Inspired by Suzi Tucker
Family Constellations is a way to explore hidden dynamics within our family systems that run our lives behind the scenes. Below is a transmission, a metaphorical exploration, that really gets across how we are shaped by our family systems and what came before us.
I was inspired to write this after taking a class with Suzi Tucker on the Shift Network. Suzi worked directly with Bert Hellinger, the founder of Family Constellations, co-translating many of his books into English and co-founding the Bert Hellinger Institute, USA.
She also happens to be the teacher of my teacher, Nick Werber, which means the wisdom that moves through my work flows directly from her lineage.
In one of her teachings, Suzi shared what she called the first constellation — a reflection on where belonging begins. The way she spoke it felt less like a lecture and more like a transmission. What follows is a resharing of what I received from her and a way of expanding on that experience.
Take your time with it. Let it land in your body.
🕯️ The First Constellation: The Kitchen Table
At the root of everything we do in Family Constellations is a deep respect for belonging. Belonging is essential. We need water, food, shelter — and we need to belong to someone or something if we are to survive.
Just as it is moments after birth, belonging begins with our relationship to our mother. When we work with the family system, it’s important to remember: our need to belong is a survival instinct. If we don’t belong, we don’t survive.
In constellations, we often begin by looking at where we first learned belonging, what Suzi calls the first constellation: the kitchen table.
The First Shelter
Before we ever joined the world, perhaps the true first constellation was our mother’s womb — what Suzi called “our first shelter”.
There, we learned what safety, rhythm, and connection felt like. We could sense if others had come before us in the womb and who is outside the womb during our time init. Is there a father our there? A sibling or two? Are they still there when we arrive?
We absorbed our mother’s relationship to herself, to the world, to her body, to those around her, and her relationship to us. We carried all of it as we grew within her and then as we were born.
And then came the kitchen table — that first circle of family where we learned so much more: how people express love, how emotions are handled, who speaks, who stays quiet, who leads, who disappears.
Even now, part of us might still be living by those early agreements — the invisible rules that once kept us safe. In constellations, we say these create loyalties: unconscious commitments to stay connected to those we came from, even at the cost of our freedom.
Loyalty to the past can sometimes interfere with the possibilities of the future. We live within rules we didn’t make, taking on roles we didn’t choose.
By the time we’re six years old, this inner map of belonging is already forming.
We may dream of moving forward, but our bodies whisper, Stay safe. Stay loyal.
A Reflection
Read over the instructions below once and then close your eyes for a moment to reflect.
Imagine your own kitchen table, before the age of six.
(Why six? Because after six is usually when other outside influence, beyond the kitchen table, begins to enter our lives, like school.)
✦ Who’s there at your table?
✦ Where do you sit?
✦ What’s the feeling in the room — is it loud, quiet, warm, tense?
✦ Who’s missing?
✦ What did you learn there about love, safety, or silence?
And… are there ghosts at your table? Maybe someone who died young, or someone who wasn’t spoken of, but whose absence you still feel.
Maybe a biological parent who wasn’t there, or a story that was never told, yet somehow, you knew.
Just notice what arises. There’s no right or wrong, only what your body remembers.
The World Outside the Window
Now, imagine that same kitchen table again, and look at the windows around it.
Outside those windows are the larger forces that pressed in on your family: war, migration, loss, injustice, poverty, early deaths.
These histories live just beyond the kitchen walls, shaping the moods and silences inside, even when no one spoke of them.
Sometimes we think, “Mom was just like that,” or “Dad was that way.”
But outside those windows, there’s more; a whole landscape of experiences that shaped them long before we arrived.
Here’s a list of questions that Suzi shared with me that are meant to prompt you to further consider what you're looking at when you look at your family story. Things happened behind us that shifted the kitchen tables of our forebears so that the language of interaction changed, often from one of thriving to one of survival.
Take a moment to ponder these questions, maybe even journal:
Did somebody in the family die very young in childbirth, in war, by suicide or another way?
