Interview
Behind the scenes
Late in 2007, Sylvia Postma (the Netherlands) asked if she could interview me. She was finishing a traning programm at the Phoenix Institute and for her final presentation she needed to interview two people who inspired her. She wanted me to be one of these two. I agreed and we met in January 2007. I asked Sylvia if I could have the transcript of the interview, so I could edit it with my website in mind. It seemed a good opportunity to explain something about the way I lead my groups and how I relate to the participants. Sylvia sent me the rough text – I deleted some parts, added a few things, left some things the way they were and rewrote others… Enjoy the result!
Sylvia: Often you have eighty or hundred participants in your groups. How do you manage to work with such big groups of people?
Daan: I did not start with such big groups and the kind of intense process work you see now! When I started to lead my first constellations, I had already fifteen years of experience as a teacher and group leader. In the late eighties I had started with small shamanic groups, a few years later these were followed by year trainings which were already bigger. When I started to develop Systemic Ritual, the groups slowly started to grow, and that has continued to this day. It is a bit like fitness: you become stronger and gradually learn to lift heavier weights. It has a lot af advantages that I started out as a teacher, specially where it concerns the didactics of the work. For example, for most people it works like this: they have to understand what is going to happen in the group before they are able to open their hearts. Their logical thinking has to agree to the process. That is why I always explain carefully what kind of work er are going to do, it immedeately relaxes the group.
Sylvia: How do you create depth in the work?
Daan: As I was learning to facilitate constellation work, I probably learned the most of standing in many roles, as a representative. In each role I would observe my own responses: did the interventions and the sentences offered by the group leader make me open up or close down? I also kept paying attention to the responses of the others in the group to what the facilitator said and did. The leader of a constellation operates in a field that is formed by all people present in the room. When it is right, he/she functions as a sort of thermometer and is also a spokesperson of this field. His/her responses are coming out of the field. The concrete experience the group leader is having are personal, but when he/she understands that this personal experience is in fact created by the larger field, his/her sensory experiences will tell him/her a lot about what is happening around him/her. The facilitator can only truly serve the field when he/she is willing to surrender to it, to merge with it.
Sylvia: What is this ‘something larger’?
Daan: I think we will never be able to fully grasp it with our minds, but we can experience something of it. It is a paradox: if I want to connect consciously with the field around me I do not direct my attention to what is happening outside of me but I turn inwards. What do I find there? My inner space. The perception of this inner space is slowly growing more and more precise and clear with the help of meditation, prayer and singing. I found that this inner space is not limited to the boundaries of my physical body. By going deeper and deeper inwards, I am touching places where the boundaries between me and what is around me are not so clear. At some point these borders even dissolve and the separation between me and the other disappears. I am leading my groups from this inner place, it is a very concrete and kinesthetic experience. There will be many short moments of silence when I work. I might drum for a minute – which for me is a way of silence and helps me to turn inwards. I mention the name of the one with whom I will work next, and then allow for some silence, waiting a bit… Each time I direct my attention back to the experience of my inner space and I invite the whole group in it, to be part of it. My personal inner space overlaps with the field of the group, I welcome the whole group to become part of it. My energetic body becomes as large as the group, larger even. At least, these are the words that describe best what I experience. I am grounded in phyiscal reality, but the inner space which is contained by that reality is holding the whole group field.
Sylvia: Doesn’t this pollute your own energy?
Daan: If I would have to protect myself from the participants in my groups, it is unlikely that I could do meaningful work with them. Then I would need my energy to establish and maintain borders between them and myself all the time. I’d have to defend against something that would be harmful, as if the people in the room would be contageous. What I do is actually the opposite: I open myself for them, I welcome them and I relax. When I do that, I am not looking for information, I am not trying to psychically pick up something about them, I do not interfere or penatrate into their space. I don’t need to know anyhting and I relax. I do not need to change anybody. I just create space for their presence inside myself.
