Constellations

Listen as I read and talk about this article.

Hello, my name is Bill Tierney and I'm a results coach and a certified IFS practitioner. I do coaching groups using the internal family systems model.

Today I want to talk about constellations. There are others in the IFS community who talk about constellations, but there's some confusion about it. And part of that confusion may be that all of us that are talking about constellations may not be talking about the same thing when we use that term.

So let me tell you about how I use the word constellations when we're working with our parts. I've got this whiteboard behind me that I'm going to use in combination with some props that are post-it notes. And I've got these various different colors of post-its that I'm going to use.

First of all, let me just see if I can explain that. When I say a constellation of parts, what I'm referring to is a group of parts that are organized around an exile. And for the purposes of this demonstration, I'm going to identify the exile by its belief.

So let me back it up a little bit. Why would I identify the exile, and exile, by its belief? It's because it's that belief, which is at the core of the burden itself, that has to be hidden, managed, controlled, and contained by all the protectors.

So what we're about to see on the whiteboard behind me is a constellation of parts that are organized around that exile and the belief that the exile holds. Let's just say that that belief is "I'm not enough." So I'm going to write that down on this post-it note, and we'll use this post-it note to represent the exile: "I'm not enough."

"I'm not enough" is what I would believe is true about me. And if I believe that, then I must hide it. I've got to hide it, I've got to manage it, I've got to control it.

So I might have parts that will try to hide "I'm not enough," and that would be a protector. This would be, in fact, a manager. This manager is doing something to make sure that the world—and let's just use the word, this "T," as the world—as somebody who might... and this looks, let's make this look like an eyeball. This is someone from the outside world that might see that "I'm not enough."

The manager blocks that. Makes sure that the outside world doesn't see the secret that I'm trying to keep—that "I'm not enough."

And if that fails, we're going to have a firefighter that is going to be Plan B. So Plan B, if the world sees that "I'm not enough," then our firefighter is ready to jump in there and take care of it.

So let's just let these blue ones represent the firefighters. Firefighters are part of the protective team that are ready and waiting just in case they're needed. And then we've got managers here. And then we've got the exile, which, in this case, we're identifying by its belief as "I'm not enough."

These three parts would represent what I call a constellation. Now this, so this is a constellation of parts. I'm going to write that word up here, constellation, and hope that I spelled it right and hope that it's in the right direction when you read this.

So that's the constellation of parts. This is the outside world, which would be people, really, and circumstances, really, that could possibly interact with that exile in such a way that it could cause some damage, that it could upset the system, that it could upset that exile.

So these managers, which could be—some of them—managers that are trying to prevent the exile from getting hurt, might be managers that hide. Other managers might try to improve the exile.

And these firefighters could do several different things. They, they might numb, they might, uh, distract. There's any number of things that firefighters can do.

So now let's just say that the manager that tries to hide the exile fails. So now the outside world sees that "I'm not enough," or at least I perceive that the outside world sees that "I'm not enough."

Well, immediately now, the firefighters have to step in front of the exile and execute Plan B. And that may be a numbing, it may be a distracting, it might be any number of things.

That can be Ben & Jerry's, it can be Netflix, it can be smoking a cigarette, it can be going into hard addictions or behaviors that would distract. From—and then kind of numb like the spray foam that we use in between cracks, like in an insulation, where we just get sprayed in there and it fills up. Pretty soon, it has created a buffer to protect that and hide that, that exile so that the outside world doesn't see it.

As soon as that all settles down, then the firefighters go back into the background again. And then our managers will step back into the front line, creating a wall.

We don't need Plan B anymore. Now we can go back to Plan A, where we can hide, improve, change, do everything that we can to manage and control the wall. And I should maybe write one that says that too: manage and control, control the exile.

And as long as they're able to effectively do their job and whatever's happening in the outside world that might be seen that could activate, first of all, the exiles, and then maybe bring in the firefighters—as long as these parts are doing their job—then the exile, we're not aware of it.

It doesn't blend with us. And then it begins to blend with us. So that's a cycle. It just continues to go round and round and round and round.

Managers come back in after the firefighters have stepped in and calmed things down again, and they maybe now have an improved version of what they were doing before because they've learned from that experience.

And over time, they get better and better and better. And that wall gets thicker and thicker and thicker and has more and more strategies in place.

And we have more and more parts to deal with if we're ever going to get to the exile and help the exile heal.

Using, as you know probably, the IFS model, we ultimately want to be able to heal that exile so that it no longer believes it's not enough, and it sees that "I'm not enough" was never valid in the first place because the belief itself is associated with the emotions related to the belief.

And the belief itself comes from the either traumatizing or unsettled, unresolved, incomplete experience that ended up exiling this belief and the part that holds it in the first place.

So that's what I mean by a constellation. I hope that's helpful, and I'd love to see your comments about how that makes sense to you.