First Person Plural: EI & Beyond
First Person Plural: EI & Beyond
Leslie Nipps: The Unconscious Reality of Constellations
In this episode we train our awareness on systems. Like individuals, systems have an unconscious reality. Constellation theory is a tool for helping us to understand that unconscious space.
Our guest is Rev. Leslie Nipps, MDiv, is the founder of Convivium Constellations. She is a Systemic Constellations and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) practitioner and trainer. She has also been an Episcopal minister for over twenty years. She is a regular contributor to the professional journal of Constellations, The Knowing Field.
Daniel Goleman talks about his Emotional Intelligence Courses, available at danielgolemanemotionalintelligence.com
What do you know about yourself? I like to make new friends. I like to be kind to others. I can read pretty well. I like to be playful, I'm smart
Elizabeth Solomon:Welcome to first person plural, emotional intelligence and beyond. I'm Elizabeth Solomon.
Daniel Goleman:And I'm Daniel Goleman. Our third host, Hanuman Goleman is way on a retreat.
Elizabeth Solomon:The fact that Hanuman isn't with us today, Dan is a perfect segue into our topic today, which is on self awareness. And that's exactly what Hanuman is doing right now on retreat is expanding his own self awareness and taking a little bit of time to reflect, I hope so well, no soon. This season, we're diving deep into what we call the building blocks of emotional intelligence, breaking down the key skills or competencies that make for an emotionally intelligent person.
Daniel Goleman:Our first three episodes Focused on emotional self awareness. In Episode One, Dan Harris talked about the theory of self awareness. And our guest today talks about awareness of systems. What does that mean?
Elizabeth Solomon:Yes, I spoke with Lesley nips, who lives in northern New Mexico and facilitates and teaches on systemic constellations, with a special focus on family systems, and constellations is at its core, a way of creating awareness on the level of systems.
Daniel Goleman:I really like how this method encourages us to be aware of systems, not just ourselves, I'm thinking of a very well known global company that was founded by a man who was widely hated. And I think that he brought that style to leadership in that company. That was in the 1930s. Now, almost a century later, the CEO of that company has become what you might say, is rebellious son against that. He's become someone who espouses very virtuous, for example, environmental goals. And I can see as a kind of through line that I hadn't thought of before, from the founder to the CEO, being such a leader in this way. Does that make sense from a constellation through?
Elizabeth Solomon:It does. Systemic constellations has its roots in a variety of modalities, including family systems, therapy, existential phenomenology, and Zulu beliefs about healing and ancestry. It was developed by a German man named Bert Hellinger, who has really amazing life story. He grew up in Nazi Germany and was recruited into the army but ended up becoming a missionary and moving to South Africa, where he lived among the Zulu people for close to two decades. And what he learned there were two things one, the presence of ancestors, right thinking in a much sort of longer timeline about those who predate us. And he also picked up this idea that cultivating awareness or doing any sort of healing work is not just an individual endeavor that it actually happens best in community.
Daniel Goleman:Let's dive into our conversation with Leslie nips.
Leslie Nipps:Well, I want to start out by honoring our founder that's always good, healthy systemic practice, which is a gentleman by the name of Bert Hal Unger, German, who died a couple of years ago. And he basically came from the psychotherapeutic world. But his context was postwar Germany. It is a tool we become very used to in our culture of assuming that we have a personal unconscious, right? There's all that stuff that we know about ourselves. And then there's the thing that made us eat the third piece of cake even when we didn't plan to write what's going on in me that I did that or that we access in dreams and symbol and ritual. But most organizational people these days also understand that systems have an unconscious, we have all the conscious material, the rules, the agreements, the members of systems, but that there's an unconscious reality. Also running systems, the kind of thing that say in a business, you fire the CEO who's an alcoholic, thinking this will solve our problem. And then a year later you realize your new CEO is also an alcoholic. Something else is running the show. Fear. And so this is a tool for helping us to understand that unconscious space. What is actually underneath the tip of the iceberg that's running what's going on in the first very fruitful context for this for Bert Hellinger was the family. So if I am depressed, I have my own personal depression that I'm managing and various kinds of ways I'm maybe I'm not making much headwind on, I'm not really getting anywhere with it, I'm still depressed. And then we start to examine what is the history of my family in which that grief or depression makes absolute sense. And then also tools for what to do about that in a nice way, we're not stuck with it now, once we can honor and include and see the original sources of grief. Again, in helicopters context, the nightmare of World War Two, but we may have slavery, or genocide or more personal losses, the three babies who died in a row in the cholera epidemic, two generations back, that there was no time to honor or give a place for once we can bring that to awareness, we can actually honor it, respect it, give it a place. And when we do that, something lifts. And it's not my depression anymore.
