Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog

Today was another day-long workshop, this time with the full-time MBA group at Henley. It was a very interesting session to run, though I was feeling quite drained by the end. They were really ready to spend some time out from what must feel like a constant onslaught of “stuff” (and nonsense?) of subjects for which they are about to enter an intense period of assessment. I was somewhat surprised that most of the learning teams had, now four months in, not spent any time deliberately reflecting, sharing and discussing how the team-work was going.  My session gave them permission to do so, and I was also determined to keep the message going regarding the purpose of PD on their programme. Overall, one of the most entertaining and rewarding sessions for me so far.

I’m now on the eighth and final task in these personal/biographical key events. It’s the wild card, the “other”, the one they couldn’t predict when they wrote the questionnaire.  Again, as with some of these other daily postings, I have ‘ummed and aahed’ about what to pick. Something related to Henley (such a big part of my identity, even before I got the job there)? Or something to help explain my area of interest in research, which is people’s ways of making sense of themselves through their stories?   Or, since we’re in the territory of history, something from the family vault?

I’m going to go for one that I don’t think I’ve written about on the Blog before, but it was an experience that had a profound effect for me. A release, in fact. Before I left Hungary, in a period of some introspection during which I mixed professional interest in systems thinking with personal curiosity, I was taken along to take part in a Family Constellation workshop (which ran over two days). Constellation Therapy is the work of a German psychotherapist named Bert Hellinger. Hellinger’s experience of the rise of Hitler in Germany, conscription, capture and escape as a German soldier, entry to and ordination in the Catholic Church, travel to and around Africa, interest in group dynamics and African social traditions, return to Europe and departure from the Church, marriage and then study of psychoanalysis in Vienna, followed by travel to the States and study of Transactional Analysis all led him to develop a (controversial) alternative therapy for individuals to address present and recurring problems in their lives. According to the UK Hellinger web site

“Hellinger discovered that the fates of those earlier in our families influence those who come later. Bert Hellinger noticed the presence and observed the actions of the family conscience which guards the integrity of the family system. What Hellinger has articulated are hidden orders supporting the flow of systemic energy in the service of bonding. In families, this energy is love; when these orders are ignored, love is harmed and family members, usually children, come under systemic pressure to balance the harm. Bert Hellinger’s systemic therapy provides a way of restoring balance to the system and alignment with what is.”

That’s the blurb. The programme I attended, run in Hungarian, was attended by about 20 people, mostly strangers to each other. We all sat in a large room in a circles and the first person volunteered to state what they felt their problem was. Then they were asked by the therapist to give information (facts only) about certain family members. The therapist then asked them to choose people from the circle to represent some or all of the the family group, going back two or three generations (the numbers varied depending on the story being told) and also one person to stand in for them. The next step was then for the person to guide the various characters into the empty space in the middle, to whichever spot felt right, and to face them wherever felt most appropriate. They also did this for their own character. The effect was clear, the person was creating a physical representation of their own family dynamic.  Once this is done, the person sat back down and we waited. The ‘characters’ were then free to reposition themselves according to whatever emotion, idea or impulse they felt appropriate, and to keep moving until they felt they were in the “right” position. This sounds odd, and it did look odd (it was even odder being selected a couple times to “be” someone’s grandfather or brother in their constellation. But, amazing things happened. Every time. First, people did react, and did reposition themselves, and they did report feeling certain emotions (including joy and fear), and certain attractions. The therapist watched the unfolding moves, and would sometimes ask a further question (sometimes people were sent out to phone for family info, since we were in Hungary and were often dealing with traumatic family stories of love and loss from the Second World War, and many families had secrets), and would sometimes introduce new characters. The process was designed to realign the constellation, to surface the business of the past stuck in the present (sounds strange, but this is how it looked) and achieve healing. Eventually, the subject of the constellation replaces the person who is playing them, and this was often when emotion was highest in the room (people cried – a lot), and the sequence usually ended with the person acknowledging their debt for living to their parents, grandparents etc and affirmed verbally their intention to now be responsible for living their own lives (“our parents always have a task for us?”). Over the weekend, then, I sat through (occasionally stood in) about 20 such scenarios, including my own.  For me, I was able to resolve a major mystery surrounding the fate of my grandfather in Ireland (a man I never knew, but someone who lived an extraordinary and tragic life) as well as understanding more about my own father and his reasons for his loyalties. I identify this workshop as the moment at which I could begin to work 100% on my life as my own project.

The whole experience was pretty powerful, with people’s entangled energy dissipating, sometimes instantly and sometimes over the next days and weeks.  It never felt religious, or even spiritual (I don’t believe that the dead haunt us, though their past actions are part of our present), but on the other hand I am at a loss to explain how a bunch of strangers could experience the flow of energy and sometimes accurately the secrets hidden in family stories of others.

Tomorrow I will try to see what pattern there is, if any, in these eight short stories.