Having been working with constellation work for 22 years I have come across the thorny issue of the superego many times. It is the main reason people do not facilitate well or even end up leaving the training.
What do I mean by superego? I don’t know its official psychological definition but for me, it represents the inner critic, the judge, the part of us that nags away and erodes our self-esteem. Where does our low self-esteem come from? Mostly from our parents, but for me, not so much in the way they treat us, but more in the way they are in themselves. If they feel bad about themselves as parents, they will be insecure in the way they take care of us – over-anxious and over-protective. Their anxieties are then transmitted to us as children and we grow up not trusting in our own instincts and abilities. They may also project their own inner critic on to us, eroding what small amount of self-esteem we have left. Then, as we become adults, we end up blaming them for the way we are and look to our children to validate us and make us feel better. And so the cycle continues.
How can we reverse this? I think particularly in British culture, this is a difficult task. There is little respect between children and their parents, in either direction. Many modern parents are themselves not at peace with their own parents and are frantically trying to be ‘better’ parents than they believe their own parents were. At the same time, they are highly stressed, often addicted to technology and many of both genders no longer know what their role is, either in the workplace or at home.
What feeds the superego is a firm belief in right and wrong, good and bad, cause and effect. These dualities have wreaked havoc in the world and often led to outright war. Whenever something tragic or difficult happens, there is a rush to apportion blame and many working in state run institutions – doctors, police, teachers, social workers – are afraid to work intuitively, because they are constantly living under the threat of being sued or humiliated. They follow the rulebook to the letter, leaving no evidence untraceable, noting everything in writing, with the result that normal human to human contact falls to the bottom of the pile. Leaders are scapegoated and branded as ‘evil’ by the masses who have often put them in that position in the first place.
Since embracing constellation work and the deep interconnectedness of everyone and everything, I have often pondered on the necessity for our inner critic. After all, it doesn’t exist in the animal or plant world does it? For some reason, we have been given the benefit of reflection but this is double-edged, because without it we would not judge either ourselves or each other.
When working as a Gestalt Psychotherapist with individual clients I would from time to time become incredibly sleepy. I would inwardly berate myself for: eating too much bread at lunch-time, overworking, not going to bed early enough the night before etc. some of which may well have been true of course, but what I began to see over time was that I could be exhausted with one client and wide awake and fully alert with the next and all those after. Then I once visited a client with chronic fatigue syndrome in her home and when I returned I felt so exhausted I had to go to bed. It was this experience that made me begin to stay curious about the overwhelming feeling of tiredness I would get at times and once I began facilitating groups, it became even more apparent, as often other people in the group would simultaneously become tired and sleepy. I began to see suppressed rage as a contributory factor, not necessarily THE CAUSE but something emerging from the field, which was worth staying interested in. Now I have developed curiosity in relation to all my interactions, looking at the field that exists between myself and another person, rather than apportioning blame or criticising myself. The Universe is constantly offering us enlightening gifts when we once begin to open our eyes.
This process opens up a wide vista for all concerned (and with groups and trainings, it often does involve more than two people) and through maintaining interest and curiosity, the field becomes a vast one and much more can be discovered. In a way this is the basis of constellation work. With the moving image in front of us we are exposed to a wider picture than our story had previously told us; we are opened up to other possibilities of what might have happened in our families. It is like we are being offered a surprise gift for the heart, which can feel very painful at times, but is nonetheless potentially transformative.
There appear to be several different groups of people who experience constellations. There are those who come for one constellation either individually or to a group, and as a result their lives are transformed and they are never seen or heard of again. The second category appear to be simply addicted to catharsis, find themselves in representations where strong feelings are expressed, or experience something similar with their own constellation but find that nothing much changes in their lives outside and yet they keep returning for more. The third category are those who do experience change outside, sometimes momentous and other times, smaller, almost insignificant and they recognise they are on a path they have no wish to move away from and constellation work becomes a lifetime’s journey for them. Often these people end up as facilitators and eventually trainers. I am one of this latter group.
The longer I work with constellations though, the more clearly I see how caught up so many people are with what is right and wrong. They may themselves have done something they feel bad about – had an abortion or an affair – or they see their ancestors as ‘bad’ people (ie perpetrators) and spend the rest of their lives atoning for either their own actions or those of their ancestors. Others live in constant denial of truth and this can lead to all kinds of illness, both mental and physical.
However, we see very clearly through constellation work that all that is needed is for those people to face their victims, to look at whatever or whoever they have turned their back on and to simply acknowledge what happened, to speak the truth, without shame or recriminations or justification but simply stating what is and what was. This is such a healing process for all concerned, but it can also be extremely painful, as people see how much of their lives they have spent in a stuck place of denial, atonement or basic survival, instead of feeling full alive and embedded in truth. But regret has no place here. Everything has its own time and it is never too late to make changes, even after someone has died.
It is a strange phenomenon that we are supposedly the superior species and yet animals seem to hold the wisdom. Watch the murmurations of starlings and see field phenomena at work – no leader, just a field connecting all of them and moving them as one into the most incredible patterns and shapes in the sky. They are not alone of course and similar processes can be witnessed with fish, turmites, bees, ants, buffalo.
Think for a moment, how differently would you behave towards others if you saw that we are all deeply interconnected? How would you see your other family members, particularly the so-called troublemakers? Imagine how different the world could be if we began to look through such a lens and could see that rather than another person or race being ‘bad’, ‘wrong’ or even ‘evil’, they were simply traumatised, caught in a stream of belonging to a certain group and if fate had just been slightly different, we ourselves could have been in that very group too?
Are you ready to make such a paradigm shift?