“It takes a village” the saying goes. It’s usually applied to raising children, but it really applies to everything.
It takes a village to…
- mourn a loss
- adjust to a new reality
- endure being unemployed
- understand and announce your identity
- name and fight against an injustice
- come home from war and heal
- recover from an addiction
- change
- help someone with mental illness
- protect the weak, or animals, or the planet
I could go on, right? It takes a village to do most anything – even hermits need to feel a community who support them in their vocation of praying for the world.
But in so many ways, we don’t have a village. We leave the responsibility to raising children to two overwhelmed parents (and then to overwhelmed teachers). We give people with illnesses of any kind to the medical community and require them to take care of it.
We face our own demons, challenges and changes on our own, and face the reality that if we want help, we’re going to have to pay for it. (Not to dismiss paid, professional help – I’m one of them! – but we’re no replacement for community, right?)
I just spent last weekend teaching my Advanced Constellations students, but mostly being taught myself. I’d invited Jade Barclay (who Zoomed in from Australia) to teach us about trauma and attachment. She taught about how constellation facilitation can profit from understanding these things, but she also reminded us that constellations are uniquely gifted to help heal from trauma and attachment wounds.
More and more, trauma specialists understand trauma as a wound of aloneness. They’ve noticed that when we have a major life injury, if we are accompanied, supported and heard, the chance of it becoming long-lasting trauma is much less.
But if everyone around us was overwhelmed, too; or we were a child on our own with troubled parents; or the system we were in was so crazy (the military, the school system, the medical system) that there were no resources; then, we have inadequate connection to deal with the experience.
This leads to a more permanent injury – trauma – that shows up again and again, in hopes of someday being properly met, accompanied, seen, and connected.
When we have a great injury, loss, shock, abandonment or crisis of any kind, our experience of community will make the difference. This is the wisdom of traditions, rituals, memorials, acts of repentance and reconciliation – these are all community expressions of solidarity, shared pain and hope. And they make all the difference.
These are also the bread and butter of constellation work. Constellations insist that all wounds are community wounds – wounds of disconnection, loss, shock and overwhelm. The circle becomes part of the healing; the movements of a constellation are the movements of grieving, including, honoring, seeing, repenting, acknowledging, confessing, and naming that are the connected movements of healing.
An attendee at last year’s West Coast Intensive recently wrote about just this experience in the international constellations journal :
“Something I’ve observed in the short year since I’ve entered the Constellations Field is the instant intimacy and lowering of judgement that happens during and after participating in a Constellation.
The kind of connection that rips through all the surface stories, prejudices and judgements, alongside the instant compassion and understanding I’ve only experienced through doing this work.
[After attending the Intensive last year] I’m feeling loved and held in a way that I didn’t believe possible, especially since I grew up far away from all my family…”
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