Insights from training in Moscow

One of the things I had least expected to ever do, was to go to Moscow to teach. Two weeks later, back at the comfortable Systemic Constellations Center Riga office, it becomes clear that this experience is a worthwhile topic to write about. It was a truly great experience. And I am grateful for having the opportunity to share it with you now.

This training group had attracted people from all over the country, with several thousands of kilometres between the participants’ home cities, spanning multiple time zones. Many of the participants were trained family constellators, but there were also a number of business owners, consultants and trainers. And such a diverse group, eager to learn, opens up interesting possibilities for all involved.

Separating the fields

I know that constellations are taught differently in different parts of the world. I know it from experience, since on my journey to become a systemic trainer, I grew into organisational work with the Bert Hellinger Institute Netherlands in an international learning environment, and family work with the Moscow Institute of Systemic Solutions and Consulting. And in a way, although all roads lead to Rome (at the very end, ah?), organisational constellations can be addressed in many different ways, leading to different results.

What became clear to me, while teaching in Moscow, is that separating the family field from organisational field has real benefits. I love the saying “we do not bring Mums and Dads to organisational constellations”. I believe that it is a smart choice for constellators not to focus on a client’s heavy personal stories, family losses, tragedies, unsolved personal relationships in the family system, repeating patterns there, etc. when doing systemic organizational constellations. Even if the client’s entire system is seductively inviting you in.

One business owner was asking for a constellation since his company had started to stagnate financially; it was not able to generate more inflow of money. When setting up the constellation, the personal context kept appearing, through a new relationship and a hint of an early personal trauma. In respect of these elements, all we did was simply acknowledge them. We then continued to proceed with the organizational context interventions. Since it was a training group, we discussed the constellation a bit afterwards, and the client said that this was not the first time he had looked at this issue, but it had been the first time he left with the energy to solve his business issues. Because what he was capable of and willing to do – was to do business!

The more familiar with family work we are, the more we see how the family system affects the thinking, behaviour, decisions and drive of business people. And the more involved in it we get, the more it is like: when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. These dynamics are the source and ultimately the reason why they are in business. They can create a great energy of achievement. I realized that this is such a big responsibility of a constellatory, to be in harmony with the “business” energy, to enable the next step towards future success instead of the next step moving away from it. It seems that our experience in organizations and the business world can help a lot.

When discussing this topic with participants, and if we are honest to ourselves, we constellators have a lot to learn from businesses when it comes to energy. When we are supportive and do systemic work from the attitude that we are all “equal & different”, we can be truly helpful (not harmful). To me, a harmful effect would be that a business owner who is full of energy and who does an organizational constellation, would decide that he can no longer lead the business until he has healed all his personal childhood traumas, built a harmonious partnership, etc. All over the world we see that people with really crazy stuff going on in their personal lives can achieve unbelievable financial and social success. And some manage to stay successful all their life.

The role of language

The training in Moscow also made me think of the role of language in systemic work. It was the first time I did this training in Russian, which is a foreign language for me. I studied it since childhood, but suddenly understood that this was a whole different field. It might be a field that unconsciously unites all people speaking the same language, and I was a guest there, an observer. I will never be able to understand all the nuances that only the native speakers get (this is not about the language proficiency); people who speak it as their mother tongue or family language. That would be a nice systemic term – family language!

It seems to me that language is much more than just a method of communication. It seems that it is the main player in the formation of the identity of a nation. Coming from Latvia, where the Latvian language, my native tongue, was repressed for many years and only in the last 30 years has been fully rehabilitated, makes me sensitive to the language aspect and its influence on systemic work. We all notice in constellations how much more effect the resolving sentences have in our own language. I still remember how deeply touched I was during the SDO course in Groningen when in the last module, Jan Jacob asked us to say some honouring sentences to each other in our own language. It was even a bit painful.

I think that it is very important to offer systemic work in the native language. When translating books, people often notice that the construction of languages is so different, it is like the language is a concentrate of a nation’s family and social patterns, and when translating we sometimes introduce not just new words and concepts, but also new thinking, communication and feelings. And it is interesting to find out where the organizational patterns fit in. In a way, the question is: What comes first – the language or the organization? How long ago did the organizations start here? Maybe I am not very clear about it, but I would just like to share my thoughts, as far as I can understand it.

50 shades of society

It is the organizational issues we are talking about in the systemic constellations training; however, the shades of society shape organizations so much. To give a few examples:

• Ownership issues in former Soviet countries have, by default, a different quality than ownership issues in western societies, though both are about the ownership. The background experience of nationalization of property, for example, opens up a different playground, where room has to be granted for both polarities and far beyond, to make room for flourishing businesses. I can imagine that this concerns many societies in the world.
• The closeness of the fields of government and business makes free systemic movement in organizations impossible and requires that a lot is done in silence; there is an unconscious feeling of danger and questions cannot even be formulated on an organizational level; maybe this is a good reason for having a lot of personal and family issues to look at, instead of opening up the business-societal context.
• For consultants and individual systemic practitioners, the question is how to approach business organizations: Not to heal them, but to make them flourish. This requires business acumen, gut feeling and good systemic knowledge.
• For the whole field to open up for systemic organizational constellations (not structural or family constellations), this a process of letting go of old patterns, also on societal level.

It was a great moment at the end of three days of work when the participants said that they felt they had become more open and available for each other, realizing they are meeting their potential in an organizational context and are hungry for more systemic organizational experience. It was on the last day when we were starting to make the change possible.

Iveta Apine
Founder of the Systemic Constellations Center Riga
Affiliated trainer of BHIN