The interview begins before we speak
Before a representation begins, there is usually a conversation. But in my workshops, the conversation doesn’t quite begin with talking.
I sit beside the seeker and invite the whole group to become quiet for a moment:
“We’re all going to just quietly tune into ourselves and to the seeker for a moment.”
Nothing particularly dramatic is meant to happen. We are simply allowing the bustle of what came before to settle and bringing our attention to ourselves, to the seeker and to what is about to begin.
That brief pause changes the atmosphere. It creates something of a meditative space around the interview, while also establishing a quieter, largely unspoken connection between the seeker and me. The people in the holding circle are included as well—not as an audience waiting for the interesting part to start, but as part of the attentive space in which the work will take place.
This is already an application of mindfulness. We are noticing what is here before we start trying to understand it. That same quality of attention continues throughout the interview: outwardly towards the seeker and what they are telling us, and inwardly towards our own responses as the conversation unfolds.
Only then do we begin to talk.
Sometimes the conversation that follows is quite brief; sometimes the territory needs a little more exploring. And there is always space for mindful pauses along the way, allowing the facilitator, the seeker and, in a group setting, everyone in the circle to quietly tune into themselves and notice how they are responding to what is happening.
The interview is not simply preparation for the representation. In an important sense, the work has already begun. As we listen with an open mind and precise mindful awareness, aspects of the entanglement may begin to reveal themselves—and sometimes the first movements towards resolution appear as well. We don’t need to work everything out before moving into representation, but neither should we overlook what is already emerging in the conversation.
We are trying to get our bearings: to understand what has brought the seeker here, what really matters to them and what they would genuinely like to move towards. We need enough relevant family and historical information to know where we might begin, while remaining alert to what we don’t know. Almost inevitably, some early ideas will also begin forming about what might be going on. The trick is to let those ideas be useful without allowing them to take over the expedition.
Meeting the person before investigating the family
It is remarkably easy, particularly once we have become interested in systemic work, to hear someone say, “My relationship with my daughter has become very difficult,” and have our mind immediately set off in search of the daughter’s father, the grandparents, previous partners, early deaths and anyone who might conceivably have been excluded from the family.
Some of that may become highly relevant. But first there is a person sitting with us trying to tell us something that matters to them.
The interview therefore begins with connection and curiosity. What has brought them here? What is happening now? Why has this become important at this particular point in their life? Mindful attention helps because listening involves rather more than waiting for enough information to formulate the next clever question. We can listen to the words while also noticing pauses, changes in expression or tone, and moments when something seems to become more alive—or more difficult. At the same time, we can notice what is happening in ourselves without needing to decide immediately what any of it means.
People do not necessarily arrive with a neatly formulated problem. They may bring a painful relationship, a pattern that seems to keep repeating, a decision they cannot make, or simply the uncomfortable sense that something is not right. Sometimes the first part of the interview is less about collecting information than helping the person hear more clearly what they themselves are trying to say.
That is already useful work. But clarification is not the same as explanation. At this stage we are trying to understand what is troubling them, not demonstrate how quickly we can explain why.
Establishing a solution focus
One of the most important tasks of the pre-representation interview is to establish a solution focus. This can easily be misunderstood, because being solution focused does not mean that we have now understood the problem and are going to fix it. Nor does it mean converting whatever the seeker brings into a tidy, achievable goal. It means becoming clearer about what the seeker genuinely wants and what they would like to move towards.
We might begin simply by asking, “What would you like?” The first answer is sometimes the problem wearing a slightly different hat: “I want my daughter to stop treating me like this,” “I want my husband to understand me,” or “I want my mother to change.” These answers matter because they tell us something about where the pain is, but they may not yet tell us what the person most deeply wants.
And people can be surprisingly frightened to say that. What they really want may feel unrealistic, selfish, embarrassing or painfully vulnerable. They may have spent years telling themselves that they shouldn’t want it at all. Sometimes the careful, reasonable answer is perfectly genuine but still manages to keep the more tender answer safely out of sight.
At times I will therefore ask, “What is your heart’s desire?” It is a slightly different question, and it can open a different door. Someone who begins with “I just want us to stop fighting” may eventually say, “I want to feel close to my daughter again.” Someone who wants to understand why their father behaved as he did may discover that underneath the wish for understanding is something more personal: “I want to be able to love him without pretending that what happened was all right.”
