out with some friends who have recently begun smoking marijuana and who are being mentored by some men who are teaching them to break into houses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Estelle lives with her parents, her mother\u2019s parents, her father\u2019s brother, and 2 cousins.  Her father works 7 days a week painting houses and apartments and her mother cleans houses. Estelle has a boyfriend and is helping her parents learn to read and write English.  Her mother hopes Estelle doesn\u2019t get pregnant before she\u2019s 18.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jim lives with his parents and two siblings on their family farm.  His father has 100 acres of corn and soybeans, is able to pay his bills each month and constantly worries about managing loans and aging equipment.  Jim is a football star, works hard to get good grades and hopes to be good enough to get an athletic scholarship to college.  Some of his friends have started hanging out at parties where it\u2019s rumored that kids are doing meth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Melanie plays volleyball, loves being in school musicals and volunteers at a senior citizen residence.  Her parents both have advanced college degrees and expect that Melanie will also.  Her father is having an affair, and her mother may be addicted to prescription painkillers.  Melanie thinks she will study biochemistry and eventually become a research scientist with the Centers for Disease Control working internationally to stop outbreaks of disease.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From one perspective the lives of Andre, Estelle, Jim and Melanie look extremely different, yet they all belong to the same system.  They have different parents and have inherited different genetic material, histories, values, beliefs, hopes and expectations from their respective family lineages.  They were each born into a unique field of knowing to which they and their family members belong out of unconscious love and loyalty.  They are all U.S. citizens, and therefore share membership in that same system as citizens.  Imagine if they all attended the same school.  To what degree their families and school teachers describe this shared system will influence how they perceive and feel about each other as young people from a wide variety of backgrounds.  Even more important to the ways that they might feel about each other are the unconscious ways loyalty to their family of origin confers belonging and, at a deep primal level, survival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps you\u2019ve wondered what life is like for another person.  In a hypothetical Constellations healing circle, each of these young people would take a turn setting up neutral representatives who would stand for their own parents and siblings as well as essential elements in their family lineage- religions, illnesses, countries of origin and so on.  Without words or processing, each person would feel and be witnessed in the holographic field of knowing of their family\u2019s soul.  All the strengths and challenges would be acknowledged without judgment.  The opportunity might arise for each of the young people to literally stand in the place of a person or important energy in one another\u2019s family, to experience what it was like for that person to move through life under some of the conditions of their specific inheritance without the need to change anything.  It\u2019s possible that they would see each other as more similar than they expected, and begin to feel more understanding and compassion for one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Growing up in the United States I often heard the phrase, \u201cThe United States is the greatest country in the history of the world,\u201d many times from politicians.  It felt off-putting to me, as a boast meant to overwhelm others.  As I grew I came to see it as a possible cover for unexamined doubt.  Through the lens of Family Constellations I can also look at it now as an undefined signifier of belonging and loyalty; an unofficial pledge of allegiance.  One of the promises of the U.S. is to recognize and respect all men, women and children as equal and deserving of equal opportunities, regardless of their religion, nationality or beliefs.  If you\u2019ve ever said the above-mentioned phrase or felt an agreement to it, I invite you to consider taking on the extra responsibilities a citizen of the US has to make it the greatest country.  Those responsibilities include being concerned enough for the well-being of every member to act in the interest of the common good.  This includes caring enough to know the lineage of every member of that family, and historically what has been your and your ancestors\u2019 place in the stories of other families. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[Originally published September 1, 2015]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Andre lives with his mother and 2 siblings.  His sister has a 2 year old baby.  He\u2019s never known his father; his mother graduated from high school and works part-time as an aesthetician.  He works after school at a car wash and has just started the tenth grade.  \u2018Dre hangs out with some friends who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/constellationjourneys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/constellationjourneys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/constellationjourneys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/constellationjourneys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/constellationjourneys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/constellationjourneys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36,"href":"https:\/\/constellationjourneys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions\/36"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/constellationjourneys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/constellationjourneys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/constellationjourneys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}