Articles
The Hidden Dynamics in Life, in Love and in Leadership
The articles on this page are designed to illuminate the hidden dynamics that can resource or entangle us, affecting our capacity to live, love and lead. They are designed to clarify deep patterns and offer fresh paths to lasting resolutions.
The links to each article are listed below in alphabetical order. The first block of articles are feature-length substantial pieces of writing and several require 30 to 45 minutes to read in full. Lower down the page are links to much shorter pieces, most are a 5 minute read. Enjoy browsing!
ADHD in young men
Sometimes there is a hidden message in the labels we give certain conditions. With ADHD there is an assumption that it is the child who has the deficit of attention. A systemic perspective illuminates other possible causes.
Adoption
There are a wide variety of experiences in adoption – for those who are adopted, for the birth parents and the adoptive family system. For some the experience leaves them feeling resourced and settled.
For others it can be an experience of abandonment, of not being able to find where they belong, feeling not good enough or fearing that someone else will leave, not choose them, or give them away. This creates a challenging existential tension that affects life, intimate relationships and work.
This article explores the complex dynamics around adoption and offers ways of restoring balance and a sense of place for everyone.
Affairs of the heart
Relationships outside of a marriage or other bond of commitment are a consistent pattern through human evolution and have coloured the history books, politics and cultures of many civilisations.
Why do human beings find it hard to be faithful to a promise of fidelity? Are affairs really ‘of the heart’, or is something else going on?
What hidden dynamics may cause infidelity and the pain it so often produces? This article explores these complex questions, offering a systemic perspective.
Being a good ancestor
One day someone will look back and find you in their history. You will have a reputation and people will share opinions about you. How do you want to be remembered, what will your legacy be?
Read the article here
Drawn out of life
When you feel a sense that life isn’t worth living anymore there may be more than current pressures at play. This article explores the hidden dynamics that may be underneath the apparent reasons and then explores how we may resource ourselves to support others who feel drawn out of life.
Fathers
Whether we are son or daughter our relationship with our father is crucial to our development and the way we relate to ourselves, our friends, partners and our work.
This article explores some of the key patterns and hidden dynamics at play and ends with a meditative constellation exercise, to support clarity, dignity and flow.
Forgiveness
This article explores an alternative perspective on forgiveness and offers a fresh path to resolution and growth.
Founders
Founders require a great deal of energy to create and then sustain a business.
That energy is sometimes connected to their sense of place, or lack of it, in their family-of-origin.
This article explores that and other dynamics and patterns around founders that can emerge as a result of the innate drive to belong.
Joining, Belonging, leaving
Social, organisational and professional systems are held, just like family systems, in delicate balance. The true culture is a product of all the people who have been members, their giving and taking, all the events in the history of the system and the way people join and leave.
Joining and leaving is an often overlooked area in social change, leadership and many coaching and organisational development interventions. However they are crucial moments to pay attention to in a system’s evolution and when not done with respect can entangle social groups, countries, organisations, teams and individuals in challenging and limiting dynamics for years.
Mass shootings
We are not looking, it seems, in the appropriate place for a solution. This article, ‘The Absence of Presence’, offers another perspective.
Men and their mothers
Mothers are the source of life, of love and of leadership.
If a man’s mother was not available, or he rejects her, or gets recruited and becomes entangled, then he may find aspects of life, intimate relationships and leadership challenging.
This article explores some of the many dynamics that can develop between mother and son. It offers insight into those that limit the flow of life and work and suggests how the dynamics may be softened.
Money
Our relationship with money is often complex, entangled and confused.
This article illuminates some of the many patterns, projections and dynamics in our relationship with money and explores ways of allowing the benefits of abundance and money into our lives, without guilt or confusion.
Please see this page for an article on Linkedin.
Organisational health
When the underpinning principles of systems are taken into account in the recruitment, retention, leadership and departure of individuals and teams, organisational health is possible and everyone can find their place, make their contribution.
The article begins to illuminate this subject.
Pain travels
Perfectionism
Individuals who describe themselves, or are described by others, as ‘perfectionist’ may be expressing a natural innate personalty preference that has become exaggerated due to stress. They may however also be caught in a systemic dynamic that began long before them.
