“Healer” is one of those words I use with mixed feelings. It gets used quite a lot, often too easily. Healing is a grave and mysterious thing, and I resist making broad claims about being a “healer.”
Having said that, we’ve all experienced healing. It’s a real thing, from broken bones to broken hearts. It’s the process from fragmentation to wholeness. However, it’s not a simple linear thing – we don’t just, say, do the opposite of what caused the breaking in the first place. Sometimes healing is profoundly paradoxical, and on its own terms, can hurt!
In constellations work, we have something we call “healing sentences.” Although there is a special focus on this idea in constellations, we’ve all experienced them. (In Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), healing sentences are like what are called “re-frames.”) Can you remember a time when you were really stuck with a certain way of seeing or experiencing something, and it was causing you pain, and then something arose – a bit of reading, the words of a good friend, a sudden insight – that caused you to see and feel the thing so differently, it no longer caused you the old pain?
Of course, we’ve all experienced this. It’s the magic of meaning-making, and what Bert Hellinger (the found of constellations work) called “our inner images.” Many good healers work with these inner images, these meanings, and help us find the pictures that can make life feel completely different.
In constellations, we discover that a particular meaning, created by historical trauma, has gotten stuck in a system. It’s this meaning, hidden and invisibly doing it’s work, that is causing the client enormous suffering. The meaning or image is there, trying to address what took place in the historical trauma, but despite its persistence, it doesn’t change anything. In fact, in its own way, it causes the system to unintentionally repeat and re-create the original trauma, so it never resolves or ends.
This is where healing sentences come in. What is underneath the trauma-dominated image that, if we brought it to light, might finally allow this process to complete and allow new life for the client? This is what we are looking for. Sometimes the new meaning arises spontaneously and powerfully – such a gift! Other times, we have to be on the hunt for it, respectfully, in the ongoing chaos of the historical trauma.
Here’s an example that arises frequently in constellations. The client, maybe, is experiencing enduring depression. They’ve tried lots of different things, but it doesn’t go away. We begin to wonder if the grief under the depression is a persistent quality of the family system, which isn’t very responsive to the usual ways of treating depression. Through constellation work, we discover that, yes, there is a deep grief, a monumental loss – perhaps much of the family died in the Holocaust, or in Chattel Slavery, or on the Walk of Tears. The trauma was devastating, unrelenting and unrecoverable.
The client unconsciously honors and tries to address the historic pain through their depression. But it doesn’t fix anything. It all continues to persist in them, without movement. So, we seek healing sentences that can allow the client to bring the past to proper consciousness, allow a place of deep reverence and respect for what happened, honor the dead, and permit new life to flow again. What words work specifically depend on the situation. But these are some that are extremely powerful:
I see now your suffering and the burden you carried. It was too much for you. I have a place in my heart always for you and what happened. I honor the dignity of your fate. I leave it with you, with respect. Thank for enduring long enough to bring me life – thank you for my life. Please bless me as I live well in your honor, always remembering the journey of my ancestors that brought me here.
There are many different words that might be useful, depending upon the specific situation. But words like these speak deeply to the soul and our innate connection with our ancestors. And when timed right, they can make all the difference – a much better way to honor our forebears than our persistent depression. When we find the right words, the client know it – their honoring and liberating quality are almost irresistable, and resolve the guilt we sometimes carry on behalf of our ancestors’ suffering.
Later this month, I am leading a workshop on how to find these sentences, for clients and for ourselves. Constellation facilitators in particular need an artful way to find these words when they are needed. But this skill is useful for any healing practitioner, whenever clients find themselves in an emotional loop that feels compelling but doesn’t take them anywhere new, and you are struggling to help them find a new position from which to view their issues.
See the details below for this online workshop. It would be great to have you!
When have you experienced the power of a new image or meaning? How did you find it – a friend, a poem, a dream? Share your stories on my blog, below…
Note: The photographs in the newsletter today are from my recent Utah adventure. Enjoy!
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