Sometimes what emerges is something that reality cannot simply provide. A person may finally say, “I want my mother to love me.” There is no need to rush in and tidy that up into a properly achievable therapeutic objective. The longing itself matters. Before exploring what might actually be possible, it can be important to allow what is genuinely wanted to be spoken and heard.
This can be a particularly good moment for a mindful pause. Something important may just have entered the room, and we don’t necessarily help by immediately doing something with it. The seeker can notice what it is like to have said those words aloud, while the facilitator—and, in a group setting, the people in the holding circle—can quietly notice their own responses. Allowing the heart’s desire to truly register and land within that mindful pause gives both direction and impetus for subsequent work.
Curiosity with a purpose
Finding the seeker’s heart’s desire helps us establish a solution focus, but the solution focus then needs to remain alive. Representational work can generate an extraordinary amount of interesting material: an earlier loss, a forgotten family member, a striking similarity between generations, an unexpected response from a representative, or something equally unexpected emerging through floor markers or figures in individual work. Any of these may be important, but they can also lead us down fascinating side roads until we discover that we have learned a great deal and quietly lost sight of why the seeker came in the first place.
This is why I think of the work as curiosity with a purpose. We want to remain genuinely open to what emerges without simply wandering wherever the next interesting thing takes us. The solution focus gives that curiosity a direction without dictating where we must end up.
It also helps us keep an important distinction in view: understanding a problem is not the same as moving towards a solution, and moving towards a solution is not the same as fixing the problem.
If an avalanche has buried the road, understanding the weather conditions, the slope and exactly why the avalanche occurred may be fascinating and useful. But eventually, if we want to get anywhere, we may need some shovels. In much the same way, we can develop an increasingly sophisticated understanding of why a family difficulty may have arisen and still find ourselves standing in exactly the same place.
Being solution focused asks something more of us. As the work unfolds, we keep returning to what the seeker came wanting and ask whether what we are exploring is helping movement in that direction. This doesn’t mean forcing the work towards a predetermined ending. A compass gives us a direction; it does not tell us what we are going to find along the way.
And critically, moving towards resolution is not the same as fixing the seeker’s external problem. A mother may not suddenly become loving, an estranged sibling may remain estranged, and the past remains stubbornly resistant to alteration. Resolution may instead involve greater coherence or recognition, a more appropriate connection or distance, increased choice, acknowledging someone or something that has previously been excluded, or simply opening a different possibility.
What can change is the seeker’s relationship to what is there. At some point the emphasis therefore begins to shift from “What is going on here?” towards “What might allow some movement towards what the seeker really wants?” We don’t need to manufacture a tidy ending. We are looking for a direction of travel.
The Resolution Compass begins in the interview
It is tempting to think of this as something we bring out towards the end of a constellation when it is time to start resolving things. In practice, I find it much more useful to engage the compass during the interview itself. When that happens clearly, the representational work that follows—whether in a group or one-to-one—tends to proceed much more smoothly. When the solution focus remains vague, something important has not been adequately recognised, or we become absorbed in understanding the problem without developing any sense of movement towards resolution, the work is much more likely to lose its way.
Solution Focus gives us our initial direction: what really matters to the seeker and what would they like to move towards?
Include What’s Been Excluded begins as we listen to their story. Are there significant people, relationships, losses or events that have had little place in it? We do not decide in advance that these explain the problem, but we remain alert to what may need recognition or inclusion.
Move Towards Resolution reminds us that understanding is not the final destination. Even during the interview, the conversation can begin to shift from repeatedly describing the difficulty towards noticing what might allow some movement in relation to it.
And Integrate can begin before any formal representation has taken place. A seeker may hear themselves say their heart’s desire aloud for the first time, recognise the significance of something in their family history, or experience a small but meaningful shift during a mindful pause. There may already be something worth allowing to settle rather than immediately hurrying on.
This has particular importance for individual work. The Resolution Compass is not dependent upon having a group of representatives standing in a room. Once the direction has begun to emerge through the interview, it can guide whatever representational form follows—human representatives in a workshop, floor markers, tabletop figures or other forms of one-to-one work. In that sense, the interview does more than prepare us for a representation. It begins to create a bridge between the conversation and the representational work that follows.
Gathering what we actually know
Once we have some sense of the issue and the direction of travel, we can begin gathering the information that might help. But more information is not necessarily better information.
Here it is useful to distinguish existential facts from the family’s accumulated descriptions, interpretations and opinions about one another.
Existential facts are things that happened: births and deaths, marriages and separations, early deaths, previous partners, children who died or were given up, migrations, war, displacement, serious illness, adoption, imprisonment and other significant events that may have shaped the family. Earlier generations may matter too, along with the historical and cultural world in which they lived.
