Remote Constellations--Why and How
There are two ways for you facilitators to do more Family Constellations, help more people, and earn a more sustainable living. They also give you interested non-facilitators a better chance to experience deep change through family constellations.
Why Do Private Constellations?
Doing only group workshops in most regions of North America is tough. In the land of rugged individualism, more folks want privacy here. The social intensity involved in baring their souls in gatherings of strangers is too much.
So doing private constellations where facilitator and client take turns doing the representing seriously increases the amount of people who can benefit from your services.
Many experienced and successful facilitators on our continent have learned this lesson.
Why Do Remote Constellations?
Think about your website for a minute. It speaks equally to people all over the world. But if you can only work with folks living within an hour or so from you--how many who visit your site can actually work with you? Relatively few...
That's one reason to also offer remote. Another big reason is that the the Knowing Field itself is a non-local phenomenon. Tuning yourself and the client in well matters, but physical distance is utterly irrelevant to successful family constellations.
I've had clients in Hawaii, Canada, Western Europe, Venezuela, Santo Domingo, New Zealand, and, of course, all across the US.
Yes, But How Do You Do Them?
The various ways to carry out deep and powerful family constellations via phone or Skype (or Google Hangouts or CoachingSpaces.com) depend on two things.
Your own comfort/skill levels with technology on the one hand and guided visualizations on the other.
And the comfort/skill levels of the client with technology and guided visualizations
Here are some of the ways I deal with these and tailor the approach to the client and situation.
Stay Flexible
How good are you are forming and working with visualizations? How about the client? If you are both OK with this, you can do the intake interview then visualize the entire constellation (Dan Booth Cohen's chosen method).
This is one end of the spectrum (voice only, lowest tech).
However, this is more like an ancestrally oriented shamanic journey. It's the furthest away from what you're used to in the group workshop setting. I think it takes many facilitators a bit longer to learn this.
Then there's the other end of the spectrum (high tech, low visualization).
If you have Zoom running, and the client has a movable laptop, you can simply have the client set up physical representatives in her living room and show them to you with her webcam. She visits the reps physically. You can either visit them "mentally," or set up physical reps in the same configuration in your space. This works quite well.
In between, when it's voice only, I have the client use a simple clockface analogy to tell me the nature, position, and orientation of each rep--and I draw or set up the same configuration. I've found this to be easy, even for non-technical, low visualization clients. It sounds like, "My dad's an easy chair at about 5 o’clock facing 9 o’clock. It's big and comfortable. My mom's a small end table next to the sofa on the 12 o’clock wall."
Take More Time to Get Tuned in
Without the physical interactions and body language of the group workshop, I take more time and do a much richer intake interview. Often (not always), this means doing the remote constellation in two sessions.
First, there's an hour of intake interview that covers the issue (desired positive change), life circumstances around the issue, and relevant family history. After some time for this to settle and bring up intuitions on both sides, we then do the constellation.