Family Constellations Training Program
In-Person, NYC | Eight Weekends | October 2024 - May 2025
This 8-month facilitator training is a part self-healing, part certification journey into the power of Family Constellations. Practiced in over 35 countries, Family Constellations is a unique and profound form of personal and family shadow work that focuses on the deep connections that exist between a person’s personal blocks and their family and ancestral history.
Are you someone who has identified that being of service to others is vital to your alignment with your authentic self? Are you looking for an opportunity to engage in personal healing work that enables you to show up in your life and for others in an entirely new way? Or, are you a current practitioner, coach, or therapist who’s looking to really differentiate your practice and expand your offering?
Intentions Of This Course
Create an experiential learning environment that is equal parts personally healing and educationally driven
Teach students the most important principles and techniques that serve as a foundation of a Family Constellations practice in both 1:1 and group environments
Build your Constellations practice upon somatic / body based trauma-informed fundamentals
Provide valuable guidelines and practices for both newcomers and relatively familiar practitioners of this work
Offer a supportive and non-judgmental environment for all students to become familiar with what it’s like to stand in the role of the facilitator from the very early stages of the training
Mentor students on the business side of having a practice and encourage specific resources for continued expansion and training in the field
Interested, but have questions? Fill out the form below:
“The so-called ‘Black Sheep’ of the family are, in fact, seekers of liberation roads for the family tree.”
Structure of This Program
Training Hours Explained
Eight weekends total, presented one-weekend-per-month from October 2023 to May 2024
Seven two-hour Zoom meetings, once per month on a Tuesday evening (recorded, optional to attend it live)
Three, one-hour mentoring sessions with Nick to talk about your practice, your process, and to answer any questions about the modality or the business side of this work
A total of 130 training hours, 112 hours of which are live and in-person
Additional Materials Explained
A printed packet written by Nick describing the concepts in-detail will be presented each weekend. The eight packets become the handbook for this program that you get to take with you.
A collection of recommended reading and videos to further your understanding of the practice will be shared each weekend
Major parts of the in-person teaching will be recorded and shared along with all recordings of the Tuesday Zoom meetings
At the close of this program, students who have fulfilled all course requirements will receive a certificate of completion administered by The Family Constellations and Somatic Healing Institute (FCSHI.org)
Topics Covered
Oct Weekend One: Belonging and inclusion, history of the work and major influences, intro to creating a trauma-informed container, setting the conditions for great work.
Nov Weekend Two: Somatic focus weekend: The neuroscience of trauma and how it can present in the body as well as the family field. Focus on tracking for safety, consent, and overwhelm in the space. Understanding FFFF responses and how to meet activation with supportive resources. Examples of why clients struggle to enact change despite knowing what they need.
Dec Weekend Three: Guilt and innocence; the role of black sheep, scapegoats, golden children, mediators and more; the intersection of Constellations and inner-child-work; biological vs. chosen families and the important role of chosen families; differentiating working 1:1 vs. groups.
Jan Weekend Four: Family order and the orders of love, understanding how disorder causes suffering in the family system. Balance of give and take in families and the the way imbalance presents.
Feb Weekend Five: Mothers, the mother line and mother wounds, exploring the place mother’s hold in the family system and how Constellations can offer healing.
Mar Weekend Six: Fathers, the father line, father wounds, exploring the place fathers’s hold in the family system and how Constellations can offer healing. An afternoon about sibling dynamics and the role of siblings.
Apr Weekend Seven: Going deeper with what facilitation involves (holding awareness of the field, the client, the outer circle and your own felt senses), tools for when you get stuck, using your own body for attunement.
May Weekend Eight: Advanced concepts, being a conscious ancestor to future generations, money/success, business/organizational work, continued practice, and a celebratory send-off, with love, from your fellow students and the teaching team.
This curriculum is subject to minor changes and shifts both before and during the program (mostly to be responsive to student’s needs and to honor the pacing of the group’s process).
Understanding Cycle Breaking Work
The role of black sheep in families [VIDEO]
Three ways to begin working through the effects of generational trauma in your own family tree [VIDEO]
A little known sign that you’re healing [VIDEO]
What Makes This Training Different?
Offers a strong somatic (body-based) trauma informed foundation, ensuring that you can work with your own and your client’s experiences of overwhelm in order to create the safest container possible
Introduced in manageable steps, the experiential focus of this program will ensure each student gets to step into the facilitator’s shoes every weekend.
