Community Corner

A Family Path for Healing

Family constellation therapy may be a way for people to change family dynamics, move forward and heal.

Linda Puechl was so moved by her own experiences in family constellation therapy that she decided to make it a new career choice.

The Regent Square resident is now renting space on South Braddock Avenue after training for two years and practicing for one. The therapy, which can be done alone or in groups, is a new tool for people seeking closure, healing and growth, she said.

“Family constellation therapy is a really powerful work that focuses on family dynamics,” Puechl said. “It has been a powerful tool for therapists to use in Europe and is just coming to the United States. If you pay attention to families, you may notice that behaviors are carried through generations, and you’d be surprised of the issues that come up in families from that, even subconsciously.”

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Puechl’s own practice, Lifelines Family Therapy, began after she started to realize the effects it had on her own life. She found that her own experience with depression may have come from her own interactions with her mother, who grew up with an alcoholic father.

“I had my own constellation and it revealed so many things that happened in my family that I knew on some level but never realized the ways it had affected me,” she said. “I thought this is something I would love to do.”

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Through the therapy, a client works with others in the room to discover different family histories, whether it’s a mother whose own father was an alcoholic, or discussing a father who lived through war before returning home.

When working with a group, other individuals in the room act as “representatives" of members of his or her own family, with one person speaking from a father’s perspective or another speaking from a mother’s perspective.

“This therapy and energy situation looks at those dynamics,” Puechl said.

Through family constellation therapy, named for the action of individuals in a room using energy and conversation to move forward, a therapist or facilitator asks the client about the problem they are encountering in life, which could be panic attacks or depression or other issues. The facilitator then has the client pick someone in the room to represent his or her own father or mother.

“They start to move and you almost see your family history acted out in front of you,” Puechl said. “With the help of the facilitator asking questions, someone may say, ‘I see now that this is my father’s problem and not mine.’ It’s very healing.”

Puechl noted that family constellation therapy is not a replacement for individual one-on-one sessions with a therapist.

“It’s not a replacement for therapy but it may be a tool to help you get to the bottom of something that has been bothering you,” Puechl said. “It might be just what you need to unlock family history that has been causing some grief, and you can take that and talk to your therapist about this issue.”

Puechl trained for two years at the Western Pennsylvania Hellinger Institute in Squirrel Hill. She said she enjoys the nature of the therapy because it makes people realize issues within their own families that may not have ever been addressed in the past. Puechl holds workshops where people can come together and have a session.

“One or all of those people may have issues they want to discuss,” she said. “You take one client and say, ‘What do you want to discuss?’ The rest of the people are available to be representatives and normally the people in the group do not know each other. When they are asked to represent someone, there is something about the energy in the room that the representatives pick up on. They call it ‘group conscience’ in the training. Those representatives feel what they should do as parents, siblings or bosses, anything that could be causing problems.”

For more information about Lifelines Family Therapy, call 412-225-0416.


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