These facts give us something of the landscape in which the family has lived. These facts can point to a place where the intensity of the seeker’s issue make s sense eg One participant who had a highly exaggerated fear of conflict turned out to have a grandfather who was run over by a train shortly after a nasty argument with his daughter. Suddenly her response to conflict could be viewed in a wider historical context. This provided a striking and useful hypothesis to explore.
What we generally don’t need is a detailed advance briefing on who got on with whom, who was difficult, who was the favourite, who never really liked Uncle Fred, or what everybody thinks motivated everybody else.
Some of that may be important to the seeker, but introducing it before the representation can also load the dice. If representatives have already been told that a father was cold and rejecting, it becomes rather harder for them to approach the representation without that description influencing what they notice and how they understand what they experience. The same applies to people observing from the holding circle and, of course, to the facilitator. In individual work, the risk is still present: the facilitator and seeker can both become so primed by the story that the floor markers or figures end up being used to illustrate what has already been decided rather than to explore what we do not yet know.
None of us becomes magically immune to suggestion simply because we know the word phenomenological.
So there is a degree of restraint involved in a good pre-representation interview. We want enough factual information to provide a meaningful context, but we can be deliberately sparing with information that tells us in advance how we should expect the relationships to be. This leaves more room for the representation to surprise us.
That does not mean the seeker’s experience and understanding of their relationships are somehow inadmissible. Far from it. “My father never loved me” may carry years of pain and be enormously important to the seeker. But it is different from “My father left when I was six and I saw him twice after that.” One tells us something about the seeker’s experience and the meaning they have made of it; the other gives us something closer to an established history. Pasted text
Both matter. We just need to know which is which.
This is another place where mindfulness becomes practical rather than decorative. We can notice the almost automatic movement of our own mind from hearing something to making something of it. There are facts—reasonably established information about events and contextual and historical facts, such as war, migration, poverty or social upheaval. There is what the seeker remembers, experiences and believes. There is what we ourselves observe during the conversation. And then there are the interpretations and hypotheses that begin forming as we try to make sense of it all.
The aim is not to stop thinking. It is to notice when thinking has moved beyond what we actually know.
More is happening than the words being spoken
Information is already emerging while we are asking these questions. A seeker’s face may change when a particular person is mentioned. Anger may unexpectedly give way to grief, or a story that had been flowing easily may suddenly become difficult to tell. We don’t need to interpret these changes immediately, but it would be rather odd not to notice them.
The same applies to what happens in us. Perhaps the seeker mentions a particular person and I suddenly notice a tightness in my chest. Perhaps I become unexpectedly sad, protective, irritated or uneasy, or feel an impulse to move closer, pull back, reassure or change the subject. Noticing these responses is itself an act of mindfulness. Rather than acting on them automatically, I can become curious about what has changed, when I first noticed it and what was happening just before it arose. A mindful pause may give both of us—and, in a group, everyone in the circle—a little more room to notice what is happening without rushing to make something of it.
Sometimes my response may alert me to something worth exploring; at other times it may have much more to do with what I have brought into the room. Usually, at least initially, I don’t know which. Unfortunately, our responses don’t arrive helpfully stamped IMPORTANT SYSTEMIC INFORMATION or THIS ONE IS YOUR OWN BAGGAGE. Pasted text Mindfulness gives us a little more room between noticing a response and deciding what it means. In that small space, we have a little more freedom about what we do next.
By this stage we have gathered rather more than a collection of family facts. We have the seeker’s account and experience, some established history, gaps in that history, things we have observed during the conversation, and perhaps some responses in ourselves that have caught our attention. Inevitably, our minds begin trying to make something of all this, which brings us to the useful—and occasionally hazardous—business of forming hypotheses.
Don’t marry the hypothesis before lunch
Give us a few facts, a strong feeling and something unexpected, and we can cook up a remarkably convincing explanation before morning tea. Sometimes it may even be right. The trick is not to marry it before lunch. Pasted text
There is nothing wrong with forming hypotheses. Indeed, without them we would have difficulty deciding where to look next. The useful stance is I wonder whether… Perhaps an important loss in the family is relevant. Perhaps a present conflict resonates with an earlier relationship. Perhaps something the seeker has always understood in one way might look different when placed in a broader family or historical context. Any of these possibilities may help us look more intelligently.
