Developmental Integration Constellations are a new process that I created for the online Family Constellations Conference and which I am extremely excited about. 

I wanted to make a form of Integration Constellations which would be targeted toward the earliest moments at which we had to put ourselves away or suppress parts of ourselves -  for our own survival and that of our family system. This work is brand new and still evolving, and I am loving it because it goes very deep, very fast, and so far seems to create profound changes for everyone who has had a session.

This particular type of Integration Constellation comes very much from Rosen Metho,. In Rosen we often see in our clients our emerging self in its earliest incarnations - in the womb or in the non verbal state of our formative years where many of our patterns evolve.
 

In Developmental Integration Constellations we focus on the earliest childhood developmental stages that we can reach for, while still incorporating ancestral influences on that evolving self. 

In this process,  we access both our internal parts -  and our ancestors - through the interaction of the client and a Developmental Statement designed to give access to the earliest need to suppress our innate perceptions, needs and desires.
 

In the current version of Developmental Constellations the client will have the option of choosing one of three Developmental Statements, which represent our earliest sensing of our internal and external worlds, in the womb, immediately after birth, and during our formative years. 

They are:

I feel

I need

I want. 

The I in this statement represents the developing sense of self,  before we are aware we exist separately, as we are still forming our first connections with what is inside and outside of us. 

The statements do not have an object, only a subject and a verb, because when we are very young we don't know what we feel, we only know that we feel. We don't know what we need or want, only that we sense need or desire.  We may not even know that we are separate from the sensation of need or desire, it just arises in us as what is. But if those sensations pose a danger to us or our family, our nervous system can react by redesigning itself to avoid feeling them.  

This may sound odd - how can we suppress ourselves when we dont even know we exist separately yet, so I will give an example. 

In the womb, as our nervous systems are developing, we begin to have sensations. It's through those sensations or perceptions that we eventually develop what we perceive of as our self.  Those sensations range from the simply physical - - Mom just sat down and there is pressure on my head - - to the profound effect that our mothers neurochemicals have on our developing nervous system, because we are so tiny that we are flooded by whatever is happening for her. It is literally the soup we develop in. 

When our mother gets upset, we are bathed in agitating neurochemicals, which are apt to push our developing nervous system toward sympathetic arousal, or the need to move to respond to sensations of danger. Those might lead to us kicking. 

If our mother is well and deeply resourced, she may notice our kicking with joy as it redirects her attention away from whatever is upsetting her and toward her delicious baby in her womb. She may immediately be flooded with oxytocin and other feel good neurochemicals -  which then tell our tiny nervous system that all is well, and that kicking when agitated is a good response because it brings good sensations.  

However, if our mother is under resourced and overwhelmed and she does not have room for our kicking, she will then flood us with even more agitating neurochemicals, and we will be forced to kick harder. We don't yet have the capacity to make choices, so we can't decide that kicking is not a good idea. So the only way to prevent kicking and therefore feeling even worse is to diminish our ability to feel ourselves -  so that we do not respond strongly, automatically  to the stimulus of agitating neurochemicals. 

This is not a choice, simply the smart developing wiring of our nervous system adapting to the environment it's growing up in. We then feel ourselves less, but we also are not as stressed, so it is a good adaptation. But then we may come out of the womb less capable of feeling ourselves, and still carrying a suppressed sense of danger. 

Most likely we will never know where this pattern originated.( unless we do constellations)  Of course, it also probably originated in the ancestors whose nervous systems designed our mother’s capacity, or incapacity,  to react to stress.

So these are the kinds of preverbal self limiting processes that this type of constellation is designed to connect with, although as in any constellation, we never know what will show up. We may encounter this self limiting at a later developmental stage, where it is more obvious, but we know the early experiences are imbedded in later ones so we are actually always working with the entire pattern, starting with the ancestors in which it first originated and moving through all the stages in which it was re inforced in us . 

We will sometimes also add ancestors or other elements to the constellation, if it is needed. 

These constellations have been very rapid and profound in their effect on those who have had them, and I am looking forward to making them available and developing them further. There will be versions that apply to later developmental stages as well.