Have you ever wondered why certain patterns keep repeating in your life, even though you’ve tried everything to change them? Why you feel anxious in ways your life circumstances don’t quite explain? Why you carry grief that doesn’t seem to be entirely yours?
The answer might lie not in your own life story, but in the stories of those who came before you—your parents, grandparents, and ancestors stretching back through generations. This is the realm of Family Constellation Therapy, a powerful systemic healing approach that addresses generational pain at its roots.
As a family constellation facilitator working with clients in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge, and online across Ireland and internationally, I’ve witnessed profound healing occur when people finally understand the invisible burdens they’ve been carrying—burdens that originated not in their own lives, but in the unresolved pain of previous generations.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore what generational pain really is, how family constellation therapy works, and why honoring what came before us is the key to finally being free.
What Is Generational Pain? Understanding Intergenerational Trauma
Generational pain—also called intergenerational trauma or transgenerational trauma—refers to trauma, grief, loss, or suffering that originated in previous generations but still affects you today.
This isn’t just about “family issues” or difficult relationships. It’s about how your grandmother’s unprocessed grief from losing a child shapes your mother’s parenting, which then shapes how you relate to your own emotions. It’s about how your grandfather’s war trauma that he never spoke about created patterns of silence and emotional distance that echo through your entire family system.
Most remarkably, you can carry this pain without ever being told about the original events. Your ancestors might have thought they were protecting you by staying silent about difficult histories. But silence doesn’t heal trauma—it just passes it on in different forms.
How Trauma Gets Passed Down Through Generations
You might be wondering: How can I carry trauma from events I never experienced? The mechanism isn’t mystical—it’s deeply rooted in how families function as systems and how our nervous systems learn from those who raise us.
Trauma is transmitted through:
Modeling and Attachment: You learn how to be in the world by watching and absorbing from your caregivers. If your parent lived in constant anxiety from their own unhealed trauma, your nervous system learned that the world is dangerous—even if your actual childhood was relatively safe.
Emotional Atmosphere: Children are incredibly sensitive to emotional states, even unspoken ones. If your home was filled with unacknowledged grief or fear, you absorbed that emotional reality without understanding where it came from.
Family Narratives: The stories families tell—and don’t tell—shape identity. When certain family members are never mentioned, or certain events are shrouded in shame and secrecy, those silences carry weight.
Systemic Loyalty: In family constellation work, we recognize that children often unconsciously take on the pain of their parents or ancestors out of deep loyalty—a need to belong, to stay connected, to somehow help or save those they love.
Understanding Family Systems: The Foundation of Constellation Work
Family Constellation Therapy, developed by German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger, is based on a revolutionary understanding: your family is not just a collection of individuals, but a living, interconnected system where everyone affects everyone else.
This systemic perspective reveals patterns and dynamics that individual therapy often misses. When you’re struggling with anxiety, depression, relationship difficulties, or unexplained physical symptoms, the roots might not lie in your personal psychology alone—they might be found in your family system’s attempt to process unfinished business from previous generations.
The Family Soul: Collective Memory and Healing
In family constellation work, we speak of the “family soul”—Bert Hellinger’s term for the deep, often unconscious knowledge that families carry. This is the collective memory, the shared pain, the unspoken rules, the invisible loyalties that operate beneath the surface of conscious awareness.
The family soul has movements—patterns and tendencies that families follow to maintain balance and belonging. One of the most important movements is this: what’s excluded wants to be included.
When something painful happens in a family—a death, a trauma, a source of shame—families often try to cope by excluding it. By not talking about it. By “forgetting” the family member who caused embarrassment or died tragically. But the family soul doesn’t forget.
What gets excluded doesn’t disappear—it finds a way back in, often through a later family member who unconsciously takes on the pain, the fate, or the characteristics of the excluded person or event. This is called a systemic entanglement.
The Orders of Love: Natural Laws of Family Systems
Family constellation work reveals that family systems have natural orders—hierarchies and rules that, when followed, create flow and health. When these orders are violated, they create entanglement, suffering, and the transmission of pain across generations.
First Order: Everyone Belongs
Every family member, no matter what they did, has a place in the system. When someone is excluded—even for apparently good reasons—it creates imbalance. The excluded member’s energy remains in the system and often affects later generations who unconsciously represent them or carry their fate.
This doesn’t mean condoning harmful behavior. It means acknowledging that the person existed, was part of the family system, and their exclusion has consequences for everyone who comes after.
Second Order: Those Who Came First Have Priority
Parents come before children. Older siblings come before younger siblings. The previous generation comes before the current one. This isn’t about power—it’s about acknowledging the natural flow of life and giving.