This short article explores the roots of these kind of dynamics and offers insights into their resolution.
Presence
Rest and sleep
Whilst we busy ourselves in our individual and collective attempts to override the natural circadian rhythms, ‘solutions’ come from all sides and include the use of sleeping pills and other ways of regulating the heart rate, blood pressure, energy or anxiety levels.
However, these medications are designed to act on the symptom, rather than the underlying cause held within the system.
Romanticism
In some people the search for a romantic relationship can repeat throughout their adult lives. This can be distracting and destructive but there are ways of illuminating and working on the underlying dynamics that soften their effect and release the individual to create different relationship patterns.
This article explores this complex subject through a systemic lens.
Secret orders
We humans belong within multiple overlapping relational fields, in relationship systems. These relational fields are governed by hidden, but natural, ordering forces. It is only because we are so busy exerting our ego and willpower, that we fail to notice them. However they influence every aspect of our life, our love and our leadership.
Size matters
If you sensed that something was needed of you then you would have been pulled, like a fragment of metal towards a magnet, into a place in that system that wasn’t yours.
As a result you’ll have soon learnt how to act as if you were occupying a different place and had to do so from a different relative size.
The body remembers
Because our mind splits off the experiences, the traumas are held in the body and the embodied effects can reverberate for years causing low level, chronic conditions that limit the flow of life, of love and of leadership.
This short article offers an introduction to this large subject.
Trumped by trauma
If you want to think ‘systemically’ you are, by definition, working and looking from a multi-generational perspective. After all, we are all born into an ongoing family system drama in which each generation passes on something to the next.
Donald Trump was born – like most of us – into a complex family system. His ancestral field had difficulties and resources in it, just as yours and mine do.
Donald’s mother moved from a remote and isolated Scottish island, aged 17, to America in 1930 to find better opportunities in ‘the land of the free’.
The rest, as they say, is history. But his-story that is built on trauma and Donald’s survival strategy is one that continues to influence the whole world.
Women and their mothers
Women with a secure and trustful relationship with their mother may find that life and love flow with ease and that intimate relationships with men and friendships with other women are nourishing and enjoyable.
Women who have not been so fortunate are likely to have more complex relationships with men, with other women and themselves.
This article explores the dynamics between daughters and their mothers and offers insights into the restoration of a better balance where that is desired.
The article was published on mothers day 2020
Working with founders
Working with founders is a complex but rewarding area because you are working with the ‘parent’ of the organisational system and so at the source. It is from this place that systemic change can be most effectively achieved and organisational health can emerge and endure.
When working with a founder or team of founding partners it can be important to have some insight into the many systemic dynamics that are available to resource them, but may also hold them back.
The journey from start up to grown up is a challenging one and founders need a particular kind of support from their coaches and consultants to travel on their personal and professional journeys to lasting success.
Walking with your Father
Our inner relationship with our father – whether he is still alive or has passed away – is an important part of our growth, development and individuation.
Whether we are a man or woman our relationship with the man we come from fuels or limits our abilty to live, love and lead.
Shorter Reads
These shorter articles are designed to introduce some of the other teachers,
influencers, facilitators and learning opportunities available.
Introducing Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, one of Bert’s predecessors and teachers who identified trans generational patterns
Bert Hellinger who synthesised others’ way of looking at and working with the human condition and added his own insights to create systemic constellations.
Introducing Fanita English and her role as Bert Hellinger’s ‘TA’ (Transactional Analysis) teacher
Introducing Stephan Hausner a facilitator who specialises in the area of health and wellness
Introducing Rupert Sheldrake and the morphic fields of systems.
Introducing Kato Wittich, a family constellations facilitator in the US.
Introducing ‘AnotherSelf‘ a six-part romantic drama that includes constellations on Netflix.
Introducing Mark Wolynn and inherited trauma language.
Please Note: The complete articles are all available through
the online community HERE.
Lifetime access to this membership community and all the articles is just £315 as a one-off payment.
This price is reduced to £250 for alumni of the Coaching Constellations programmes.
You will be welcome to join us