Elizabeth Solomon:Yeah, I think you're pointing to a couple of things. One, I think, you know, in the context of organizations, you just said that which is conscious, right? I mean, I think about the values, we write down the norms that we sort of explicitly agree to, right. And then this reality that we can have all these things that are written, right, all these codes of conduct all these employee handbooks, right. And we can still feel that something isn't totally in alignment with what we've written down. And I also hear you talking about this piece of like these things that we kind of circle the wagon on again, and again, and again, right, and we might go to many different modalities to help resolve an issue like depression, and nothing's quite working. But the words you use is see you just use the word see, you can actually see it. And so I just want to invite you to share with our listeners, how do constellations work, right, because I think this gift of being able to, quote unquote, see is one of the beautiful things about this work.
Leslie Nipps:Yeah, and this is a bit of the tricky bit, because it can sound like a lot of other things that it is not, it is not roleplay, it is not acting, there's some overlap with both of those little overlap with what some people might call psychic phenomena, you're perfectly free to be agnostic about that. But it's not any of those things. And at this point, I like to appeal to some basic biology, mammalian level biology, which is the capacity of the herd to feel the emotional quality of the herd. Very important survival tool. Yeah. So if you're the meerkat who ignores the group's fear about the hawk warning, you're gonna be hock lunch, right? Yeah. So it's very important to be aware of the group's emotional tone, its sense of safety, its sense of fear, whatever might be going on. And we are like that, too. We are mammals in that regard, all this limbic structure in our brain, we can feel when a group is stressed, we can feel when a group is comfortable and safe. We all have experiences we can match to that. So what we do in constellations, we use that capacity that we have to feel and know the emotional tone of a system. And we crank up the gain on that, so that we can really feel it. And we bring to presence. So if we're looking at a family, mom, dad, grandparents, World War Two, whatever it might be, we bring those two presents. And I promise you when we do that, we will feel the emotional tone of that system. Its fear, its guilt, its rage, its joy, if that's what it was like for them. Yeah. And this is an uncanny thing. The moment we bring into presence, any elements of a system, we will feel inside our limbic system will pick up that emotional sense. And everyone who's listening right now can do it. Think about one of your grandparents who had a hard life and your heart will shift. You'll feel something, you'll feel some grief, or some fear, or some confusion, something will arise. We bring to presence in our mind. The moment we think of something, it's it's somewhat present. Yeah. And we start to notice the system. And then in terms of concrete tools, there's a lot of ways we do it. Sometimes we do it just the way I did it. Sometimes we do it by looking at objects on a table. So trance, we do it in groups and have individuals step into the roles, but again, not play acting, it's an order to bring to presents the emotional meaning of the system. Once we do that, we can see it and start working with it.
