Matt Shepheard, previously Programme Director of the Psychosynthesis Trust for 6 years, shares his teachings on family constellations ahead of his upcoming family constellations workshop.
The family story, the experience of our parents, grandparents and ancestors creates a web of relationships across time with its own patterns, possibilities, and limitations. We can be unconsciously loyal to these underlying dynamics, operating in our blind spot, until the entanglements are made visible and integrated.
Traumatic or difficult events in our family history can create aftershocks that impact across generations, emerging as unconscious family patterns or habits that shape our experience in the present day. This “family field” creates a filter which means that there are things we cannot sense, see, or feel, and mindsets we are compelled to take in order to re-create the past.
The Family Trance
Psychosynthesis authors, Firman and Gila, talk about the “family trance” that emerges from the transgenerational trauma, systemic defences and survival patterns shaping the family group – “the family trance defends against the possibility of being abandoned by the family system and thereby confronting non-being” (The Primal Wound, p.171).
This consensus trance is about compliance with the group’s belonging rules, and to break the trance is to risk experiencing “discontinuity in the ongoingness of being”. Firman and Gila sum up the challenge of moving beyond this deep unconscious loyalty as facing “the voodoo death inherent in the breaking of a tribal taboo” (The Primal Wound, p.172).
While we exist in this trance, our capacity for presence and our availability for the emerging future is limited. The trance is very much about the past. We unknowingly inherit, create, or perpetuate these systemic patterns and generational habits until someone does the hard work of integration and healing.
In her poem, On the Pulse of Morning, Maya Angelou wrote “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again”. We can’t engage in an authentic future until we have broken the spell of the group survival trance and are done recreating the past.
Spiritual teacher Thomas Hubl, in his book Collective Trauma Healing, describes how “life seeks to digest the unintegrated past by recreating it in ‘new’ experiences” (p.105). His suggestion is that what we used to call karma (the past becoming our future), we might now frame as undigested transgenerational trauma determining the path forward.
Family system trauma
The world we’re born into is pre-traumatised at a collective, societal, and family level. This trauma field creates a filter, and this filter shapes what it is possible for us to experience. All the denied, unprocessed, unintegrated past becomes our collective trauma, our family system trauma, the trauma in our family’s collective nervous system.
Of course, this defensive filtering structure is a survival mechanism from a time when something overwhelming occurred in (or to) the family system. The survival pattern is ultimately made from a deeply creative love. Thomas Hubl highlights Dr Judith Herman (Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Harvard – author of Trauma and Recovery) who talks about the past as unresolved content, “ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told”. These ghosts become generational habits, and it is the work of facing systemic shadows, integration and healing that can turn these ghosts into ancestors. Thomas Hubl frames this endeavour as “offering our demons the opportunity to be integrated as allies in a new understanding of our world” (p.60).
If you’re interested in learning more about drawing on systemic constellations and psychosynthesis, Matt is facilitating a Family Constellations workshop on 7th February 2026 at the Psychosynthesis Trust, Tooley Street.
Find out more and book your place here.
References:
Thomas Hubl, Healing Collective Trauma, 2020.
John Firman and Anna Gila, The Primal Wound, 1997.