Published in Systemic Solutions Bulletin 2000/1 Page 37
By:
Publisher: Barbara Stones
59 Englewood Rd London SW12 9PB
Phone & Fax: +44 (0) 20 86 73 2508
As if by coincidence, a man and a woman from the same village met at a recent workshop in Bavarian. Although they only knew each other by sight, the woman felt inhibited, and in order to protect her privacy she decided she would ask him to leave the room when she set up her constellation. As it turned out, she didn’t work until the third day of the workshop and by then she was confident enough to do so with the man present. Her issues were about problems in her relationship with her husband, as well as the severe neurodermitis that afflicted her two younger daughters. She had four children, the eldest a boy, and three daughters.
As she set up her system, she seemed completely unaware that she had placed the two youngest daughters facing away from the rest of the family. Almost immediately, both of the representatives began to feel their skin itching and they said they felt pushed out and couldn’t remain in the constellation. A further enquiry into the history of the family failed to reveal anything significant, and the client herself seemed quite detached from what was going on.
As a last resort I asked the client whether fire had ever played a part in her family history, or if she knew of anyone who had died in a fire. In one of Bert’s workshops in Glarus, as well as in one of my own, I had abserved that there was a correlation between skin disease and incidents involving burning or fire. The client remained uninvolved and yielded no helpful information. However, the man from her village was instantly moved to tears and asked if he might say something. With the client’s agreement he reported that he had played in a brass band with her father and that every time they had played a particular march, at the same place in the music, her father had become upset. He would break down in tears, stop playing and leave the room.
I asked him what the theme of the song was. It was about comrades who had died by fire. I then asked the client to choose a representative for her father, and four others as him comrades. As soon as the comrades were placed in the constellation the two daughters began to feel much better. They felt drawn towards these men.
As I placed their grandfather in front of his comrades, the daughters no longer felt a pull towards them, but the severe itchiness remained. The grandfater’s representative did not want to look his comrades in the eye and he expressed no emotion.
I asked the four men to lie down on the floor. Now it became difficult for the grandfather to hold himself together and the terrible pain he felt was very obvious to see. Slowly he fell to his knees, looked into the eyes of his comrades, stroked their skin and comforted them. Finally he lay down beside them.
As at last he became peaceful, the two daughters were able to turn towards their family and the client rurned to her husband. She looked back once at her father and I asked her to say: „I agree to this and leave you with love. I will stay. Please bless me if I stay and bless my husband and my children.“
The representatives of the two daughters with the skin condition experienced it as particulary healing when the grandfather stroked his commrades skin. Their consuming task of carrying their grandfather’s grief seemed to have ended, at last.
Here we can see how the movements of the soul connect the group and can be trusted.