Elizabeth Solomon:Yeah, I'd love to have you just explain that a little bit more about this piece that in the constellations World War Two, you would call a representing right, where you actually have either objects or people sort of stand in to represent usually individuals within the system, although obviously, they can represent concepts, they can represent kind of unknown elements, but they just I want to touch on that a little bit. I'll just say briefly that I think, you know, one of the powerful things for me with this work, I am a very visual person, right. So there's one level of understanding things mentally. So for example, you know, in my own family system, thinking about my own dad, right? I'm like, Okay, I know, my dad has anxiety, something I've known my whole life, and that there is an impact on me in the family system as a result of that anxiety. And yet, when I have seen someone represent my dad in a constellation, and show up with that anxiety, someone who doesn't know my dad at all, has no has never met him doesn't have a backstory. Somehow the visual imprinting of that, for me, has allowed me to not just understand it mentally. But again, to sink into that place of empathy that you're talking about, and really feel it and say, oh, cool, that's really true for my dad. And I can have a different understanding about that. So there's a piece here, I think about the representing that feels unique to this work,
Leslie Nipps:if someone is mourning, a recent loss, so your parent has died, a sibling has died. They know they're sad. And they know that they're grieving. And they know that they remember the person in ways that might be useful, or unuseful, depending upon how it's showing up for them. Yeah, and they know all of that is important. And then they go to a funeral for the person. And they sit by other people who are grieving. And they bring to presence in a different kind of way. And the rituals of whatever the funeral are, yeah, represent the person's presence. And if we don't have the funeral, it matters. This is what Family Constellations, notices, and then uses far more intentionally to therapeutic effect for both individuals who have a problem like depression, or for organizations, other kinds of systems that are wanting to understand what's going on here. We bring to presents the actual Mrs. White really glad you invited me, the actual emotional system, not our idea about it, not our memories of it. As powerful as memories are. It's actually not about memories. It's the truth of the actual system, but with a certain frame of consciousness and awareness, so that we can actually work with it a bit. Yeah. So now that we have brought your father and all of his anxiety into presence, we can we can bring in some tools for the daughter of this father, and already just naming that we've done something that wasn't a big move. We didn't do very much. But we just named something now, and we honored a little tiny dyadic system. Just it's a twosome. It's not a big system. But it's very important to move into the space. Oh, I am my father's daughter, and he wrestled with a great fear. Now we've moved it out of the technical language of anxiety. And then we can take the next move and and bring in what he was afraid of whether we have a guess about what that is, or we don't know. And then you can honor what he feared. Oh, he feared that. And then we have some other moves. Things like, I honor my father wrestled with that I leave that with him. Thank you for my life. It's never about dismissing emotions. It's actually about bringing them fully present, so that we can honor them, and then release them to whom they appropriately belong. Oh, that's my father's fear. It's so
Elizabeth Solomon:beautiful. You know, it's so much I hear in this. It's a piece about slowing down. Right. And I think in the context of thinking about self awareness on the individual level, we would categorize this as mindfulness, right, just taking a moment to slow down and actually name the experience. And so what we're really talking about in constellations is doing that on the systemic level. And then there's also this piece that you're bringing to light around process ritual, this piece around honoring and that you were an Episcopal Minister before you were a constant later. and have been thinking a lot about, you know what it was for you to get up in front of a congregation to participate in so many rituals, births, deaths, marriages, right? And how that work in ministry of being present to sort of rites of passage has translated into your work as a systemic constant leader.
Leslie Nipps:Yeah, I mean, one of the things in Christianity, the more sacramental versions of it is something called the communion of saints. It's the idea that there is some reality to the existence of the dead. This is not new to Christianity, traditional indigenous cultures around the world. Honor the ancestors in ways that culturally we've lost contact with. And I do think there's a great yearning for this, this whole ancestry.com Looking for our roots. genealogical stuff, I think we're responding or reacting to our lack of connection with all of that. So in certain forms of Christianity, it's called the communion of saints, which I always thought was a lovely idea. The first time I did a constellation I went, Oh, it's real. It's not just a nice idea. But the way I like to put it is the dead are not completely dead to us. They're kind of alive. Now, they're the fact that people die matters. Death and life are different. But they remain in the system, as as meanings as presences as influences, and their traumas and losses are relevant to us. Because we are their children, or their children's children or their descendants. Yeah, we are part of their system. And if their great traumas and losses were never acknowledged, or dealt with, or they were busy surviving, or whatever it was, we're going to still be wrestling with that. And this is something we're becoming very aware of in the racial justice space. Yeah, the post slavery trauma syndrome, the awareness to the degree that we have not really wrestled with these things, as a nation really, is still affecting all of us very much. So from my Christian world, my priestly world, I feel this deep connection with these larger influences, and creating ritual spaces for us to find our good place amongst them, so that we can receive good life from our ancestors, and then do the job that we've all got, which is very simple, which was to live really fully,
Elizabeth Solomon:I think, you know, especially in a Western culture, right? We have a sort of very kind of truncated sense of time, right? There's a lot of fast movement, right. And I think what you're talking about, too, I almost think of it as like, elongating the timeline. And I'm wondering, thinking about your focus is often on family systems, but thinking about how this idea of ancestors translates to organizational systems, that organizations also have these long histories that impact the systemic realities in the present.