When you do this, as a facilitator, you must have done your homework concerning your own shadow material. Of course it is true that all kinds of things have happened in the families of the participants: exclusion, betrayel, rape, expulsion, crime; you name it. But, are those things bad for me? Do I need to protect myself from them? From what exactly should I defend myself? I suspect that a facilitator’s feelings of fear and the need to defend against certain participants are mostly created by their own pain and blind spots. And when you are trying to avoid your own fear or shadow, you can only close off from the people who are triggering these responses in you. One way or another you have to find a way to do your homework! And you have to keep doing it, no matter how experienced or senior you are as a facilitator. You have to find a way to welcome your clients, with all of the history from their whole family system. Otherwise your work will always be limited. Participants will know and sense immedeately if they are truly welcomed by the group leader or not. When a group experiences a real welcome, the group will relax. The tension in the field will disappear because people open up. And when a group of people is basically relaxed and open, it does not really matter much for the group leader how large it is. When the work is finished however I need space and silence. Back home, after a group, I will not pick up the phone for some days. Again I will pay attention to the experience of my inner space, but now, when I am on my own and there are no others around me, my own personal self will appear in there. I will read a good book, watch a startrek episode on DVD, I go to a diner to have breakfast and read a newspaper, I will sweat and detoxify in the sauna… In that way, I come back to myself.
Sylvia: How can you know, if you work with the larger field, if you are still in contact with the individual client or their family system?
Daan: It is not really my intention to work with one specific client only. The opposite is true! As my friend and colleague Francesca Mason Boring says: the whole client is the group. The group itself is the client. I work in many different countries and cultures, and not everywhere do people focus as much on the personal realm as most people in the western world do. In many places, in all kinds of groups, the ‘we’ is more important as the ‘me’. In such an environment a client can never speak openly about the problems in their family. You can not share with a group what went wrong in the lives of the ancestors, because you would shame them that way and you would make the group uncomfortable. In such a situation, as a facilitator you really have to find other, more indirect ways to work with family histories! You have to learn to think and act more from ‘we’, less from ‘I’.
I will often ask participants to write me a letter in the weeks before the group starts, the organiser of the group will give them instructions on what kind of information I need and how to write. They know I will read everything, and that I will pray over each single letter. In this way, I create a holding for all that personal and painful information. Then, when we work, I will often focus on the archaic structure of the client’s story and leave out the specific details. Most family stories are variations on a number of basic themes and structures, and when you focus on that essential structure, everybody will recognize the meaning of the situation. Imagine a client who would like to do a constellation because her grandmother lost five children. I could ask for details, and then I might learn that one of the children died from a disease, two of them were born too early, one child has simply gone missing and the fifth child died of hunger. What to do with these facts? One child went missing, so maybe this person never even died! One child died of hunger. Was someone guilty of neglect? What happened exactly? Before you know it, you are creating a strange hierarchy in which one dead child is given more importance than another. The deaths belong to different kinds of categories, and maybe you would be tempted to think one of them is more interesting or more important. But is that necessary? And how do I know if my interpretation of the situation is even remotely accurate, how could I ever pretend to know what went on in the soul of the woman who lost all those children? I usually connect more with the archaic layer of the story. And when I do that in this case, I simply see a woman who lost too much and who could not keep her heart open for the few children that survived and her husband. If I stay with this basic image, I see how I can work. I could ask some people to represent all the children of this woman, both those who died and those who lived, and I would add a representative for the husband. I would place them all in a wide circle. I would place the woman who lost the children in the center. Between her and the circle of children, I would place a second circle of at least twenty women. I would ask the mother of the children to speak to these women: “Each one of you is a little part of my heart. I myself could not afford to feel anymore after my children died, I had to close my heart. But each of you is a part of my heart, and you are still able to feel. Each of you is a part of my heart that is whole.” Then, she could take the hands of each woman, one by one, and ask them individually: “Please go where you need to go. Bring my love where it wants to go.” You would see each of the women find a place in the outer circle with the children and the husband. In the end, the husband and children would all have at least one little but whole part of their wife or mothers heart next to them, holding them. Most likely, one or two of the women representing parts of the mother’s heart would choose to stand next to their ‘owner’, the women who lost so many children.
