What is Systemic Family Constellations Psychotherapy? Yildiz Sethi
Systemic becoming a buzz word
I have noticed the word 'systemic' has gradually become fairly mainstream in psychotherapy, counselling and coaching and also in the business and technical worlds. Systemic meaning opening up to view an individual or pattern as part of a larger organism with its resultant symptoms, elements and dynamics.
At the end of this article I offer you a highly discounted online offer for an online Introduction coming up soon.
Where we have come from in this field
The first person who did that was Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in his development of the first of the psychodynamic range, psychoanalysis. Through this he realised we are driven largely by our formative years where deep patterns of resilience and also dysfunction are set up through the connections with our main care-givers, our parents. He formulated an approach to assist his patients to resolve their psychic and emotional conflicts so as have better mental health.
Initially he discovered that being able to talk about their life experiences appeared to help. This became the birth of talk-therapies.
Over time, he found that although talking does provide some relief and awareness, it often doesn’t result in deep psychological and emotional change or resolution for many.
Through his practice he came up with the notion of the mind consisting of at least two sections: conscious and subconscious.
This has now been validated.
In the early 2000’s, the conscious to subconscious ratio was deemed to be in the ratio of about 20:80, while in 2026 through further neuroscience research, that ratio is 5:95.
Following his idea that much of the causes of what his patients suffering came from disturbing experiences that were repressed to a much deeper place in their subconscious mind. Freud wanted to find a way to access the subconscious mind. This led him to Franz Anton Mesmer a Viennese physician from the 1770’s who successfully used mesmerism in his treatments with patients. Freud became fascinated with mesmerism or hypnosis as a way to the deeper realms of the mind. Unfortunately for Freud, there was little known about hypnosis at that time, other than being able to view hypnotist shows, often in fair grounds or circuses. He was unable to access the knowledge and skills to use hypnosis as a therapeutic tool with the mind.
He eventually gave up on this exploration and decided instead to develop his talk-therapy approach called psychoanalysis.
An extremely long-term approach of years and decades of treatment due to working only with the available 5% in trying to locate the 95%.
From the early the mid 1900’s a range of psychotherapies for personal and family therapies evolved. In focusing on family therapy as a focus on assisting dysfunctions arising from family relational connections, a wide spectrum of Family Systems psychotherapies arose. This was followed by the work of Virginia Satir’s process of working with families and the now the popular Internal Family Systems that has evolved over the last twenty years.
In the background of these developments, we had Bert Hellinger a German retired catholic priest who took his experience of being with the Zulu people and became a family therapist. He did studies and researched many psychotherapy styles including the psychodynamic, Jungian therapy, Transactional Analysis, Gestalt and Virginia Satir’s work and Milson Erickson’s metaphoric hypnosis to create Family Constellations in the 1990’s.
(The progression and evolution of psychotherapies is explained in much more in my book Rapid Core Healing Pathways to growth and emotional Healing Details.)
Today we have a wide scope of psychotherapies from the transpersonal, psycho-spiritual to the emotionally focused, creative and play therapies, client centred Rogerian, to Cognitive Behavioural Therapies on the other side, that now include such approaches as EMDR and Mindfulness meditation as well.
Interestingly, Internal Family Systems (according to an Internal Family Systems presenter and trainer at a recent psychotherapy seminar presentation) is part of the psycho-spiritual part of the psychotherapy spectrum, due to its use of ‘Higher self,‘ in its therapeutic process. This is also where I would put Systemic Family Constellations in its systemic view of individuals as part of their larger family system in providing a healthy place. Where the opportunity to make peace with generational entanglements and dynamics may be seen, so as to move towards more personal freedom.
Systemic family Constellations is a culmination of much from the past with Hellinger’s unique approach of viewing family systems and demonstration of how patterns may be carried into the present. This has its own philosophy, theory and practice for personal and group work. This approach accesses what I have called “the generational subconscious”: An important part of the 95% of the mind in brief experiential interventions.
There is now good quality clinical Research on Family Constellations
Systemic and Family Constellations is now validated by several published clinical trials with another to be published later this year.
What I offer
I am holding an event called Introduction to Family Constellations on 21 June 10-4 pm Online AEST Brisbane for a huge reduction in price of $49 AUD. This is a day of information and experiences for anyone who may be interested in mental health, personal growth, psychotherapy and those who are natural therapists, coaches, educators or leaders.