Yes, but what does it mean to you? The matter of making meaning.

I hope you enjoy this short video that explores the question of how and why we make meaning, and whether that matters to constellation work. Bert Hellinger seemed to imply that we should * never * talk about constellations once they were done. Is that really true? Listen in to find out what I think.

P.S. A note of apology for the reflection on my glasses that showed up after recording. Hopefully you'll be so interested in the topic, you won't notice.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

In this video, I want to explore how clients make meaning of their experiences.

Humans use language and stories to make sense of our experiences. To create our identities, to know who we are, what we should do. When we're doing constellation work, I'm sure many of you know, images can show up on the floor or the table that challenge clients ways of making sense of themselves or their families or even their work teams in sometimes significant ways.

Sometimes this goes really well, and sometimes it doesn't. I believe that we often don't give enough attention to the meaning making process. At the end of a session, I walk away from the issue. It's not mine. I go home and leave it there. But my client takes this home. They have to integrate this experience into their understanding of who they are in their system, and how what they've seen is going to affect their relationships.

I remember an experience I had with one client who did not like the image of a parent that showed up on the floor, and it was so unreally important to her, largely because of their absence in her life. When the client saw this parent in the context of the parent's system, his behavior became understandable.

The parent was not, as the client's family story had it, the cause of all her suffering. So, as you can imagine, this challenged her identity as the helpless victim, and as a result, she was rather angry with me about what showed up on the floor. I did understand how this new view challenged her identity, I didn't push her, and left the door open for conversation.

A few days later, she called me, having had some time to let the image settle. We were able to continue our conversation, it turned out that seeing her parent as more human allowed her to break free of the position of victim and to feel more agency to direct her own life, and maybe to be a little kinder with her own human frailty.

I was aware that she needed time and some support to make sense of this experience in a useful way. And useful is the key word here. I know in our work we can get so caught up in the drama and the feelings that arise in a workshop that we can miss the question sometimes of, is this really truly useful to the client?

We human beings make meaning to navigate in our world. We have to know what things mean and what to do. Some scientists propose that our brain's primary purpose is as a prediction tool to keep us safe in the world. So I have three sense-making rules, a sequence that I watch people use to make sense of things.

The first thing is to ask: what is that? What do I see out there? And what does that mean for me? I'm observing behavior. If I'm seeing something happen, what is it? What does it mean to me? The second thing we have to decide is what do I do or not do in response to that? And finally, the last thing I have to do is decide: if I do or don't do that, what will happen next? We're always in this process of making meaning and making sense out of things. As groups of humans, we rely on shared sets of this behavior in order to coordinate our activities. If I see someone on the street and they say, Hi, how are you? I know I would just say, I'm fine. How are you? And it would be a very simple exchange. Or I know if I get in an elevator to turn and look at the door and not look at the other people or look at the back of the elevator. In fact, we don't even think about these rules. They're just part of the fabric of our everyday life.

We all share a set of resources of “this is how you do that.” There was a sociologist named Harold Garfinkel who used to torture his graduate students by sending them out into the world to break little shared social rules that make the fabric of our daily interaction. And if you want to try it, you can turn and stare at people, strangers, in an elevator and see what happens.

Not surprisingly, when we have different templates for what behaviors mean and what should happen, we can easily misunderstand each other. And we're most likely to make up stories about the other that are not so helpful. By the way, this happens all the time with couples. In the helping professions, I think we first need to understand the models we use to make meaning out of our client's story that guide our actions.

Your training shapes what you see and what you don't. If a client comes and presents the same set of symptoms to a medical doctor and then to a trauma therapist, they're going to have very different interpretations and very different responses to the same sets of behavior. The way that we interact or don't with clients, the meetings we make, the interventions we choose, the questions we ask or not, are driven by our training.

These form our meaning making resources. The thing about these resources is we don't see them. They're just part of the fabric of how we move through the world. I like to say it's what happens. We find these like when you go to a foreign country, if you're there long enough, you'll discover your culture's own assumptions by smacking into the ones that are different in the other country.

So it's really kind of hard to find what are our own sets of assumptions and what are our own sets of resources. But here's the rub. When you're working with someone, especially in a workshop where you may not know the person well, your client may or may not have the same set of meaning making resources that you do, and they may or may not make the same meaning out of the experience that you think they are.

Part of chair work, the initial interview in constellations or therapy or coaching or consulting, is to help us identify our view and the differences that our client may hold in terms of what resources they're using to make sense of the experience that they're having with us. But I think in constellation work, we often ignore and downplay the role of meaning making.

We focus on feelings and the drama and all of the stuff that happens. We discount how important meaning making is to our clients experience and on the value that they take from it. I know Bert imagined that clients would resolve the tension between making meaning of experiences and what showed up on the floor, and often he was right.

Sometimes he wasn't right, though, and clients suffered unproductively. Experience was not useful for them, so we really need to ask ourselves: what resources does my client have? And are they able to integrate the experience in a useful way? I've been really interested in the discussions I've seen about aftercare in constellation work, and I believe that these really are centered on how the client makes meaning of what they experience in a constellation?

I do think it's possible to tell when a client is talking just to reaffirm old unproductive beliefs and when they're really working to integrate a new understanding into their view of themselves and their family. We should not discount the different ways that clients make meaning from constellations and other therapeutic experiences.

Part of my inspiration to really pay attention to and explore meaning making, and to recognize the processes that clients use came from, Milton Erickson. who is the granddaddy of hypnotherapy. There's one particular book, called Phoenix: Therapeutic Patterns of Milton H. Erickson. It's by David Gordon and Mary Beth Mayer Myers Anderson. Milton was a master at grasping and using his client's model of the world to their benefit and at really understanding their sense making processes. I invite us to bring meaning making back into the constellation work world and in a mindful way to recognize that it is important for clients to make sense of what happens and to think how we might support them better in this process.