The development of Family Constellations in Australia
Family Constellations in Australia was still relatively little known when I first encountered the work around 2000.
Over the following two decades, I became closely involved in the development of Family Constellations training and practice in Australia.
My introduction came through Gestalt Therapy Australia (GTA), which brought two Dutch facilitators, Peter van Zuilekom and Otteline Lamet, to Australia. Their workshops introduced me to a way of working that was quite unlike anything I had encountered in my psychiatric and psychotherapeutic training.
Peter and Otteline brought a grounded and thoughtful approach to the work. They were quite open about the controversies and disagreements within the Family Constellations field at the time, and presented the explanations then being used not as established truths, but as the best ways they had found so far of making sense of what they were observing.
They also often facilitated together, effectively tag-teaming their way through a constellation and commenting as they went on what they were noticing and why they were making particular interventions. This made their decision-making unusually transparent. I was able to observe not only what they did, but something of the process by which they arrived there.
That combination of careful observation, openness about uncertainty and willingness to make the facilitator’s thinking visible made a strong impression on me. In retrospect, I can see some of the beginnings there of questions that have continued to shape my own work: What are we actually observing? What are we inferring? What explanations are useful — and how lightly should we hold them?
Chris with Peter VanZuilekom and Otteine Lamet when he brought them to Sydney to run a training in 2005
Helping the work develop in Australia
Over the following years, I became increasingly involved in Family Constellations and in helping the work develop in Australia.
From 2001 onwards, I helped bring a succession of experienced international facilitators to Australia. These included Peter van Zuilekom, Otteline Lamet, Jakob Schneider, Bertold Ulsamer, Gunthard Weber, Ursula Franke, Albrecht Mahr, Judith Hemming, Sneh Schnabel, Stephan Hausner and Guni Baxa.
This was an important period in the development of Family Constellations in Australia. There were practitioners and groups emerging in different parts of the country, but relatively few opportunities for sustained training or for people interested in the work to learn from one another.
I ran Family Constellations workshops in Melbourne, Sydney, Queensland and Western Australia, and later taught internationally in New Zealand, the United States, Singapore and Japan.
My involvement gradually extended beyond running workshops and organising visiting trainers. I became increasingly interested in how facilitators themselves could be trained, and in how the work might develop when brought into conversation with other areas of professional practice.
Chris Walsh with Jakob Schneider at the International Intensive Training in Kloster Bernreid, near Munich, in 2006
Training Family Constellations facilitators
Between 2006 and 2014, I ran three extended Family Constellations training programs, each lasting around eight months. Two were taught with Catherine Ingram, an accredited family therapist and psychiatric nurse, and I taught the third independently. I also provided Family Constellations training in Singapore.
Some of the people who trained with me during those years are still facilitating Family Constellations workshops today.
These trainings also became a place where my own approach began to change.
I had been practising meditation for many years and was increasingly teaching mindfulness professionally. Rather than treating mindfulness as something separate from Family Constellations, I began incorporating mindfulness practices into the facilitator training.
Initially, this was one strand within a broader training. Gradually I became interested in something more fundamental: what happens when mindful awareness becomes part of the way we actually observe and facilitate a constellation?
Developing mindfulness for everyday life
Between 2010 and 2018, I also ran six extended mindfulness training courses.
Each course consisted of three levels, with each level running for six weeks. An important feature of these programs was that mindfulness was not confined to formal meditation practice. Participants learned to bring mindful awareness into ordinary daily experience — relationships, conversations, emotional reactions, bodily responses and the countless small transitions that make up everyday life.
That emphasis turned out to be particularly important for my later work with Family Constellations.
If mindfulness is something we practise only while sitting quietly with our eyes closed, its usefulness to a facilitator is rather limited. Constellation work requires awareness while something complicated is actually happening: while we are listening, responding, noticing our own reactions, attending to a group and deciding whether or not to intervene.