Such a ritual, in its simplicity, will address and touch all the unfinished grief in the system. Many of the representatives in such works go through intense and emotional processes, but after some time the tears dry and the whole system feels balanced. They will experience feelings of peace and integration. And everybody in the group will be part of it, also the people who are not active as representatives. Everybody knows what it feels like to close your heart when the pain is simply too big. Everybody knows what it means to long for someone you have lost. At the archaic layer, we see is a story that is almost mythical, and we can all identify with it. I am not looking for existing myths and try to fit the family story into it, I am simply looking for the basic structure of the story, the most fundamental aspects of it. The sound of the drum unites us, the prayers and melodies open us up to this. Through the direct involvement of the people, something is touched in everybody’s family system. This is the essence of Systemic Ritual – it is based on ‘we’, not on ‘I’.
Sylvia: Do you sometimes experience resistance from participants who are not used your kind of constellation work? You are praying and singing…
Daan: I never really gave that much thought… I presume that people who will not like it will simply leave. Howevere, there are only very few people who have walked out on a first day of a seminar. Don’t forget that I am know for a certain kind of work: people know it is a spiritual and ritual kind of constellation work. Many people come to a seminar after they have read one of my books, so they are prepared. Or maybe a friend or family member had a good experience in one of my groups and has told them to try it for themselves too… People probably know what they can expect.
Sylvia: What do you do when a lot is happening in the group and many people are touched by what is happening?
Daan: I sing a lot during the work, and I pray. The wordless songs take me inside and they help me to ground myself in a silent place. When people are touched by what is happening, the only thing I do is take them with me as I turn inside. I do not dry their tears for them, I just take them to my center en make place for their tears there, inside myself. I think the facilitator of this kind of work has the task to turn inwards again and again, to find peace and grounding, and to connect everything that happens around him/her to this source of healing. Create room for what is there, trusting that something right will unfold. I connect to the sense of the larger field, and then I might ask myself what would be the right step, where I would need to be in the constellation, what is needed for a client to move towards integration. Then, when I get an impulse, I will follow it. It is a kind of intuition, but this intuition is not separated from my logical thinking or my experience in thousands of constellations and ritual, the intuition has merged with that.
Sylvia: Does it happen that you have too many impulses, or that you do not know what to do?
Daan: Sometimes I do not get it. Then I will tell the group: “At this moment I do not fully understand what is happening here.” That is the truth, and most people in the room will have felt it already before I said it. By recognizing this, a group does not get tense but it will actually relax. I simply welcome the fact that for the moment it is unclear. And from the relaxation a next step will show itself – even if that might take a little while.
Sylvia: Do you have a plan when you lead a constellation?
Daan: Why will somebody go and visit the doctor? Maybe to get a diagnosis, but mostly to get healed. To get rid of the symptoms, the pain and the discomfort! Why is someone coming to a group? They pay for it, they take days off from work for it and they open up, trusting I will do my best for them. Most people come with a need, a question, a problem. As the faciliator, I am obliged to do what I can to help them to find solutions, to help them to take a step towards healing and integration. The first step is to make sure people feel welcome – I described that already. The second step is to be respectful. There are constellation leaders who use confrontation, but that is not my style. For example, I do not think you can end a constellation with the words ‘There is nothing we can do here’. How should a participant go home after this message? The facilitator has just told them their problem is too big, too diffcult, too complex to be touched. This is not strengthening the client, it is stigmatizing. If it happens that during a work I can not see any opening, when I can not detect even a small possibility of a movement, when I see only weakness in the representatives it is still not the end. Also then, I have all kinds of options. I can place a circle of ancestors around the representatives, and ask the ancestors to go into the field and share their strength with the people there. Or I can place a new representative next to each one already in the constellation, and the new ones will say: “I know exactly what you are going through. I have been in that place myself. And I stand next to you.” The problem is maybe not solved by such interventions, but the client will come out of such work with more strength and balance.
