The stories can be worlds apart, the cultures can be built on pillars so different, however, the family dynamics underneath them are so much alike.
I have worked with expats from many corners of the world, and this has made me look at family constellation work from a somewhat broader perspective. People arrive carrying very different languages, traditions, religious beliefs, social conventions and ideas about marriage, motherhood, independence, success and duty.
Different culture, but a truly identical love
What is considered respectful in one society may be experienced as oppressive in another.
What one family understands as loyalty, another might experience as control. In one culture, leaving home at eighteen may be regarded as a natural sign of maturity. In another, remaining closely connected to one’s parents throughout adulthood may be the unquestioned norm.
Even our ways of expressing grief can be profoundly shaped by culture. What death means, how mourning is observed, which colours are worn, how openly sorrow is expressed, how we speak about those who have died — all of these things carry cultural meaning.
And yet, beneath these distinctions, I keep encountering remarkably familiar human questions.
Can I love my parents without living according to their expectations?
Can I leave without experiencing that departure as abandonment?
Whom do I belong to? What do I owe my family?
How much of myself am I allowed to become?
What happens if I choose a life that bears little resemblance to the one my family imagined for me?
This is where I find the potential of constellation work particularly compelling.
Not because family constellations somehow erase cultural differences. They shouldn’t. Quite the contrary.
Culture matters enormously. Our relationships are shaped by social norms, gender roles, religion, migration, history and collective experience. Any systemic approach that pretends to be entirely culture-free risks imposing the assumptions of one society upon another.
But beneath the cultural form, there are relational experiences that seem remarkably recognisable.
What family means- what roots give us
A daughter may be expected to care for her parents because that is what her tradition demands. Another may have been raised to become fiercely independent. One may feel guilty for leaving. Another may feel guilty for staying.
One may have broken away from her family’s religion. Another may have married someone from a completely foreign cultural background.
Someone may have crossed an ocean to build an entirely new life. Someone else may have crossed only the invisible boundary between “the person my family wanted me to be” and “the person I actually am.” The circumstances vary.
The inner conflict can be strikingly similar. We carry our families — even when we leave them. This is perhaps one of the great paradoxes of becoming ourselves.
We don’t become ourselves simply by rejecting where we came from. We carry our origins with us. Their values, their fears, their expectations. Their ideas about what makes a “good” daughter or son. Their attitudes towards money, relationships, achievement, failure, responsibility and freedom.
And sometimes we carry something much more elusive: loyalty. The quiet, often unconscious feeling that says:
If you suffered, I cannot be happier than you.
If you sacrificed everything for the family, I cannot choose an easier life.
If you stayed, perhaps I shouldn’t leave.
If you were rejected for being different, perhaps I shouldn’t become too different either.
These loyalties are not necessarily conscious decisions. They may be expressions of love. And that is precisely what makes them so difficult to recognise.
Family constellation work is built around the idea that our difficulties can sometimes make more sense when we stop looking at ourselves as isolated individuals and begin considering the relational system from which we emerged.
Hellinger’s original approach placed particular emphasis on belonging, generational relationships and unconscious loyalties. Whether or not one accepts every theoretical claim associated with Hellinger’s approach, this systemic perspective offers a valuable question:
What if some of the things we call “my problem” are also connected to the way I belong?
The human part comes before the cultural explanation. Working with people from across the cultural spectrum has taught me something important.
We all want to belong- and we also want to become ourselves
The particular form of love is cultural. The particular rules of a family are cultural. The meaning we attach to independence, obedience, marriage, motherhood or success is cultural.
But the struggle between belonging and becoming seems much more universal. We want to belong. And we also want to become ourselves.
We want roots, and we want freedom. We want to honour the people who gave us life, and sometimes we desperately need to stop repeating their lives.These two movements are not necessarily opposites. Perhaps maturity is not about choosing between them. Perhaps it is about finding a way to say: “I am yours. And I am also myself.”
That is why I don’t think constellation work needs people to share the same cultural background in order to be meaningful. The work does not require us to have identical traditions. It asks us to recognise something more fundamental: that every person comes from somewhere. Everyone has parents, whether they knew them or not. Everyone has a history and everyone has experienced some form of belonging and exclusion.
Everyone has had to negotiate, in one way or another, the invisible boundary between what was given to them and what they choose to carry forward. And perhaps this is where the languages, colours, religions and customs begin to recede into the background.Not because they cease to matter. But because underneath them we encounter the same ancient human movement:
How do I become myself without having to stop loving where I came from? That, to me, is one of the most universal questions family constellation work can touch.
And perhaps the deepest form of healing is not to sever our roots. Nor is it to remain imprisoned by them.
It is to become conscious enough to recognise which roots we want to carry into the future — and which patterns can finally end with us.
Read more about the individual family constellation in Budapest
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