02/03/2026
And again, external events pe*****te our surrounding space and our inner space too…
Luckily, we can develop inner resilience, so that external events dictate less of our mood and our day-to-day presence. But that requires investing time. Just as athletes invest time in training, and mindfulness teachers invest time in meditation, so we in the field of systemic family constellations invest time in bringing order to systems. From family systems to any system that holds difficulty, challenge, or conflict.
Entropy is a concept in physics that describes, simply, the tendency of systems to move from an “ordered” state to a more “scattered/random” one. For example, a tidy room tends to become messy over time without anyone intending it. To maintain order, we have to invest energy (to organize, clean, and restore structure).
When we speak about entropy in a family system, we mean that we too are made of matter, live within time, and are influenced by basic laws that operate in every physical system.
The second law of thermodynamics entropy describes a natural movement in which, without nourishment and maintenance, systems tend to become less organized, more dispersed, and much more “noisy.”
Just as hot coffee cools and its heat spreads into the room, just as a drop of colour disperses in water until everything becomes uniform, so it is in a human system.
When there is no reflection, acknowledgement, and processing of what is alive within it, the undertow of traumatic events gradually grows and reaches the next generations in the lineage.
In human systems, chaos and disorganization are felt as confused roles, blurred boundaries, burdensome secrets that were never given a place, or people and parts of the story that were pushed out and then reappear through symptoms, conflicts, cutoffs, anxieties, or repeating choices from generation to generation.
In constellations we witness that when a system stops looking at itself, when generation after generation of fathers and mothers could not pause, feel, understand, mourn, give place to what is missing, and bring order so there is room for everyone, it begins to unravel. What remains outside the picture continues to operate as a hidden force, seeking recognition and belonging.
We are the generation that comes to bring order. We are the ones who can no longer live with the chaos in our inner world. And we are the ones living in a time when densely packed external events shape our inner state.
In Bert Hellinger’s book Love’s Hidden Symmetry we read about the order in family systems that arises from the nature of human connection between partners, between parents and children, between brothers and sisters.
The way life moves in a family through belonging, through place, through respect for what came before allows order to be restored.
This order also meets the personal story of each of us. What happened in our lineage and with our parents influenced how much love we received in childhood, how much pain we carried, which experiences remained without words, and how this shaped our ability to feel safe, to open, and to trust.
Each of us also arrives with our own strengths and resources temperament, resilience, emotional intelligence, the support we received and also with a particular body and genetics that affect sensitivity, the nervous system, a tendency toward anxiety or calm, and the capacity for regulation.
So everything that happens in the family system is also physical, it is recorded in the body, in the breath, in muscle tone, in stress responses, and in the way we organize ourselves in relation to life.
Systemic constellation enters as an approach that brings a new order to our inner system an order that restores organization, direction, and deep silence.
This order helps us gently reconnect what was cut off from the lineage, such as a forgotten person, and what was cut off within us, such as a feeling that had no place or a truth the system could not bear.
Constellation also supports the movement of separating what is too entangled in the system such as roles that became mixed between parent and child, loyalties that bind a living child to a dead child, inner ties that became heavy and confusing in adulthood. When connection returns to its right place and separation happens where it needs to happen, the system becomes more stable in the face of disruptive external events.
This deep order reaches and influences our experience of self. After a constellation process, it can be possible to sense a quality of here-and-now presence felt in the body: living quiet, an inner space with clarity and tenderness. And when we experience presence, there is a center an anchor that makes it possible to meet pressure from outside without falling apart inside, to feel an emotion without being swallowed by it, and to choose a response instead of being swept into it.
Systemic work restores order in our relationships, deepens presence within us, and brings us into contact with an experience of a stable self coherent, organized, and supportive in stressful times.
