Theriault and Edward Henry Faust & Joy Weldon Faust and To all families everywhere.
Contents
An Introduction: Finding Peace through Your Family Lineage
A Continuation of Healing Traditions
PART I:Acknowledging Our True Nature
Chapter 1: Remembering Who We Are
Chapter 2: Three Perennial Questions
Chapter 3: How We are Connected
Chapter 4: The Constellation Approach
PART II:Accepting Our Family as It Is
Chapter 5: Our Family of Origin
Chapter 6: Our Father’s Lineage and Our Mother’s Lineage
PART III:Accepting Our Family Influences as They Are
Chapter 8: Physical Disease and Mental Illness
Chapter 11: Immigration and Migration
PART IV:Agreeing to Our Soul Nature
Chapter 14: The Last Barrier to Peace
Chapter 16: Agreeing to All of It
PART V:Constellation Experiences
Appendix A: Family Constellations—Historical Development
Appendix B: Key Constellation Approach Concepts
Appendix C: The Constellation Approach Immersion Program
Foreword
We live in times of massive and irreversible global change. Accelerating destruction of the biosphere by the onslaught of petroleum-based industrial civilization is bringing about what evolutionary scientists call “the sixth extinction.” Population pressures are combining with environmental degradation to create a “perfect storm” that threatens the foundations of the social order—even as feckless politicians squabble about protecting their parochial interest.
These rapid global changes demand that once-isolated fields be studied as multidimensional systems. Such a systemic approach, requires, for example that leaders in the fields of medicine and psychotherapy work together to forge new methods for healing and intervention. Psychotherapy can no longer be viewed as a special sort of private interaction between two individuals in a closed room, but necessarily involves consideration of the complex web of relations existing in families, across multiple generations and within communities.
This multidimensional perspective to approaching global challenges has given rise to a systemic approach to multigenerational family therapy. Numerous individuals have developed this approach over the past thirty or so years both in Europe and the United States. One of the most original and influential pioneers of the family systems approach is the German former priest and family therapist Bert Hellinger, who is one of the three main teachers whom The Constellation Approach founders Jamy and Peter Faust credit as contributing to their own unique approach. Perhaps because of his history as a missionary priest in South Africa, Hellinger discovered and taught that recognition of the spiritual reality of pre-birth and post-death soul consciousness—a kind of consciousness—can be accessed through simple perception, without verbal analysis, of the relative postures and positioning of bodies in space.
As Jamy and Peter Faust put it, there are certain “threads of consciousness” that connect family members regardless of time-space distances and regardless even of the boundaries of birth and death. It is here that we find in the Hellinger-influenced systemic approach the most radical departure from conventional individual or family systems therapists. The majority of family systems therapists,