Mindfulness is useful here too, because attachment to an explanation is something we can learn to notice. There is a subtle but important difference between having an idea and finding ourselves increasingly invested in proving that idea right. We may notice our attention narrowing, our curiosity diminishing, or contradictory information becoming just a little irritating. That is useful information about us.
The trouble begins when I wonder whether quietly becomes I know. Once that happens, confirmation bias is only too happy to help with the wedding arrangements. We begin noticing everything that supports our elegant explanation and becoming curiously less interested in whatever doesn’t. The skill is not to stop forming hypotheses, but to form them without needing them to be true. Pasted text
This matters particularly in representational work because some of the territory we explore cannot be completely known. An idea may fit beautifully with the information we have and still turn out to be wrong. A hypothesis earns its keep by helping us decide where to look or what might be worth exploring; it doesn’t need promotion to historical fact.
The solution focus helps us here as well. A hypothesis may be plausible—even brilliant—and still not be particularly relevant to what the seeker came wanting. We do not have to chase every rabbit that appears simply because it has an interesting family history.
What we don’t know matters too
Sometimes the interview leaves us with less certainty rather than more. We may discover that almost nothing is known about one side of the family, that dates don’t quite fit, or that a significant period has simply disappeared from the family story. Nobody may know exactly what happened around a migration, separation, death or estrangement.
Those gaps can matter, but an empty space in the family history is not an invitation to furnish it ourselves. In science and systems thinking, something we cannot directly observe is sometimes treated as a black box. We may not know exactly what happened inside it, but we can still observe what went in and what came out. Gaps in family history can sometimes be approached in much the same way.
Sometimes more can be discovered later through conversations with relatives, documents or genealogical research; sometimes the information has simply been lost.
There is considerable value in being able to say we don’t know and leave the space open. This too is an application of mindfulness. Uncertainty can be uncomfortable, and the mind has a rather endearing habit of trying to relieve that discomfort by producing an explanation. We can notice the urge to close the gap without necessarily obeying it.
Remaining with we don’t know is not a failure of the interview. It tells us where the boundary between knowledge and imagination currently lies. It also protects us from one of the seductive hazards of systemic work: finding a story so compelling that we forget we invented part of it.
Enough to begin
There is no prize for conducting the longest pre-representation interview. Actually brevity usually wins the race. At some point we have enough.
We have some understanding of what brought the seeker and have established a solution focus that can continue to orient the work. We have gathered the existential facts that seem relevant without unnecessarily loading what follows with interpretations about who everybody was and how they related. We have listened for what may have been excluded or overlooked, noticed important gaps in the history, and probably developed a few tentative ideas about what might be worth exploring. And we have not forgotten that the point is eventually to move towards resolution, rather than becoming permanent residents of the problem.
Throughout the conversation, mindfulness has been quietly doing some of the heavy lifting. It began with those few moments of stillness before we spoke and remained available in the pauses along the way. It helped us listen without immediately explaining, notice changes in the seeker’s responses and our own, distinguish what we know from what we are making of it, and recognise when a useful hypothesis begins turning into a cherished one.
Mindful awareness can also help us recognise when something seems to carry particular weight—in the seeker, in ourselves, or in the group—even when we don’t yet know what to make of it. We don’t have to explain it. We can simply notice it and remain alert to whether something later resonates with it.
The Resolution Compass has also already begun doing its work:
We don’t need the whole map. We need enough of it to take the next useful step.
What that step looks like will depend upon the setting. In a workshop, we may move from talking about the system to placing human representatives into space. In individual work, we may begin with floor markers, tabletop figures or another form of representation. Either way, something changes when the system is no longer only being talked about. Relationships acquire position, distance, orientation and shape, and what seemed straightforward in conversation may begin to look rather different. Pasted text
Something we expected to be central may barely register, while something we had hardly considered begins asking for attention. An early hypothesis may be supported, considerably complicated, or sent quietly out the door. The Resolution Compass allows us to follow these discoveries without losing our direction, whether we are working with a room full of people or two people and a handful of figures on a table.
That is why the pre-representation interview needs to do enough, but not too much. Its job is not to solve the representation before it begins, nor to provide us with an explanation clever enough to make the representation unnecessary. It establishes a sufficiently clear direction while leaving us free to discover what we don’t yet know.
We begin with a compass in our pocket, some knowledge of the territory, and enough mindful curiosity to discover that the landscape may not look quite the way we expected.
Explore Mindful Representations Training
This article is part of a developing series exploring the practice of Mindful Representations.