Special instructional time devoted to how this work can be practiced in a 1:1 setting for those who are interested in individual, rather than group practice
Explicitly encourages you to integrate the principles of Family Constellations into your own tone, style and any existing practices you’re already engaged with
Provides specific tools and techniques to help you move through stuckness or resistance within yourself or the Constellations you’re facilitating
Included one-on-one mentorship on both the practice and the business side of Family Constellations
Recordings of both the Zoom based teaching and large portions of the in-person weekends will be provided to you for later review
About Family Constellations
Actor Guy Pearce describes a Family Constellation he did about his father, who died in an accident when Pearce was eight years old.
Family Constellations is an eyes-open, experiential approach, in which fellow participants will be asked to stand and represent relevant aspects of your life. Depending on the blocks a person is experiencing, representatives may be chosen for specific family members, a partner, a boss, an ex, or other entities in your their.
Representation is not acting. Oftentimes the representatives are given very little information about the family members they are standing in for. And yet, by simply by agreeing to represent a person’s father or mother or significant other, something surprisingly resonant and accurate can show up. A perfect stranger, knowing very little about your story, can become a powerful mirror of your experience - showing you a third person view of the relationship dynamic that’s been playing out, sometimes for a lifetime.
Why is this beneficial?
There are enormous benefits to ‘constellating’ the issue in this way. For many, seeing the challenges play out in front of them, rather than inside of them or between them and another family member offers a safe distance from the issue (something we rarely get). It’s not uncommon for participants to state that this format allowed them them to feel safe enough to explore something they had previously felt was too painful or too scary to address.
Family Constellations also allows us to explore, in real time, how entire family dynamics change when one or two people stop playing the roles they had played previously. Using this living breathing map, we can see what happens when someone stops sacrificing themselves for the wellbeing of their mother. Or what happens when a healthy boundary is finally put in place between them and a troubled sibling. This work is flexible and can be used to help people work through a wide range of family issues originating in a person’s immediate family or even generations back.
How can a stranger accurately represent a family member of someone they’ve never met?
The phenomenon of representation is not specific to Family Constellations. In fact, it is integral to several longstanding therapeutic and groupwork modalities being practiced today. It is a feature of Bessel Van Der Kolk’s trauma structures technique (author of The Body Keeps The Score) and Thomas Huebl’s shadow work group practices. It is a part of Psychodrama, Family Sculpting, and is a tool utilized in group therapy at men’s prisons (featured in the groundbreaking documentary The Work.) There are also several similarities to Gestalt Therapy and indeed, there are many therapists trained in Gestalt principles who practice Family Constellations.
Representation is something everyone can do no matter their experience level. It’s a simple exercise that shows just how much we know about each other unconsciously, without even realizing it.
A deeper explanation of Family Constellations can be found here including a link to the recent feature of Family Constellations on Netflix.
Program Overview
Dates, Time & Location
Group Training Hours: 130 training hours total, 112 in-person Individual Training Hours: Three, one-hour mentoring sessions with Nick via Zoom In-Person Dates: Will be announced in April 2024Location: Gramercy, Manhattan - Specific Location Shared After Signup
Class Organization: One in-person weekend each month and one evening Zoom class per month in between
Timing: Weekends are Saturday and Sunday, 10am to 5pm. Zoom class is one Wednesday per month, 5 - 7pm EST (recorded and shared afterward).
Exchange Information
Regular Tuition: $3,750Payment Plan Available: Payments are shared in four increments (outlined on the enrollment page)
Certificate of completion issued by The Family Constellations and Somatic Healing Institute (FCSHI.org)
About Nick Werber
Nick Werber is an integrative coach in private practice specializing in individual, family and inherited trauma, embodiment, applied neuroscience and energy work. He is a board member of The Focalizing Institute and received the bulk of his initial training over nearly a decade of mentorship from the institute’s founder and pioneering psychologist, Dr. Michael Picucci.
Nick has been a featured practitioner and teacher by the International Systemic Constellations Conference, The Embodiment Conference, the Center for Integrative Hypnosis, and the MyWellbeing network and leads workshops and retreats both domestically and abroad. Approximately five years into his work with the Focalizing Institute, a mixture of intuition and serendipity moved him to work with several world-renowned practitioners of Systemic Family Constellations including Suzi Tucker, Dan Cohen and Emily Blefeld. Today, he has become a prominent voice for Family Constellations and the effects of ancestral trauma and is one of the most active FC facilitators in the Northeastern United States.
To date, he has taught hundreds of therapists, coaches and bodyworkers across 12+ countries how to integrate the principles of Family Constellations and trauma informed somatic work (Focalizing) as a means to connect with intuition, heal from generational and individual wounding, and to create a path forward free from various entanglments with the past.