Leslie Nipps:I'm going to come back to that question. But I want to connect this rather explicitly with with the thought we were just sharing, which is in the West, and maybe specifically in the Western Hemisphere, maybe specifically the United States, I won't speak for the world, we've got a very forward facing culture. And that's by the very nature of being, you know, colonists pioneers. When are many of our ancestors left their originating countries, there was often a lot of trauma around that movement, whether it was voluntary or forced. And so we as a culture remain very forward facing, you know, don't look to the past, you know, grab for what you want. It's wrapped up a lot in our individualism as well. Yeah. The individual making their way forward. And these larger cultural, systemic threads impact all of us, including our organizations, so that history is part of the land. It's part of the culture, historical traumas, like, you know, the Civil War and slavery and the Native American genocide are relevant to all of us. Many organizations have more local history, either super local would be having a founder who was themselves a perpetrator, then it's going to be part of the DNA of the organization. Right? Or it's been around long enough that one of the CEOs almost drove the organization into the ground. That kind of thing is going to continue to be proud isn't to the the organization, if the business or organization got their original capital, their money, their land, their property, and unethical ways, this is going to remain part of the system. And this race is a really interesting and useful conversation about reparations. But before we get to anything like reparations, something like constellations can actually help us understand what is going on what is going on in this system, you know, that our profits keep on failing, or that we have such high turnover in our employees, these are the kinds of things that a constellation can start to reveal, because we hit the limits of what we consciously remember or know in the group, and can explain for, and even the stuff that we may consciously know, we may not consider relevant. And so yes, the history of organizations or the the system that the organization is embedded in, is often extremely relevant to why the organization is or is not functioning well. So
Elizabeth Solomon:I think the the line of questioning that we often pursue when there's an issue or a pain point is kind of what's wrong with me, or what's wrong with them. Right. And I think the gift of constellations is toward is to ask the question of like, what's happening in the systemic field or what's happening in the system. And I'm wondering if you could give us a maybe even a more specific example of some of the ways that you reframe questions for your clients, to be asking questions that are systemic, instead of fraught with placing blame or onus on a single person or persons.
Leslie Nipps:One of the frames of constellations is that we have strong loyalty bonds to the groups that we belong to. So the stories we have about who's to blame are extremely powerful. They are really strong. And for really understandable reasons now, and trying to get into a conscious conversation about that, that will loosen up that frame of who's to blame often doesn't go very far. And I want to say, particularly when they start to touch on events of our own childhood, right, because our own childhoods, were so defenseless, we were so vulnerable to everything that was going on. And so changing the questioning, I often try to do that and find myself kind of not making a whole lot of progress. What I do really prefer to do is start to bring the system to presence, whether it is in a sort of a formal constellation the way I've already described to you, or even in their mind's eye, so so let's just say for a moment, we're in a dilemma with our mom. And we still really fight and I don't know how much it's my fault, or how much it's her fault. This is really common, right? And so I'm curious about that. But then I say, Okay, let's stop for a moment. Just just bring to your mind for a moment. And the listeners, if you don't have this problem with your mom bringing any relationship into your mind side that seems to have this quality, we've all got at least one right? Could be your best friend could be your spouse could be your adult child. So bring bring it to mind, bring in your mind's eye, an image of you and your mother, who are enduring this difficult dilemma. And when I look at them, I notice how stuck they are and how painful it is that the two of them can't figure out whose fault it is. So that's one move right there something shifted or changed already. Yeah, that is hard for them. I would like them to be able to get out of that, you know, that question? So I'm curious. on whose behalf are they holding this question of who's to blame? That is so strong? Now, I don't know the answer that question. Oh, if I do a longer interview, we might find out. Oh, yeah. Her father actually went to jail for murdering somebody. These kinds of things show up. Yeah. And that guilt is lingering in the system. And now me and my mother are working it up between the two of us. Yeah. on whose behalf Are we having this experience?
