Dan Booth Cohen, Ph.D. Hidden Solution Newsletter Spring 2011
"In all of my years of work around racial and social healing, I can truly say that the process work done with Dan Booth Cohen allows for a depth of dialogue, insight and transformation that can only be described as --MIRACULOUS!" Belvie Rooks, Co-Founder, Growing A Global Heart
"The workshop opened another dimension for me totally. It is without doubt life changing." Leslie Kirkland
A Constellation Story
The Psychology of Trauma Symposium Herrenalb, Germany
A man asked to look at his aggression in a Constellation. Born in 1958, he works as an addiction counselor. He told us aggression festered in him and burst through in destructive outbursts. Relationships and intimacy were difficult to sustain. At his job, he felt himself absorbing the negativity of the men he counseled.
His mother (b. 1919) was the illicit daughter of a 21 year-old German house servant and her employer, a wealthy, married German Jewish merchant. When this family maid became pregnant, the father denied paternity and fired her. The young woman was rejected by her parents out of shame. When the baby was born, she was given to an orphanage and lived there more than a year until the father paid a sum of money which enabled her mother to take her.
The girl grew up unaware of her Jewish heritage. She only learned she was the daughter of a Jew after the War started when she was assigned to manage a girls’ organization (BDM) within the Hitler Youth. Under the Nazi racial purity laws, she had to produce her original birth certificate. Seeing it for the first time was like receiving a death sentence. If her bosses knew, she would immediately be arrested and deported to a Concentration Camp.
Her first response was an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Then, she wrote a pleading letter to her mother’s brother, Rudi Graber, who held high rank in Joseph Goebbels’ Propoganda Ministry and wrote speeches for Hitler.
How Constellations Work: The Intelligence of the Unconscious Mind
Originally, modern psychology's therapeutic focus was on delving into the recesses of the unconscious mind. By the late 1970s, this approach was largely discarded. For the past 30 years, the mainstream of psychology has emphasized evidence-based cognitive, behavioral (CBT), and pharmaceutical approaches.
Jonathan Haidt, in his best-selling Positive Psychology book, The Happiness Hypothesis, recommends a three-pronged approached for taming the unconscious mind: meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac. One to calm, one to overcome, one to alter biochemically.
Systemic Family Constellations are grounded in a different tradition. Drawing from systems theory and indigenous traditions, they are a heart-centered, right-brained, intuitive approach for receiving the wisdom of the unconscious mind.
In Constellations, the unconscious is not approached as an unruly, wild horse to be tamed or controlled. Rather, difficult emotions, destructive behaviors and debilitating symptoms are understood as a way of calling attention to someone or something that wants to be noticed. When the impulses and eruptions of the unconscious are understood, accepted, and loved, they cease being destructive.
The unconscious mind is a storehouse of billions of bits of information, only a tiny fraction of which are accessible to the conscious mind at any given time. Its wisdom appears to extend into the cells of the body and beyond into the four dimensions of space and time. It is infinitely more intelligent than our individual cognition.
Constellations combine two important innovations. First, is the emphasis on silence and stillness over talking and analysis. Second, is the focus on repairing broken connections within the trans-generational chain of life. The first, enables accomplishing in a single session what took years in psychoanalytic therapy. The second allows safe contact with the reservoir of traumatic memory without triggering retraumatization.
Individual Constellations
In Person, Telephone or Skype By Appointment
Private Constellations are the most convenient and time efficient format for transforming the lead of your life into gold.
Recently, people have asked for my help for:
Chronic Pain
Mother-Daughter Issues
Overwhelming Sadness
Children on the Autism Spectrum
Marriage, Infidelity, and Child Custody
Loneliness
Money Problems
Inheritance Conflicts
A new research study surveyed clients who had Constellations for a particular personal issue. 80% reported that their Constellation resolved the issue successfully. Thanks to those of you who participated in this study.
If you have benefited from your Constellation, please consider saying to a friend or loved one, "You can do a Constellation for that."
Slavery's Legacy: A Workshop on Intergenerational Trauma and Healing with Belvie Rooks and Tom DeWolf
Friday April 22, 2011 San Francisco, CA
IONS International Conference
Thursday-Sunday July 20-24, 2011 San Francisco, CA
Tom DeWolf, Belvie Rooks and Dan Booth Cohen will guide participants in a deeply personal, shared exploration of woundedness and the potential for healing and reconciliation stemming from slavery and it's lingering impact. This interactive workshop will draw on personal stories and family histories as the pathway for a deeper inter-active dialogue about inter-generational trauma and healing.
Dr. Cohen will show workshop participants how to perceive transgenerational knowledge and wisdom. Fields of collective intelligence extend beyond the specifically personal to touch the inherited memories that remain active in the unconscious mind. According to Dr. Cohen, "We do not need to languish or despair over these legacies, but we do need to contact and see them clearly to become active participants in creating new models of healthy social behavior."
A Weekend Healing Circle for the Jewish Community of Sweden with Dan Booth Cohen
Saturday - Sunday April 30 - May 1, 2011 Stockholm, Sweden
This weekend is for Swedish Jews and others with a Jewish background to meet, investigate and share our collective experiences and memories. It will be rewarding for the small Jewish Diaspora in Sweden to work deeply and seriously within our own group.
This workshop will create a strong container for groundbreaking Personal, Mythical, and Political Constellations. We offer a new language and a new type of meeting. Our aim is to contribute healing and understanding for each person who joins our circle.
