Family Constellations — Working with Generational Trauma

September 23 8:00 pm - 9:00 pm Online

Constellations are becoming more and more popular. The method that only a handful of people knew about in 2008, when I started practicing it, is now in growing demand. They even made a TV series about it — a Turkish one called Another Self. I haven’t watched it myself: for me, there are already more than enough stories about family tragedies, but they say the show is quite captivating.

I usually work with students and clients using Process-Oriented Therapy (Process Work). This method lies at the crossroads of deep psychotherapy and energy work, and it often proves very effective for those who are searching for new horizons in their careers, creativity, and relationships. But at some point, I pause the client and say: “We can’t go further — now we need a constellation.”

Why do I say that? Because sooner or later, we encounter tragedies of such scale that the two of us — client and therapist, two ordinary women — simply cannot enter them alone.

These stories were shaped by vast groups of people, cultural and religious frameworks, wars, and decades of organized violence. The family systems in which most descendants of the no-longer-existing Soviet Union were born are distorted and conditioned for survival under fear, hunger, deceit, hypocrisy, and endless resentment toward the world. Carrying these distortions, they force us and our children to repeat old stories again and again, only in new variations.

Behind each of us, no matter where we were born within that enormous multinational space, there is some collective nightmare: the Holodomor, the Holocaust, forced dispossession, the destruction of small peoples, labor camps, and so on.

Somehow, we managed to turn things around and step into a more prosperous world — one where we can have wealth, self-expression, love, and freedom to choose how, where, and with whom to live. But family systems — or in constellation terms, the ancestral field — do not reorganize themselves automatically.

They need to be seen, felt, lived through, digested. We need to reclaim the knowledge and respect for our ancestors’ experience: their talents, their ability to survive and endure hardship and danger, their strength and wisdom. And when we do, it’s no longer necessary to repeat the old narratives of poverty, loneliness, or the inability to create. By honoring their lives and stories, we can take their strength and weave a new pattern — one that was unavailable to previous generations.

We can live new stories, with less horror and violence, and more creativity and conscious choice.

This is especially important for my generation — those of us who are now 50+. But it is even more important for our children, who grew up under less external pressure, yet still feel the tension of the family field as a vague threat to their future.

I will write about our children and generational trauma in my next article.For now, I invite you to a Zoom meeting:

“Family and Systemic Constellations: Everything You Wanted to Ask and Learn About How We Live and Relate to Generational Trauma.”

Program: a short lecture, Q&A, and a brief practice.

Join us