Family constellation about pets and how I came to this technique
Today I'll talk about a topic I love, which is the family constellation, more specifically the constellation about pets – and how I got to it.
Many people already know or have heard of family constellations, but the constellation with pets is still a little rare. When I began my studies about it in 2009 (at Instituto Evoluir, São Paulo -SP), I didn't see animals being mentioned. After all, the technique was developed for people, so it only spoke of human beings, ancestors, system, family, some coincidences, repetitions between generations, etc.
But I kept thinking: “the principles of the family constellation are so clear, we see them so easily in people... Could it be that it has something to do with animals? Can't they also 'suffer' the same consequences or be in the tangles that we have in our system?”
Something crucial for me to come to this question was a certain type of experience that I had (and continue to have) at the clinic. As a veterinarian, I have been working in the Oncology and Nutrition specialties for a long time, and I started noticing some “coincidences” in my care routine.
For example, I saw a dog with a breast tumor, and the owner said that she or someone in the family had or was undergoing treatment for breast cancer; a dog with a bladder tumor, and someone close to the family had a bladder tumor; a cat with lymphoma, and the owner asked: "What medication are you using for him today during chemotherapy treatment?", I would answer what it was, and the person: "wow, doctor, my son had leukemia and he used this same medication".
I also often saw people with multiple pets with repeated problems, as if they were sharing the same diseases. I remember a person who had four cats at home, three of them with kidney disease. Another had already had several dogs in her life, three of them had developed brain cancer.
In the beginning, I thought: “what a coincidence!”. But after two, three... ten, twenty coincidences... Wait! Too many coincidences, right? There must be something behind it.
So, talking to other veterinarians from different areas, they reported that they also noticed coincidences in their specialties, that they saw the same family having similar problems as those of pets. But, in practice, I didn't see anything about animals in the constellations in which I participated. Until one day I received an invitation.
It was an advertisement for a “veterinary constellation workshop", that would be conducted over a weekend by Genésio Lopes. For the first time I saw this topic addressed so clearly. Until then, I didn't know other people who had these same ideas and doubts. I decided to participate.
In this workshop, the things I saw were actually what I was looking for. Finally, I started to find answers to the questions I had. It was then that I decided to do my training as a family constellation therapist.
The first training I took was in 2019, at Espaço Casa Viva, with psychologist Eunice Porto. The second one, I also started in 2019, a two-year course that I have just completed. It was held within the Psychiatry Institute of the University of Sao Paulo (USP) Faculty of Medicine and was conducted by the dearest psychologist Del Mar Franco, founder of Instituto Evoluir.
By the way, taking this training within the Hospital das Clínicas complex in São Paulo, at the USP Medical School, at the Psychiatry Institute, only made me see how beneficial is joining forces in health. Each technique (traditional or alternative) comes to complement the other, each professional (doctor, psychologist, veterinarian, constellation facilitator) has his role, all equally important and all in favor of another human being – or another living being, in the case of animals.
And that's how I got to family constellations with this look at issues involving animals. However, when we do the training, we learn to deal with everything, so much so that I don't really like to use the term "veterinary constellation", because it can give the impression that we are only looking at the dog, cat or other animal, when in fact we need to look at the whole family system.