Sylvia: In shamanism, one of the foundations of your work, contact with the spirits is very important. Do you communicate with spirits while you are working?
Daan: I am doing less and less classical shamanic work, and focus more and more on the experience of my own inner space. When I am leading a group I keep a prayer going, for example I will ask the participants’ ancestors and sources of strength to be present and to support the work we are doing. With my eyes closed I will pray for guidance, so I will know what the next step will be or what kind of intervention is needed. Images might come up, images that will help me to guide the work in progress, but I do not necessarily know from what source these images arise. I can not know if these images come from my logical thinking, if they are based on a memory of a similar situation, if it is some kind of spontaneous insight I am having, if the images comes from my analytical understanding of the situation as a teacher or group leader, or if they come from my intuition or an ancestor… Everthing is possible.
Sylvia: I have the impression that you do not bring your own entanglements into the constellations you lead. Is that correct?
Daan: No! When someone brings in a story that touches upon my own family story, I must be carefull. There must be a clear border between the client’s history and mine. If I am identified with someone else’s story, I will only perceive myself, not the other. So, regularly I ask myself: Am I free enough of identifications to be able to serve this client? And if I do not trust my own motivation to work with someone I will have to wait till I feel clear again. In my role as facilitator, I always keep a small part of my attention free to check how on how I am responding to the people in the group: I register what I am thinking about them, what I am rejecting about them, what I want from them, what I need from them… If I have very strong feelings that I would like to work with someone, I have to ask myself the question why. If I start to feel very close to someone, I probably have become identified with them. And most of the time, that will have its roots in an unresolved entanglement in my own family system. I can only work with a participant I am clear about my relationship with him/her. This does not exclude the unconditional welcoming that I already described, this is about another layer. This is about the necessary awareness of transference and counter transference, about being realistic about my own unresolved personal and systemic issues and taking responsibilityfor them.
Sylvia: How can you differentiate between opening yourself for someone and identifying with them?
Daan: First of all I have my professional skills and expertise. Also, by now I have gained insight in my own history. From experience I know with which themes and stories I will easily identify. All of that helps. But beside these factors, I also pay attention to the experience of my inner space. Does it expand or contract? I have noticed that I can trust the experience of that space expanding when there is also a growing sense of calmness. A peaceful enlargement of my inner space connects me to my body and the earth. The more I sense my body, without any agitation, the less identified I am with the stories of others. If my inner space becomes smaller and when there is restlessness of any kind, when I start to make plans and have opinions about the story – then I have started to become reactive, and this means I have become identified with the client or an aspect of their story.
Sylvia: Who are your teachers and guides?
Daan: In the constellation scene I do not have real teachers, but I do have a regular professional exchange with a number of colleagues. In earlier years I have learned a lot from my two native American teachers. One of them died, the other I have not seen for seven or eight years now. Bert Hellinger has been a very important source of inspiration in the past. I have a rabbi, reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, but he lives in the USA and I can see him only occasionaly. I make sure I have a place where I can continue to be a client and a student: I am enrolled in the Ridhwan school, founded by Hameed Ali. Hameed Ali is better known as Almaas, the name he uses as an author. The Ridhwan school teaches a process called inquiry, which is a form of self-exploration. It combines elements of Sufism, developmental psychology and meditation. Every year I go on retreat several times to continue the process of inner research under the guidance of exellent teachers. I do not use the Ridhwan techniques in my own groups, but they are essential for my own personal development.
Sylvia: Thank you for answering my questions.
Daan: Thank you for asking them!