Already read this in the NYTimes Discussion? Then look at “Do Ancestral Families Have Soul?”

I too practice a healing modality known in the US as “Systemic Constellations,” or “Family Constellations.” The word “constellations” here is not a reference to astrology, but rather an image used to describe an ancestral family group with its own dynamic, homeostatic structure. This structure imposes different functions at times on the lives of the individuals that belong to it. Its purpose in doing so is simply the survival of the family group–the passing on of life and love through the generations.

When I hear about good parents, good siblings, and for instance one brother or sister that is somehow seriously problematic, my first impulse now is to look into the recent ancestors in the family system.

There is accumulating evidence that serious unaccepted fates and feelings among these ancestors can be passed down to grandchildren. It appears to be a kind of load balancing carried out by the family system. So, my first question is—is that “bad” child expressing a larger, older systemic problem that needs to be resolved?

An excellent analogy for this is found in modern technology. Suppose you have a problem with your voice mail. If you have local voice mail on your own device, you can troubleshoot this device. This is like trying to heal an individual person without reference to any larger system. But many of us these days have voice mail “in the cloud”—that is, with Verizon or some other larger networked system. If your voice mail is not on your local device, troubleshooting it there will fail. The problem will look inexplicable. You are looking in the wrong place. But if you go to the larger system of which your local device is a functioning part, you are now looking in the right place and can resolve things. So, sometimes our very individualistic culture misses these group issues. Not simply individuals, we belong as well to larger systems. We too are “networked.”

Hard science has recently abandoned its optimistic “genetic determinism” for a more realistic view that genes are switched on and off by a complex “epigenetic” coating which is inheritable, and which codes experiences in the lives of ancestors (see “Why Your DNA isn’t Your Destiny” at http://www.Time.com). This goes already a long way towards making family constellation work a more plausible approach.