family sculpture paper

Sat Oct 10 09:07:05 CDT 2009

I happened to see my name regarding the paper on sculpting.    I read the paper.  Yes, it was good psychodrama, and I do not know whether you could have added constellation techniques to what happened, because I was not there to intuit what those might be.   You have to go by 'feel' in the here 
and now, in the presence of the protagonist, to add anything constellation-wise to psychodrama.   If my protagonist is locked into his perceptual level of the way things are, and is not particularly 'open' to new insights, it is better to get to inner revelation by psychodrama, not by adding constellation work techniques.    Thus far that has been my experience.

Bud,

The reason I say that is that when I am doing psychodrama, I am operating at a different level than I am when doing constellation work.   Psychodrama operates at a psychological level, the psychology of an 
individual protagonist, working through issues with others in the social atom on that level.   Occasionally, when a protagonist is in a trance, and transfixed in a psychodrama, and I intuit something beneath on the soul level, I might ask him or her to utter a line from the depths (of what Hellinger has discovered to be the 'soul level' ) to bring inner peace in addition to his psychologically working through something.   Here, when I do that, I ask the protagonist to repeat the line in monotone so it can become obvious the line resonates or does not resonate in the depths.   If it resonates in the depths, you can tell.   All the auxiliaries are 'affected' in a significant way, advancing the psychodrama, and the audience as well is moved.   The physical and emotional body cavity of the protagonist actually trembles with the realization.

If it doesn't do that, you ignore it.

This then becomes a psychodrama 'informed' by constellation work.   But it stays primarily psychodrama.
I agree with Bud that the advantage of the psychodrama is the sharing.   It is important that the sharing 
bond the group in a common human identification.    This is important for a therapeutic contract of being
able to disclose, work through emotional blocks using each other's experience, and learning to bond w/
others.

This is not what constellation work is trying to do.   Constellation work is usually one-shot.  There is no
therapeutic contract.    It does not try to work through problems on the individual's emotional level.   It
is a study of the energy field of the family.    The protagonist is not the client, but the family, and the facilitator may or may not use the client in the exploration.   While the constellation often is emotional,
that is not the goal of the constellation.   The goal of the constellation is to find the status and locus nascendi of the family issue in the past 5 generations, and then to intervene on an energy level, rather 
than a psychological level, to resolve it.   Lines are often used which often effect resolution, simple lines
like 'You are my mother, and you always will be my mother," when that kind of natural respect and
gratefulness has eluded the children for whatever reason.  "You gave me life."  But the main healing 
comes from the soul movements, the inner promptings to move onstage by the auxiliaries, without knowledge of the roles they are playing.   Roles are not elicited by role reversal or role development, but by the energy field, and what happens in the bodies of the auxiliaries.  The goal is never individual psychological resolution, but a certain 'peace' within a family system.   Hellinger came up with the work because he saw in his clients lingering effects from WW11, and the Holocaust, riddled through family systems, and came up with the constellation to bring peace and reconciliation to both the living and deal within family systems.    In Israel, Hellinger has worked with Jews and Palestinians with the same aim.

Sharing after a constellation is no problem, as long as there is sufficient distance between the constellation
and the sharing.   You are supposed to give the constellation time to work in the soul.   It is meditative in that sense.    Since constellation work is usually one-shot, building bonding as an ongoing therapeutic
goal is less important.   But not impossible either.

The one thing I do disagree with, Bud, is that Hellinger has no understanding of warm-up or Moreno's sociometry.    I have heard a lecture on this by Hellinger in Washington DC, in 2003, that showed he 
had picked up on warm-up/readiness, and group focus from somewhere, and it sounded likeour understanding.   I don't believe he was influenced directly by Moreno, but he obviously came across
someone else who had.   He constantly talks about the necessity of group energy to focus on the client before the work can proceed.   

Now, as Hellinger is as charismatic as Moreno, they both divert from their own understanding, by using their charisma to warm-up the audience, to draw the energy and focus of the group on his choice of someone to work with.   But they would both teach us when we have no such charisma, to pay attention
to the group process before working with people.

Ron Anderson

________________________________
From: Bud Weiss <bud.weiss at gmail.com>
To: Adam Blatner <adam at blatner.com>
Cc: list at grouptalkweb.org
Sent: Friday, October 9, 2009 11:19:15 PM
Subject: Re: family sculpture paper

Dear Adam: 
Thanks for bringing this forward.

I think you posted this previously and I really like it a lot.

 I imagine that when others see it, they will be doing a lot more family sculpting as it really gets things off the ground. 

I am sure there were other sessions following up on this one for Ruby with either CHris or another director. I would love to have heard about subsequent sessions prior to and perhaps, if there were any, after Ruby's discharge. 

I would like to hear from Ron or Karen who are trained Constellation facilitators as to what they might have done in addition in the session which was very rich to be sure. I think a lot of additional resolution could have taken place using some of the techniques and special sentences developed in Constellations regarding what is called "the orders of Love" that would have lead to greater movement over time for the protagonist. 

One of my peeves about the Constellation work is their refusal to allow for sharing ala psychodrama afterwards with their notion that somehow it will disturb or dilute or somehow interfere with the completion of the internal memory reformation that takes place when a constellation is completed. I really think that is because none of the people I have heard of who have trained at any level in constellations other than Ron and Karen really understand proper sharing and the way in which the director can guard against inappropriate analysis and distancing during the sharing. Moreover they do not understand Sociometry and the huge piece of social atom reconstruction that takes place for all involved as a consequence of effective sharing. 

Thoughts anyone?  Bud 

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 5:05 PM, Adam Blatner <ablatner at verizon.net> wrote:

I forgot, did I tell you about this paper I posted on my website?  http://www.blatner.com/adam/pdntbk/famsculptpdmenngr.html
>Adam Blatner, M.D.
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