Hey there, my friends. So, let's start this class by briefly talking about what horse-assisted family constellations are. Starting with family constellations themselves.
Many people say that Bert Hellinger is the great creator of the systemic view, family therapy, and phenomenology, which is not true. What we know about family constellations is that they descend from many, many therapeutic practices that were brought together by this German man in the 60s and 70s, through his own personal quest to understand family systems and the laws that govern these relationships. The systemic view already existed, and phenomenology already existed.
Rupert Sheldrake was in the middle of research on morphic fields and their effect on animals, and consequently on us as well . Psychodrama already existed, among many other therapies; primal therapy, holding therapy, in short, many other therapies that also came to shape and complement Bert Hellinger's work. But briefly about the history of this man who we consider the great disseminator of family constellations, the man who codified this therapeutic practice as it is done today.
In short, he was a church missionary who spent 16 years on a mission with a tribe of Zulu warriors in South Africa. And what happened there is that this man, let's put it bluntly, went to catechize but ended up being catechized, because he began to perceive how these tribe members handled the relationship dilemmas that occurred among them. So, they usually sat in a circle, they usually brought the tribe's elders, those who knew the parents of the people involved in the dilemmas, and they dealt with these dilemmas from a broader view, or as we could say, from a systemic view.
That was not just a problem between two members of the tribe, but rather a problem for the entire tribe. Another very interesting thing is that for the Zulu warriors as well, the ancestors who died did not simply cease to exist. It is said that they believed and still believe that ancestry remains perpetual within the tribe, both through the dynamics of their children and spiritually on another plane.
So, we can understand that when one of our ancestors dies, they continue to act within us from this point of view. This was what most caught Bert Hellinger's attention when he brought these practices into the Western scenario, into our more Cartesian culture: that perhaps those who came before us may have left a legacy that is not just our physiognomy, not just our appearance, but they may also have left behind behaviors, traumas, lived dreams, unlived dreams, loves, illnesses, and so on and so forth. So, we can say that family constellation begins with an approach from an indigenous people, the Zulu people.
This is very interesting because the practice is often judged as something, uh, coming from Europe, from Germany, that is patriarchal, that belongs to a German, and therefore comes from a Nazi, which, in truth, has nothing to do with it. Family constellation transcends all these stereotypes in which society is involved and it truly looks at what is. And that is what we will cover in the next lesson.
Yeah.
