The first-ever user-friendly guide to Bert Hellinger’s Family Constellations—a powerful group therapy method for interrupting intergenerational trauma, healing painful family patterns, and reclaiming your own empowered narrative

Includes insights on somatic wisdom, the seven stages of a constellation session, and bringing relational dynamics into awareness for healing and growth

In Family Constellations, Joy Manné introduces the groundbreaking work of Bert Hellinger, whose therapeutic method reveals how unresolved family trauma can shape our lives and influence our experiences—sometimes for generations.

Drawing on Hellinger’s deep expertise across cultural and therapeutic traditions, this book guides you through the wisdom of family systems. It explores how unconscious loyalties, forgotten ancestors, and unmetabolized traumas can keep us from embodying—and expressing—our true, authentic selves and gifts. Here, Manné helps us understand approaches to care and repair so we can bring these patterns to light—and unlock new pathways to love, freedom, safety, and healing.

Inside, you’ll learn about:

• The “orders of love” that govern family systems—and what happens when they’re disrupted
• How family patterns of giving and taking, belonging and neglect, and loyalty shape our lives and embodied experiences
• The seven stages of a constellation session, from naming to integration
• The role of the ancestors and the ongoing influence of the dead on the living
• Practical exercises and truth statements to translate the insights and wisdom of constellation sessions into your everyday life

With clarity and compassion, Manné explains the theory and practice of constellations—how they’re set up, how healing happens, and how resolution can bring peace to an entire family field. She also shows how you can carry these insights into your daily life, relationships, and even work settings. Accessible, deep, and profoundly moving, this book offers a new framework for understanding yourself—and your families—in a new, empowering, and healing light. "This is a special book.... And it is such easy and beautiful reading. Beyond this, it is soul warming with many surprising hints on how to make our lives and our relationships richer and more fulfilling."
—From the foreword by Bert Hellinger, principal developer of Family Constellations therapy and author of more than thirty books

"You have only to read the table of contents in Family Constellations to know that this is a book that addresses everything you want to know about Bert Hellinger’s system and how it is being used. Joy Manné presents a clear and simple description of this effective method of reconciling with others, with the past, and with ourselves."
—Kylea Taylor, author of The Ethics of Caring: Honoring the Web of Life in Our Professional Healing Relationships

"Family Constellations is the book that I and many others have been waiting for. This introduction to Family Constellations is written in clear language that breathes on the page. Like a good chef making sauce, Dr. Manné has reduced the manifold ingredients of this branch of therapy to the essence of both the practice and its spiritual nature. Aptly illustrated with case histories, the central message uplifts and inspires: when we open our hearts and agree to what is so, rather than what we believe to be so, we meet Love–the one and only healer."
—Philippa Lubbock, Life Alignment therapist, Constellator (Family Constellations), Healing Through the Family Soul

"Joy Manné has done a wonderful job distilling Bert Hellinger’s Family Constellations method. If you are interested in this work, you don’t need to buy a shelf-full of expensive books that you will never have time to read. Dr. Manné has done the work for you and written it all down with a clarity and directness that is all too rare in books about therapeutic approaches."
—Ken Sloan, co-developer of Nature Constellations Work

"Joy Manné has written a succinct, didactic book about Family Constellations that focuses on the essence of the approach. She has a gift for unveiling the method, its usefulness, and the different parts so that readers understand the overall picture before delving into the details. This book is a jewel among books on Family Constellations. Dr. Manné’s wisdom, respect, and love come shining through making this mini-textbook a testimony to the devotion and discipline of Family Constellation facilitators."
—Kate Lindley Scheidegger, The Talent Spirit, Geneva, Switzerland

“This slender guide gives a succinct outline of family constellations work… a useful guide for those new to the method.”
—New Consciousness Review

“[Family Constellations] certainly is very detailed and easy to understand, even to those whose background is not in psychotherapy… [The book] provides a unique view on the causes and solutions to many of life’s problems.”
—Luxury Reading