The everyday-life mindfulness training therefore provided a much stronger foundation for what came next. Rather than simply adding mindfulness exercises to Family Constellations, I began exploring what constellation work might look like when mindfulness was built more intrinsically into the process itself.
Creating places for practitioners to learn from one another
Alongside the training, I was interested in creating ways for practitioners to continue learning from experience.
For more than a decade I coordinated a Melbourne peer supervision group for Family Constellations practitioners. This provided an opportunity to bring difficult or puzzling experiences from our work and explore them together, rather than assuming that the facilitator was always supposed to know what was going on.
In 2003, I also established and chaired Constellation Talk, an email discussion group that eventually grew to more than 1,000 members internationally.
This was well before Facebook groups became the usual meeting place for these conversations. Email discussion groups now seem almost quaint, but Constellation Talk became a lively forum in which people from Australia and overseas could compare experiences, discuss ideas and sometimes disagree quite energetically about them.
Much of that conversation eventually migrated to social media, and Constellation Talk is considerably quieter these days. For more than a decade, however, it provided an important meeting place for a field that was still finding its feet.
Developing larger training opportunities
In 2011, I initiated and organised the Australasian Pacific Intensive Systemic Constellation Training, bringing together Australian and international teachers for a more comprehensive training experience. I was both an organiser and trainer in the program.
By then, Family Constellations had become considerably more established in Australia. Different facilitators were developing their own ways of working, drawing on different therapeutic, systemic and experiential traditions.
My own approach was changing as well. My clinical work as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist increasingly included trauma and PTSD, while the mindfulness training had given me a much richer understanding of how awareness could operate in the middle of complex interpersonal situations.
The strands were beginning to come together.
From Family Constellations to Mindful Representations
There remained much about Family Constellations that I valued. Spatial representation could reveal relationships in a strikingly immediate way. Shifting perspective could loosen a story that had become fixed. Paying attention to bodily and emotional responses could bring previously overlooked information into awareness. And looking at an individual within a larger family or social system could considerably broaden our understanding of a problem.
At the same time, I became increasingly interested in how we know what we think we know.
There is what we observe. There is what we experience. There are facts we may know from other sources. And then there is what we make of all of that.
They are not necessarily the same thing.
Over time, these different strands — Family Constellations, psychiatry and psychotherapy, trauma work, systemic thinking and the increasingly intrinsic use of mindfulness — came together in the approach I now call Mindful Representations.
It grew out of Family Constellations rather than being a rejection of it.
An unexpected feeling, movement or response during a representation may be worth exploring. It may suggest a hypothesis. Sometimes subsequent information supports that hypothesis; sometimes it takes us somewhere quite different.
The challenge is to remain curious enough to notice what is happening without becoming so enchanted by our explanation that we stop looking. Look carefully. Wonder about what you see. Test your understanding. And remain willing to change your mind.
That has become one of the central principles of Mindful Representations. For those interested in the broader development of my approach, the Mindful Representations pages explore the ideas and practices in considerably greater depth.
[Read more about Mindful Representations →]
Family Constellations in Australia today
More than twenty-five years after I first encountered the work, Family Constellations is practised in many parts of Australia. There is no single Australian approach, and practitioners come from a wide variety of professional and personal backgrounds.
It is particularly satisfying that some of the people I trained many years ago are still facilitating Family Constellations today. The work has travelled in directions that none of us could have entirely anticipated in those early years.
My own work is now based in Melbourne, where I run Mindful Representations workshops and professional training at Abbotsford Convent.
For people looking specifically for workshops, there is more information on my Family Constellations in Melbourne page.
[Explore Family Constellations in Melbourne →]
Looking back, my relationship with Family Constellations has certainly evolved. What has remained remarkably constant is the curiosity that drew me to those first workshops.
There is still something valuable in creating a representation, looking carefully at what happens and allowing ourselves to encounter a situation from a different perspective.
The task, as I now see it, is not to have all the answers. It is to become better at looking, better at wondering, and a little less certain that our first explanation must be the right one.