“Children should be seen but not heard” was a favourite saying of my grandfather. At school, we learnt to “only speak when spoken to” and “not to speak out of turn”. To keep the family safe we knew to keep certain things under wraps. Doing so ensured that, as children, we had a place in our family.
According to Bert Hellinger (developer of Family Constellations), each family system has its own consciousness called the Collective Conscience. It governs what is acceptable and not acceptable behaviour in your family system or group. We learn that it is best to keep quiet and not to speak about certain things. Some secrets cannot even be voiced within the family. There are topics which we speak openly about that were taboo for our parents and grandparents. Yet the pattern of not speaking up can still remain in place today.
The problem is that, as adults, these learnt behaviours do not serve us or the people around us. With one’s Personal Conscience, we can rewrite the rules. It is harder to do so when there are entanglements with one’s family that pull one into the feeling of guilt or bad conscience when we go against the Collective conscience. In this Constellation Circle, we explore how we can begin to speak the unspoken with a good conscience.