You deserve to be able to heal emotionally

You deserve to have some ease in your healing journey . . . it doesn’t need to be hard work with few results

You deserve to feel competent in your healing process . . . you shouldn’t have to meet someone else’s (or the whole mental health field’s) expectations of your healing process

For those of you who struggle to know what you feel or speak about what you feel, Parts Constellations may be a key to that.

Parts Constellations is a combination of Internal Family Systems and a way of working using a group of people borrowed from Family Constellations.  

Parts Constellations works with the strengths of people who struggle to know what you feel rather than requiring you to do what is hard or impossible. People who struggle to know what they feel often have external oriented thinking and also thrive when others are able to reflect to them what they might be feeling.

In Parts Constellations, the client gets to focus outside of them as other people represent parts of them and name with some level of intricacy and detail what those parts are feeling, motivated by, desiring, etc.

Parts Constellations themselves can be a corrective experience for people who struggle to know what you feel. If your struggle comes from a childhood where you learned that it was dangerous to know what you felt or to talk about what you felt, you definitely didn’t get the attuned reflecting of your emotional experience that young children need from their caregivers. When parts of you are represented by other people, those parts of you may be able to experience that attuned reflection that they maybe never knew was possible.

What does a Parts Constellation look like?

There’s a facilitator (me), a client (maybe you?), and several other people (maybe including you?) on a zoom call for a couple of hours. 

The client shares about an issue they’re wanting to work on.  I help parse out what parts might be involved in the issue.  

The client chooses others on the call to represent each of the parts.  

Then, the focus is on the representatives of the parts, as I facilitate getting to know the parts.  

The client connects with the parts as little or as much as feels right to them, supported by me.  

What does a Parts Constellation feel like?

To the representatives of the parts, it most often feels like:

• as they step into representing the part, they start to feel things in their body, notice thoughts, emotions, etc, that come from the part (they get information from, what the Constellations world calls the “Knowing Field”, what science called “non-local consciousness”.)  

• being held; the facilitator caringly and thoughtfully holds the process so that the parts and the representatives feel held 

• an honor; being a part of someone else’s healing is and most often feels like a tremendous honor

To the client, it most often feels like: 

• relief: they don’t have to work so hard to try to get the IFS process to work for them

• attunement: parts of them that have never been understood or known are able to be deeply known and understood through the representatives of the parts

• gentle: I attend to the client and all of the parts the whole time, ensuring that the pace and the direction feels gentle and kind to everyone

To the witnesses, it most often feels like: 

• a palpable feeling of the honor of being a witness to a group working together for someone’s healing