Elizabeth Solomon:This to me, I've sort of in my mind, I'm calling it almost like the level 2.0 of awareness right? I helping people really have the awareness to kind of name their trigger and then modulate their response to that trigger. Right. And we've talked about this often is just the amygdala hijack what happens when something occurs and we get totally flooded with emotion and what can we do to create some space and I think The gift of systemic thinking is that we go to the next level of saying, Why is it this thing that's actually always triggering me? Right? So once I know how to sort of modulate my response to it, still, that thing sometimes continues to Ignite Within me a strong emotional reaction that seems kind of out of context or out of place for what I intellectually understand about the situation. Right. And so I love what you just said, because the question is, if it goes from being who's to blame, whose fault is it? Who's doing what to? Why are we looking to blame someone in the first place?
Leslie Nipps:Yeah, this is a real gift. I'm a big fan of self management around emotions. Yeah. Because we can't always know what the heck's going on. And we need a way to turn down the dial, and, you know, not hurt ourselves or anybody else, right? Step away. Yeah. And there's a whole nother level of relief. This is another example that was coming to my mind this morning. And this is something that many of us have been able to do at a conscious level. But constellations allows it another level, let's imagine, I'm still carrying anger at my mother, for all the weird ways that she put me down when I was starting to become a sexual person. You can't go out late at night, don't look at those boys, it's dangerous for you a common enough story. You know, don't you know what's going to happen to you? Don't be dirty minded, and whatever it might have been. Yeah. And I'm still angry about that all these years later said of probably influences my sexual life, that that happened. Yeah, so I'm still mad about it. And then I find out from a cousin, that my mother was sexually abused by her father. Ah, it doesn't change that when I was 12. It hurt that my mother treated me that way. But something very significant releases immediately. It's, it's, again, I think of it as very biologically based. It's a parasympathetic reset, it's, it's not self management. It's not making myself think differently or more compassionately about my mother, or taking responsibility for myself, which is another move we might make. It's like, oh, my mother was trying to keep me safe from something she wasn't safe from. And so constellations is a tool for helping us, even if we never know what the heck happened to your mom, we can bring in your mother and her parents, and see her fear of her parents feel the fear of her parents and go, Oh, wow, this fear was present way before I popped into the world hole. So and again, something can shift, and it's just a release. And now we can function more congruently in our in our system without, at least with a lessening of the triggers around all that. And this will have cascading effects. I've seen over and over again, once that kind of awareness, embodied somatic level ritual awareness, not merely intellectual, I start having a different experience with my sexuality. Because I'm not carrying this thing with my mother quite as fiercely into my sexual relationships.
Elizabeth Solomon:Yeah, and also just want to focus for a second and talk about the gift of constellations to also put us in touch with with that, which is positive, which has come down through our lineage, right. And just to say a little bit about that as well.
Leslie Nipps:At one level, if we reduce it terribly, it's all positive. And this is what I mean by it. You and I are here. All of our ancestors endured and survived everything they faced. Yeah, there are lineages that stop. Right? They don't pass on life. And one of the things I often say is that constellations is the overdue funeral, or the overdue reckoning or the overdue honoring or the overdue taking responsibility if it was a great violation, or perpetration, or the overdue honoring of the spectacular loss, that sort of thing. Once we do that, there's some ritual phrases here we use very frequently, which is, dear ancestors, parents, grandparents, whoever it is, yeah. I honor the dignity of your fate. I leave it with you. Thank you for my life. Please bless me as I put it all to good. And so that place we can land congruently not in a Pollyanna pretty. Make yourself think positive kind of a way, but in a true heart opening kind of way is wow, I have a place in my heart for this suffering of my ancestors. And I'm so grateful for the life that they gave me. Now this is often a big shift, I have clients who are not sure being alive is such a good deal. That that's something that's worth being grateful for. So one needs to be very tender. And careful with this process, particularly when there's like a lot of abuse or generations of oppression. Yeah, but that that is the landing place. And the more we're able to land in that place, the more the release happens, and we congruently receive that, that ancestral juice, that gives us the, the capacity to be lively, which means to love, to build, to create, to work for justice, to do all the things that only the living get to do until we're done, and we join the dead ourselves. So in some sense, it's all a positive frame, with a lot of room necessary room for honoring what we can conventionally call the negative. But it really is the sweetness of honoring things as they have been. So going to a funeral and leaving and going. I know, this is a weird thing to say. But that was a good funeral. We all cried our eyes out. And we laughed a bit. And we, we talked about this person in a real way, not a pretend way. And I'm glad we did that. And I can feel them smiling on us now.