When a child tries to save a parent, carry a parent’s pain, or fix what their parents couldn’t fix, they violate this order. Children cannot save their parents. When they try, they get entangled—stuck in patterns that aren’t theirs to resolve.
In family constellation therapy sessions—whether in person at my practice in Dublin, Naas, or Newbridge, or through online sessions—much of the healing work involves helping people release these inappropriate burdens and return them to where they belong.
Third Order: Balance Between Giving and Receiving
In healthy relationships, there’s flow—a balance of giving and receiving. But in families with generational trauma, this balance is often profoundly disrupted. Someone gave too much and received too little. Someone took too much and gave too little. That imbalance echoes through generations.
Constellation work helps restore balance by acknowledging what was given, what was received, and what remains out of balance—not to assign blame, but to see clearly and allow healing to flow.
How Family Constellation Therapy Works: The Healing Process
Family constellation work can happen in individual sessions or group workshops. While the methods differ slightly, the core principles remain the same: we make the invisible visible, we honor what was, and we release what is not ours to carry.
In Group Constellation Work
In a group setting—available through my workshops in Ireland and online—the person seeking insight (the “seeker”) briefly describes their issue. The facilitator then invites other group members to serve as representatives for key family members.
What happens next is remarkable: the representatives begin to feel and express emotions, body sensations, and impulses that reflect the actual family dynamics—without being told anything about the family history. This phenomenon, sometimes called “knowing field” or systemic resonance, reveals the hidden dynamics at play.
The facilitator then works to bring resolution—helping excluded members be seen and acknowledged, helping entangled family members release what isn’t theirs, and restoring proper order to the system.
In Individual Constellation Sessions
In one-on-one sessions—available in person or online across Ireland and internationally—we might use figures, chairs, or visualization to represent family members and explore the systemic dynamics. While less dramatic than group constellations, individual work can be equally profound and often allows for deeper personal exploration.
We work with guided meditation, somatic awareness, and constellation principles to help you:
• Visualize your family system and feel into the relationships
• Identify systemic entanglements and inherited burdens
• Practice releasing what belongs with previous generations
• Receive the blessing and support of your ancestors, freed from entanglement
Why Honoring Matters More Than Healing: A Paradigm Shift
Here’s where family constellation work offers something radically different from traditional therapy: the goal is not to “heal” generational pain, but to honor it.
This distinction is crucial. In our culture, we’re obsessed with fixing things, solving problems, making pain go away. But with generational pain, trying to heal it—trying to fix it or transcend it—often doesn’t work. Why? Because it isn’t yours to heal in the first place.
Your grandmother’s grief isn’t yours to fix. Your grandfather’s trauma isn’t yours to resolve. You can’t go back and change what happened to them. But what you can do is honor it.
The Practice of Honoring
Honoring means:
“I see what happened. I acknowledge this pain existed. I recognize what you carried.”
Honoring means:
“I stop trying to carry this for you. I stop trying to fix what you couldn’t fix. I let this pain remain with those it belongs to, and I carry only what is mine.”
In family constellation sessions, we often use this central phrase: “I honor what you carried. And I leave it with you.”
This isn’t coldness. It isn’t abandonment. It’s profound respect. It’s saying: your life was yours. Your pain was yours. Your fate was yours. I honor it—and I don’t need to live it too.
Common Patterns of Generational Entanglement
In my work as a family constellation facilitator across Ireland and internationally, certain patterns appear repeatedly. Recognizing these can help you identify whether you might be carrying generational pain:
Taking on a Parent’s Grief or Trauma
Perhaps the most common entanglement: children who unconsciously carry their parent’s unprocessed pain. You might experience depression without clear cause, anxiety that seems disproportionate to your circumstances, or a heaviness that feels ancient and not quite your own.
Identifying with an Excluded Family Member
When a family member was excluded—a child who died young, an uncle who was disgraced and never spoken of, a grandmother who was ostracized—someone in a later generation often unconsciously represents them. You might feel like an outsider in your own family, struggle with similar issues, or find yourself drawn to the same fate without understanding why.
Repeating Ancestral Patterns
Relationship dynamics, career struggles, health issues, or self-destructive patterns that repeat across generations often indicate systemic entanglement. The family system is trying to resolve something unfinished—and keeps repeating the pattern until someone finally sees it and breaks the cycle.
Survivor Guilt and Loyalty Binds
Sometimes people unconsciously limit their own happiness, success, or joy out of loyalty to family members who suffered. “How can I be happy when my mother was so unhappy?” “How can I succeed when my father failed?” These loyalty binds keep you entangled with ancestral pain.
The Movement of Healing: From Entanglement to Freedom
The journey from entanglement to freedom through family constellation work follows a natural movement:
Step 1 – Recognition: Seeing the entanglement. Understanding that what you’re carrying isn’t entirely yours.
