Family Reconstruction and its Value for Clients

This article introduces Family Reconstruction, a valuable therapeutic approach that fits within family systems theory. It blends aspects of psychodrama, gestalt, sculpting, altered consciousness, and fantasy. It involves groups of 10-20 people and an explorer or star (the person doing reconstruction). This person chooses the members of the group who will play roles of their family members, including their maternal and paternal families. A trained guide helps lead the process.

The five goals of Family Reconstruction are (1) to gain new insights and pictures of one’s maternal and paternal families of origin; (2) to enable the explorer to experience mother and father as human (rather than as parental roles); (3) to complete unfinished business (releasing suppressed feelings and meanings); (4) to let the explorer discover if they have a deep, pervasive and hidden need to change one’s parents; and (5) to allow the explorer to bond with the family roots in a new, adult, human way.

After the explorer (client) chooses the members of the group who will play their family members, they pick a stand-in or alter ego to play their role and select a mother and father role player. The guide decides which family side is developed first and the explorer chooses the members of the group who will role play.

The explorer can speak to the role players about their story, place them in physical positions like statues to be sculpted, or the role players can engage in acting out through psychodrama (involving sculpting, freezing, and sharing feelings/thoughts).

Remaining generations of children and family members can then be brought into the reconstruction, sculpting them into different positions that evoke feelings and thoughts. This process can be repeated for important family events.

The psychodrama part of the reconstruction can be directed in a number of ways, sometimes involving detailed scenes where the explorer speaks to them and sculpts them so they begin to resemble something more real and authentic.

It offers value to the client (who is the explorer) so they can experience a recreation of an authentic version of their mother and father, and an appreciation for how their parents become who they are in their families. Ideally, the insight gained by the client is a combination of intellectual, emotional, and physical.

Family reconstruction is intended for the client to appreciate their parents’ humanness and dissolve the concepts constructed about their behavior and roles as parents. This helps to see parents as human and to encourage acceptance, compassion, and empathy for them in the context of their experience with their own parents and family members. It’s possible that the client may discover anger, grief, or sadness that comes to the surface after it has been buried or hidden for some years. It can awaken something profound in the client, who may not have experienced aspects of their parents’ lives from these other perspectives.

Sources

Brothers, B. J. (2013). Virginia Satir: Foundational Ideas. Routledge.