Elizabeth Solomon:We've used the word somatic a couple times in our in our conversation, and I just want to back up and just define what we're talking about when we're saying somatic,
Leslie Nipps:acute coming back to this limbic system that we have, which is of course connected to the whole body skin sensing, you know, visual, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, or guts capacities, are our mental capacities as well. Our whole body is is highly attuned to the emotional quality of systems. Is the system well, is the system scared? Is the system angry now. And we know the biology of fight flight of the sympathetic system coming online to tell us it's time to run or fight. And then when it's over the person pathetic system coming online to tell us we can go back to grazing, you know, everything's okay. All right. I believe that's in systems when the whole system is in fight flight, we feel it in our bodies. Again, it's a good survival move, except for when it isn't. But in its original form, it's to make sure we're not hock lunch. And we can feel when the system is at peace. And okay, yeah. And we process this all through our bodies, all of it through our bodies. Now, some of us, you know, have different strengths. Some of us are more kinesthetic, some of us are more verbal, some of us feel our heads more some of us feel, you know, down in our pelvis is more. So will will process this in different parts of our body. But it is all being experienced through the body one way or another. I feel my father, I feel my ancestors, I feel grief, I feel peace.
Elizabeth Solomon:You know, we're talking a lot about family systems, because obviously, that's where your work is centered, it's a beautiful place to start, because we're all part of a family system, right. And we're born into a family system without the language to even describe what we're experiencing. And so in many ways, everything is is a somatic experience, right, which is taking in all this information. This work is used a lot in organizational systems, and that these two systems have different rules of belonging. So, and you've said this many times, we always belong to our family system, whereas organizations are human created systems that we opt into opt out of, and where I'm going with this is I want to talk a little bit about, you know, when I was doing a lot of work, evaluating organizational culture, I noticed that organizations have used a lot of family metaphors to describe their culture, right. So we're a family here, welcome to the family. And yet family systems and organizational systems are governed by very different systemic laws, so to speak. And I'm just wondering if you can speak to that a little bit.
Leslie Nipps:So yeah, the rules of belonging vary from system to system. I want to say that there's one very important role that is the same in pretty much every system, which is the necessity of honoring what is and what goes crazy and systems when we don't do that. And so that's true in a business as it is in a family. There's also a and similar rules around honoring precedents and seniority and role. Yeah. So the uncle is the uncle, the janitors, the janitor, the sisters, the sister, the CEO is the CEO. When roles and seniority are honored properly, both family and organizational systems will struggle. Yeah. Belonging as you're quite right it is, is a bit different. And, and it's, it makes it tricky. And I want to honor this. Because the degree that we say in a business, we want it to feel like a family. We're trying to bring in the the kind of respect and honor for each other that we hope families have for each other. We spent so much time at work, we would like our workplaces to feel respectful, fair, usefully structured, warmth, that we're up to something that matters, that were congruent, all things we hope from a healthy family. The dilemma is with organizations, of course, is that people, mostly with some exceptions, do come and go, yeah, so you get hired, and then you leave and go to another organization, you no longer have any say, and that in that organization that you used to belong to. Yeah. And so that's one of the great differences. Having said that, most of the insights of Family Constellations work are relevant and useful in organizational systems. And I'm going to use just a really simple example that we've all experienced. You go into work meeting, you're a few minutes late, you walk in, and you're like, something's a little tense here. Okay, so the limbic system is already