Step 2 – Acknowledgment: Honoring those who came before. Acknowledging their pain, their fate, their lives.
Step 3 – Release: Giving back what isn’t yours. Using phrases like “I honor what you carried. I leave it with you.”
Step 4 – Receiving: Once freed from entanglement, you can receive the true gifts of your lineage—the strength, resilience, and love that also flows through your family system.
Step 5 – Integration: Living your own life, free from the burden of ancestral pain while still honoring those who came before.
Family Constellation Therapy Across Ireland: Workshops and Individual Sessions
Whether you’re in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge, elsewhere in Kildare, or anywhere across Ireland, family constellation work is accessible through both individual sessions and group workshops.
Workshops in Ireland
I regularly facilitate family constellation workshops where participants can experience the power of group constellation work. These workshops provide an opportunity to:
• Work on your own family issue as a “seeker”
• Serve as a representative for others (a profoundly educational experience)
• Witness multiple constellations and learn the principles of this work
• Connect with others on similar healing journeys
Individual Sessions: In-Person and Online
For those who prefer one-on-one work or cannot attend workshops, individual family constellation sessions are available both in person and online. Online constellation work has proven remarkably effective, as the systemic field and the insights that emerge are not limited by physical proximity.
Individual sessions allow for:
• Privacy and personal space for exploring sensitive family dynamics
• Integration with other holistic healing modalities like somatic therapy
• Flexible scheduling and location (accessible from anywhere in the world)
• Deeper exploration of your specific family patterns over multiple sessions
Who Benefits from Family Constellation Work?
Family constellation therapy can be particularly transformative if you:
• Feel burdened by emotions or patterns that seem larger than your own life
• Notice repeating patterns across generations in your family
• Struggle with loyalty conflicts between different family members
• Carry anxiety, depression, or pain without clear personal cause
• Feel like an outsider in your own family or never quite fit in
• Have difficulty with relationships, success, or allowing yourself happiness
• Know there were difficult events in previous generations (wars, deaths, migrations, trauma)
• Feel drawn to understand your family history and patterns more deeply
As a holistic, non-clinical practitioner, I work with the understanding that family constellation therapy is a profound healing modality that honors the wisdom of family systems while empowering you to live your own life freely.
Integration with Other Healing Modalities
Family constellation work integrates beautifully with other holistic healing approaches. In my practice, I often combine constellation principles with:
Somatic Therapy: Working with how generational patterns live in your body—the inherited tension, the ancestral holding patterns, the somatic signatures of transgenerational trauma.
Energy Healing: Addressing the energetic cords and entanglements that connect us to family members across time.
Meditation and Visualization: Using guided practices to connect with your lineage, honor your ancestors, and receive their blessings.
This integrative approach—combining family constellation work with somatic and energetic healing—offers a comprehensive path to releasing generational burdens and stepping into your own life with clarity and freedom.
Conclusion: Honoring the Past, Freeing the Future
Generational pain is not your fault. You didn’t create it. You didn’t ask to carry it. It came to you through the invisible bonds of family, through the loyalty and love that connects us to those who came before.
But here’s what you can do: You can see it. You can honor it. And you can choose not to pass it on.
Family constellation therapy offers a path to breaking cycles that have run through generations. Not by denying the past, not by pretending the pain didn’t happen, but by finally seeing it clearly, acknowledging it fully, and lovingly returning it to where it belongs.
When you honor what was carried and release what is not yours, something remarkable happens. You free not just yourself, but the entire system. The effects ripple backward to your ancestors and forward to your descendants. The cycle of unconscious transmission ends.
And then you can live your own life—truly your own, not weighed down by burdens from generations past, but supported by the genuine gifts of your lineage: the strength, the resilience, the love that also flows through your family soul.
Whether you’re in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge, elsewhere in Ireland, or connecting from anywhere in the world, family constellation work is available to support you in this profound journey of honoring what was carried and finally, lovingly, being free.
About the Author:
Abi Beri is an IPHM-accredited Integrative Holistic Therapist and trained Family Constellation Facilitator with expertise in systemic healing, ancestral trauma work, and generational pattern resolution. Based in Ireland with practice locations in Dublin, Naas, and Newbridge, Abi offers both in-person and online family constellation sessions and workshops across Ireland and internationally. With training in Bert Hellinger’s family constellation methodology, somatic therapy, and multiple energy healing modalities, Abi provides trauma-informed, systemic approaches to healing that honor the complexity of family systems while empowering clients toward freedom and wholeness. Currently pursuing an MSc in Counselling and Psychotherapy, Abi maintains a holistic, non-clinical practice focused on deep systemic transformation. Learn more at blissfulevolution.com, somatictherapyireland.com, and familyconstellationseurope.com.