In Systemic Family Constellations, we work with three essential aspects that, when honoured, allow a family to find peace: belonging, order, and balance. Every member has a right to belong, regardless of what they did or what happened to them. What or who came first must hold its rightful place in time. And relationships function best when there is constant, equitable exchange.
When these aspects are disturbed - for example, when someone is excluded, when right order is out of sequence, or when trauma and harm are unacknowledged - the system carries the imbalance forward, often through the generations, until someone, somewhere, finds a way to see or feel it.
So, what happens when we widen the lens from family to place? When we look at our place on the land, or at our relationship to our immediate community and culture?
Belonging: who has been left out of the story
In family work, belonging can be disturbed when a relative is left out of the family story. This might be a death that was too painful to process, such as a child who was lost early, or it could be a buried family secret too shameful to speak about. At the level of place, though, this becomes something larger. It might be the original inhabitants of a land who have been displaced or erased from modern memory. It might be the dead from conflicts, or those who suffered abject poverty at the hands of social inequality, who have, in time, been forgotten. And, as I discovered when a group of us formed to explore this topic, it can include the land itself - which is not merely a backdrop to human history, but a living presence with its own memory and standing.
Order: what came first…
In families, there is a clear principle that when we respect and honour hierarchy and right place - such as birth order - there is ease and relaxation within the whole system. At the level of place, this might show up as recognising and honouring what and who came first: the ecological history of the land, its earlier names and uses, the people who lived there before colonisation or development. Here, compassionate attention is given to observing the sequence accurately, so that what and who came first are acknowledged and given their right place.
Balance and reciprocity
In families, unresolved imbalances can create discord that moves through the generations. A healthy system allows energy and love to flow naturally, so that all parts are included and in balance. At the level of culture and land, we might see imbalance arising from colonisation, displacement, exploitation, or war. Naming what has happened and witnessing the imbalance can begin a movement where things have been stuck for a very long time.
The story a place tells about itself
Alongside belonging, order, and balance, I find myself drawn to a fourth question when thinking about where I live, and ‘place’ in general: are a town’s official history and its lived, felt history always the same? Maybe part of the exploration and movement towards wholeness is simply allowing both to be observed and spoken.
What wanted to be seen: a recent constellation in Stroud
I recently co-led a session exploring these questions, with Stroud and the Five Valleys themselves as the field we worked within. In Systemic Constellations work, we start with a question or a situation to explore, and then we create a space where representatives (members of the group) can give presence to aspects of this. Because we were working with place and belonging, group members were chosen to give voice to the land, the spirit of the land, past indigenous communities, the modern community, and what needed to be seen. The beauty of this work is that we do not know what will emerge when we step into a representative role - we just need to be open to the possibility that each part carries its own memory and story. A representative is asked to feel or sense what is showing up in their body, or perhaps where they wish to stand in relation to another representative, without any kind of interpretation or ‘acting’. By adding different representatives one by one, we can observe what needs to be acknowledged or re-ordered, for example.
What came first was encouraging. The Land’s representative received the Spirit/Deva of the land and the indigenous peoples positively. The first settlers were the hunter-gatherers, the Neolithic peoples, and then the Dobunni, the last tribe to live on the land before the Romans arrived. What is particularly poignant is that the Dobunni people’s spiritual life is understood to have been focused on worshipping and living in harmony with the natural world around them. This same sense of respect and honour for nature and the land felt very alive in the representation of Stroud’s modern community too. Interestingly, the Land’s relationship to the modern community here was neutral. The disturbance lay elsewhere: in what was out of balance, had never been grieved, or had simply gone unseen.
Relief only began to move through the system once the impact of change and development in the 19th and 20th centuries was represented, one by one: the wool trade, including the sale of wool goods into the colonies; the workhouse and its effect on people and place, from the 1840s through to the 1940s - an echo I believe we can still feel today in the shame often tied to the use of food banks, and the continuing presence of hunger, poverty, and inequality in our modern age; the arrival of the railway in 1845, which shaped the decline of trade along the canal; and the boom and bust of WWI, when factories turned to war production and a generation of young men was lost, followed by the grief and shifting roles of WWII.
Across all of it, one thread surfaced strongly: the drive for power, progress, and profit, and the question of who profited, and at what cost, to local people, nature, animals, water and land. When this was acknowledged, and those who had not been heard were seen and given a voice, a beautiful re-balancing followed.
Of course, these remain universal themes. Not all change is bad, and progress has its place. But have we not been mistaken in believing that human wants and rights sit above the land itself? In the order of things, the land came first. It was here long before us, and it will remain long after we have gone. When we step over that order, imbalance can follow, and it is rarely the land alone that pays - we feel it too. Our group session also highlighted that right relationship is essential. There is a place for everyone and everything, the land and nature included. What might true exchange with the land and nature look like when reciprocity is honoured as a guiding principle? How might we, in our communities - both local and global -reimagine our place, now and in the years to come, so that balance and care can flow?
The patterns we carry as individuals are often threaded through family, yes - but also through the land we were raised on, the culture that shaped us, and the history that surrounds the place we now call home. When we bring systemic awareness to place as well as family, we open a wider field of understanding of ‘belonging’.