going, you're aware, it's tense, something's a little off. And then you look around, and you try to explain it to yourself, well, we're horrible at putting agendas together here, I really frustrated with the way we put together agendas, or Oh, Joe's running the meeting. That's why Joe's terrible at running meetings, or it's too cold in here, or whatever it might be, you come up with your conscious reasoning. And then at the end of the meeting, Juan says, Guys, I'm really sorry. But that's something to share. I just got a bad biopsy. And I don't know how to tell the kids. And the whole room goes, Oh, now, this is classic elephant in the room stuff we've all experienced that we all know about it. And this kind of stuff is running the show so much. In organizations, we are trying to fix a problem with the conscious material we have accessible. And it's not the problem, or it's not the issue, or it's not what's going on. And we work it really hard. And we don't get anywhere. And if we have a good framework for it, we'll get really frustrated, you know, we're supposed to do taking minutes this way, guys, and they don't fix everything if we do minutes this way. And still it resists solution, because the pattern is lodged somewhere else if something else not being acknowledged or seen. And again, this is where constellations can be a really useful tool, when all the leadership had brought all their best efforts, and they still can't figure it out. What's clogging up the gears here? I don't know.
Elizabeth Solomon:But that brought me to one of my questions, which is just just having you speak about why a leader or someone stepping into leadership should care about this approach to systemic thinking.
Leslie Nipps:Exactly. Yeah. Again, we all come equipped with the best of, you know, Leadership Theory, organizational theory, you know, are we a top down organization? Are we a horizontal organization, whatever versions of this that we have. And we want to bring the best of those tools to support organizations that do work that matters. Yeah. And when we run into these walls, and those really appropriate structures and fixes are not fixing it, then it may be time to ask for your local organizational constellation consultant to come out on in and help you think about this. This is very personal to me. My last work as an Episcopal minister was in a very conflicted parish. It had been conflicted a long time and eventually the conflict landed on me. And I had access to most of sort of the systemic thinking, you know, non anxious presence, understanding triangulation, all these things. And I couldn't manage being in a non anxious presence for about a half hour at a time at best. It was a gnarly situation and Nothing I had available to me, gave me the chance to kind of open up the hood and go, what's actually running this conflict? Yeah, because this is the thing, we cannot blame ourselves. We talked about triggers. But what is a trigger? It's when we experience ourselves under threat. And if the system is running threat signals all the time, or a lot of the time, and some of them are accidentally hitting us, or if we're the leader, they're being thrown at us all the time. It's really hard not to feel threatened. I really want to give us a break around this a little bit. Yeah. And I so wish I had this tool, so that I could could see what was the larger, inherited systemic threat that was going on this system that was landing on me. And I couldn't find it because I was too much in it. That's the thing as leader, so you got to be part of your system. And you're representing something in it. Now, if that happens to be your experience. Yeah. So this really is the tool to allow us to see the larger system, and to make real adjustments together, maybe honor that our business, got our land. By I just moved to New Mexico, a lot of the businesses have their land by shuttling the original peoples, whether they were Spanish or before them, the indigenous Americans is some of that lingering in the system. And then we can honor it and give it a good place. And then maybe do some reparation work as well might be part of the follow through. But if we're trying to fix the conflict, by me be doing better with conflict. For many of us, we have found that this only gets us so far. I'm wondering
Elizabeth Solomon:if you could tell a story about a particularly impactful constellation that you've experienced that somehow really, like acutely and immediately attuned due to the power and potential of this work.