Systemic and Family Constellations Oslo, Norway
Saturday - Sunday May 7-8, 2011 Oslo, Norway
Dr. Dan Booth Cohen returns to the Hellinger Institute of Norway to teach and demonstrate his unique approach to Family Constellations.
In addition to personal Constellation, we will also look at political, social, and environmental themes.
Free Community Constellations
Bay State Prison June 2, 2011 Norfolk, MA
Community Circle of Boston June, 2011 Jamaica Plain, MA "Anyone can be imprisoned. Anyone can find freedom." Billy Simpson
Call or email for details.
The Constellation Call Free 45 Minute Teleconference Tuesdays, 8:00-8:45 Eastern (530) 216 4363 PIN 650271# Learning Group for Activists, Artists & Sensitives The HeartBeat Collective Jamaica Plain, MA 7:30-10:30 pm May 19, 2011
Rudi Graber saved his niece’s life by directing Baldur von Schirach to intervene and change her assignment to a nursery in Finland. With false birth papers and the protection of high ranking Nazis, she survived the War.
Near the end of the war, when Germany’s defeat appeared certain, Rudi Graber volunteered for combat on the Eastern Front. As expected, this suicidal decision resulted in his dying in battle.
The client’s mother had died in 2007. To the end, she felt bitterness towards Jews and Judaism. He described her as a complex woman, sometimes good humored and other times melancholy about the circumstances of her paternity, birth and upbringing. Like his mother and grandmother, he often struggled with dark emotions. His Jewish relatives escaped from Germany and moved to the US in the 1920s. His mother had made some attempts to contact them which were rebuffed.
Recounting this story in front the group brought tears to his eyes and those of many others. He had done much therapy of over the years, including his first Constellation more than 20 years ago. He felt the deadly conflict between Jews and Germans rage inside of him. These therapeutic interventions had not relieved his internal state of war.
Perhaps this setting, with the support of Alexandra Senfft, the granddaughter of a hanged Nazi war criminal and me, son of a Jewish-American Army soldier, could touch the hearts he carried in his heart: Who among them dared to forgive?
There may be no heroes in this story, but were there instances of heroism? Our minds naturally accept some and reject others. This Constellation brought forth complex ambiguity. The uncle, Rudi Graber, who wrote speeches to justify the murderous persecution of Jews, saved his niece’s life. The wealthy grandfather, who was a victim of hateful discrimination, left his daughter in an orphanage to protect his reputation.
I asked the client to begin with a representative for his grandfather and grandmother. Immediately, these two could be seen as existing in two separate worlds. The divide was not only between the worlds of Germans and Jews, but also males and females, and culture and creation.
Because this workshop was held in a professional setting with a societal theme, I expanded the Constellation so it was about more than one client and one family. Gradually, the Constellation space filled with many elements. The Jewish grandfather was joined by his wife, sons, Rabbi, and Moses to symbolize the cohesive force of Jewish tradition. The grandmother stood with her brother and elements representing the Fatherland and German culture.
The client’s mother remained alone in a no-woman’s-land. Her mother and German family rejected her for being the product of an illicit affair. Her father denied her very existence. Her representative reported feeling filled with shame, anger, and despair.
I asked the client to stand in the Constellation with his mother and a representative for Aggression. Surrounded by the external elements of their tragic story, they stood in the still point where powerlessness and rage converged.
With the representatives invited to move with their truths, the healing movement came spontaneously and unexpectedly from a surprising source. The Jewish wife of the wealthy merchant opened her heart to the child of her husband’s affair. The actual woman has been dead for many decades, so her movement does not represent family facts and may actually contradict them. Instead, this was understood as an expression of compassion and acceptance towards a child who did nothing to create the circumstances of her birth.
This simple gesture of acceptance by the Jewish wife allowed the client’s mother to move towards her own mother. The human heart is surrounded by gates that protectively close from the experience of trauma. The closed-heartedness created by severe trauma can seem irreversible and persist for decades, even be passed on to children and grandchildren.
The irony of this quality of closed-heartedness is it can be utterly irresistible to change and yet it can change in an instant. This is the potent effect experienced so often in Constellations.
The Jewish wife’s movement released the tension of closed-heartedness in the system, opening the floodgates of open-hearted love, compassion, and acceptance. Even so, these movements are tempered by the limitations of culture and creation. For example, when the representative for Moses opened his arms to the client’s mother, her response was, “Where was your acceptance when it would have done me good?” Similarly, the uncle’s act of heroism was tempered by his crimes.
The client commented afterward that the Constellation lifted an immense burden off him. He felt an inner happiness that was quite new and unfamiliar. Some weeks after, he wrote me:
"I found a deep peace and harmony inside. I saw a clear answer to my struggles with "German culture," and "Intellectual behavior." They were represented in the Constellation as the energy of my cold grandmother and the Nazis. I felt empathy for my grandmother, her being alone as a young pregnant mother, denied and lied to by the Jewish family and rejected by her own mother and father. She was so alone. And my mother was the victim of her hurt and hate - because my mother always reminded her of the trauma of sexual violence, what my Jewish grandfather did to my grandmother. I am very thankful that I found a place for deep sadness and contrasting energies in my life."
Private Constellations are the most convenient and time efficient format for transforming the lead of your life into gold. 
Saturday - Sunday
