When identifying deficits or unfavorable processes in a group, in a family or in a team, one is always faced with the same questions:
- How is it that we act like this here?
- Who is blaming whom for what?
- Who offended or annoyed whom, and by what means?
- What is missing here to cause an improvement?
- Who has benefits from the problem and who objects?
- Who profits, who loses?
- How come the problem has existed for so long? (Clients usually do not come for counseling 10 minutes after a problem has arisen, but only after a few failed attempts of their own).
It is one thing to identify all these deeper interactions and quite another to make them discussable. But let’s take it one step at a time:
Analysis phase:
Together with the team leader or the person bringing the concern, the current state is visualized by visualizing the situation, the people involved, but also all the influencing forces.
Even while the first image is being created, a great deal is being sorted, discussed, shaped and aligned. This process of making visible creates clarity, if not about the solution, at least about the ‘problem’. Of course, this process can also be done together with all members of the group or team. The good thing is that these are ‘only’ virtual figures on a virtual board. This allows the participants at any time to enter into a kind of protective dissociation posture, in which they comment on the situation only in a figurative sense. By calling up the meta-positions of the individual figures on the board, more and more becomes recognizable. By calling up the inner views, more and more becomes perceptible and experienceable. The immersion in foreign emotional worlds provides for expanded perceptions and thus allows for different conclusions than the usual ‘just talking’. At this point at the latest, it is helpful to have also given intentions, fears or assumptions their own figure. A situation does not only consist of its participants! Much more not the persons but their situation-forming energies shape the situation. Not the counterpart, but what the counterpart says creates injury. If it is possible to separate what is said from the persons, a first good step towards ‘peace’ has been taken.
From problem to solution:
In a next step, we consistently search for what is missing here to make the solution possible. That does not mean that here a figure is too little – it can also quite simply a change in the constellation, in the Zusammen_stellung prepare the way to the solution. Maybe only directions of view are to be changed, maybe meanings in which size and/or color and/or form of a figure is changed.
By engaging in the processing of emotional information (popularly known as gut feeling), surprising ideas and approaches to solutions emerge. The special thing about working with the online-constellation-board is the inside view. Once you have seen the situation through the eyes of others involved, it is not far to understanding and empathy.
Closure:
Representation generates clarity. Clarity generates understanding. Experiencing generates understanding. Designing generates power to act. At the end of the process one picks up the next steps on the basis of the final picture and, depending on the assignment, goes into an accompanying or supervising role, or passes it on to the client.