Leslie Nipps:So the very first constellation I participated in, I actually had a very low key, I was given a very low key role in someone else's constellation. She was a lovely woman, who was the daughter of a single mom, and had been the result of essentially a one night stand. So she didn't know anything about her father, or that whole side of her family, except she knew he was Cuban. That's all she knew. Yeah, I want you all to put yourself in the in the shoes of that. And some of you may actually know this experience, what what that might be like to have no connection with the Father, or the lineage and to be the only child of this man and this woman in this way. Yeah. There's a hole there. You're never invited to Thanksgiving dinner at the cousin's house on that side, because there's just no connection with any of them. And of course, the loss of the Father. So the facilitator of that constellation just asked for a bunch of people to represent people. No, no identify are people on that side of the family? And could you please surround her and welcome her to the family. So I was one of them. We stood around her. And we said, Welcome, we're glad you're here. You belong to us. And I experienced this remarkable feeling of genuinely welcoming, like being an ancestor, who knows, grandmother, great grandparents, I don't know. But speaking so glad this life had come into it, even in the painful way it had come into the world. And so you're one of us, you belong to us. And then seen in the clients face what it meant to finally hear and feel that from half of their, you know, genetic inheritance. It's extremely powerful experience. Very simple, very beautiful. And I was hooked.
Elizabeth Solomon:The last thing I just want to touch into here is that, again, the rules of constellations are is that if it's a system, you can constellate it, right? So again, we've been talking about families, and we've been talking about organizations, but there are natural systems, right? The organs of the body are a system, it's kind of a fun modality because you can get a lot of insight into a lot of different complexities. One of the things I know that some practitioners do is to attempt at constellated in kind of large, societal, systemic issues,
Leslie Nipps:they will definitely find it as kind of all of our cultural awareness of social issues, continues to grow in really positive ways that we're all really glad for looking at things like climate change, or What's going on in Ukraine right now? racial injustice, all kinds of larger social issues. You can set up aspects of various larger cultural situations and see what are the invisible influences? What is the history? I mean, we've had many commentators on the radio saying, Where is this conflict in Ukraine coming from? Right? It's not just the result of one crazy person. There's a lot more going into this than just what we can see on the surface. And so you can set up these constellations to find out, you know, what, what is influencing what is sourcing some of this, and what might be potentially much more powerful interventions than the ones we've been attempting to make? Yeah. Usually, this is done by people who have a stake in the issue, a group of people who identify with a particular marginal group, or a particular advocacy group, will set up these constellations in order to get more understanding, like, oh, that's what's going on. It shifts how we think about them a bit in ways that can be very useful, and then might give them more leverage and how to contribute in a useful way. Because often the ways in which we try to contribute to change, as we all know, can often be counterproductive. And so what are the ways that we can actually be helpful, that would be useful for the situation? So yes, people are using it for that as well. Any system we can look at it?
Elizabeth Solomon:Mostly, I want to thank you so much. I think this is such a powerful tool for our listeners to have in their toolkit to sort of explore like you're saying the different leverage points in order to make some change in a system. And also just to understand what we are often sensing but have not had an opportunity to give voice to. I've said
Leslie Nipps:it a few different ways. But I do want to bring us back to our original context, which is self awareness and emotional intelligence. We are naturally biologically emotional creatures, and this is a good thing. And our emotions often baffle us and make life tricky for us. And my hope is that constellations work helps us come into friendlier relationship with these waves of emotional experiences that we can often have an honor what their roots in an actual context is, because they're trying to say something to us. That's really, really important that something knocking on the door. And so finding a way to honor who's knocking or what's knocking so that we can, in essence, love all of these emotions, and find some relief. If in any way that's been bothersome to us is something I've really enjoyed doing and invite people to explore.
Elizabeth Solomon:Thank you so much. That was the perfect ending.
Kerry Seed:Thanks for listening to first person plural EI and beyond. Subscribe now and sign up for our newsletter to get notified as new episodes are released. This show is brought to you by our CO hosts Daniel Goleman, Hanuman Goleman and Elizabeth Solomon. It's sponsored by Keystep media, your source for personal and professional development materials focused on mindfulness, leadership and emotional intelligence. Special thanks to Sujata, whose voice you heard at the top of the show, and to today's guest, Leslie nips. For guest bios, transcripts and resources mentioned in today's episode, check out our episode notes on our website first person plural.com This episode was written and produced by Elizabeth Solomon and me Carrie seed. audio production was by Michelle Zipkin. Episode art and production support by Brian Johnson. Music in this episode includes tiny footsteps in the snow by bio unit and our theme music is by Amber O'Hara. Until next time, be well