Was there a mother or a grandmother or a great grandmother who died in childbirth?
Did someone in the family commit a great crime or do something that brought shame upon the family, creating guilt or perhaps leading to atonement?
Did your parents or their parents have previous marriages or important other relationships that ended precipitously? What happened to that person?
Were there people in the family who faced special fates that made them outsiders or outliers in the family. This was perhaps generations ago, where the rules of belonging were even narrower than they are today. Think about the unwed mothers or so-called disabled children. Family members who were institutionalized, imprisoned, financially humiliated, or those who loved in ways that were unacceptable or misunderstood by the prevailing conscience of the family.
Was there an early separation between a biological child and a parent, or both parents?
This includes adoption, foster parenting, step parenting. It includes the death of one of the parents, or the hospitalization of the baby or young child.
Was someone or many forced from their home or their homeland? Did they leave for a so-called better life, or did they leave to save their lives?
Did anyone cause the death of somebody outside the Family, whether by accident or deliberately?
Conversely, was someone killed by somebody outside the family, whether by accident or deliberately?
Suzi says “‘So, these are the first questions, and perhaps you have more. We are looking for profound breaches of expectancy that happened around previous kitchen tables and shifted things in such a way that they rolled through the generations, one or two or four or seven, until they reached us, and we just thought, “Well, that's life.’”
The Systemic Conscience
When we begin to see what’s outside those windows, something opens.
We start to understand how we belong to their belonging.
We didn’t just inherit their personalities. We inherited their circumstances, their survival strategies, their unfinished stories.
This is our inherited personal conscience that we can talk about with our therapists. And Constellation work helps us look at that bigger system: the systemic conscience.
It’s the conscience we follow, but don’t feel. It’s the places where we are mysteries to ourselves: why we do things we can’t explain, why we hold on or push away.
It’s the invisible order that governs belonging within a family.
Suzi calls this the cult of the family — the early code of what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s beautiful, what’s forbidden. Our survival was once tied to following that code.
Even when it no longer serves us, our bodies stay loyal.
When Belonging Becomes Survival
Sometimes the kitchen table is thwarted — someone leaves, disappears, or suffers. For example, the fearful mom, the angry dad, the motherless mother, the older sibling who has a difficult fate…
We move in to compensate, to make up for something, to not disturb what’s fragile. Our natural growth slows. We take on roles not of our choosing: the caretaker, the golden child, the invisible one, the peacemaker, etc.
We survive first. But to truly live, we must one day thrive.
Something that really stood out to me she said: some of us remain and continue to “survive” but we don't get to thrive. (This is where doing the work matters!)
As my teacher Nicker Werber said “To expand on this, one way Family Constellations helps enable healing is that it allows people to discover and truly step into what it feels like to step outside so many of the rules and regulations, traditions, taboos and ideas of right or wrong that come out of the systems they belong to.”
By looking back, with compassion, we begin to find peace in our own system, our own body, our own nervous system.
We become informed by where we come from, but no longer confined by it.
And yet, it’s important to also acknowledge that out of that “cult” come extraordinary things — our humor, our way of loving, our tastes, our sense of belonging.
Returning to the Table
Family Constellations invites us to look with humility, to see that we are part of something much larger.
“The fundamental purpose of this work is to allow, imagine and operationalize new ways of belonging.” - Suzi Tucker
We look at the system from which we come in order to find peace within the system we shelter, our own nervous system, so that we can move forward with contribution, creativity, and true optimism.
A grounded force of life emerges when we are no longer bound by the past.
So as you close this reflection, hold this image: your kitchen table, the windows around it, the world outside, and your place within it.
That’s where every constellation begins.
✨ An Invitation
If this teaching speaks to you, this is the heart of what we explore in our Cacao & Family Constellations gatherings as well as 1:1 with me, where we honor our lineages, heal through belonging, and open to new ways of being in relationship with ourselves and those who came before us.
👉 Join an upcoming circle or learn more here →