Since I started facilitating New Family Constellations in 2013, I have been able to experience on several occasions what Lola C. Belmonte calls ‘Real Estate Constellations’. As this is an important line of the services I offer to professionals, companies and organisations through Ibiliaurrera.com, I could not but attend the Bizkaia 2024 Real Estate Congress.
This event has been an exceptional opportunity to delve deeper into the world of real estate agents, and to learn from experts from the public and private sectors about the hottest issues in the sector, which also affect us all as citizens, such as the legal aspects of contracts or those related to holiday and touristic rentals.
Attending the Bizkaia 2024 Real Estate Congress has reaffirmed my commitment to the application of the New Family Constellations in the real estate field. It has been enriching and exciting to meet so many professionals dedicated to something as essential as helping people find, or pass on to others, the spaces where they can dwell with their families, where they can live and relate to each other. Private spaces where we live our lives and our ‘intrahistory,’ as the Bilbao writer and philosopher Unamuno put it, and also those where we work and serve others.
So, ¿What are “Real Estate Constellations”?
It is a
powerful tool that uses phenomenological representational techniques – a ‘somatic mode of attention’ (Csordas) to the present moment of the here and now. These techniques allow us to access, in a short session, the non-visible information necessary to facilitate a purchase or sale that is dragging on and seems impossible. It can also be applied to resolve inheritance or legal disputes that delay property management, and to address a variety of housing issues. These include the recognition of property boundaries, conflicts with neighbours, squatters, thefts, breakdowns, pests…
This way of working, which is none other than the New Family Constellations applied to the world of real estate transactions and everything that has to do with real estate, offers us essential information that escapes us on a conscious level, and that always has to do with human relationships, with unresolved conflicts at the level of the family system or family systems of those involved. Thus we see that repressed emotions, unresolved reconciliations with one or more excluded people, often stand between us and what we want to achieve with so much effort.
This method, developed by German therapist Bert Hellinger in 2005 in its new modality, and which Brigitte Champetier de Ribes has taken further with her BChR method and with spectacular results, shows us that everything that happens has a systemic cause. The difficulty of a person belongs in fact to his or her whole family system, which has entrusted this person with the task of solving something from the past that was left pending. The difficulties we encounter in various areas of life, such as business, or in this case, buying or renting a house, and everything associated with housing issues, are a mirror of what is unresolved in our family system.
In constellating – that is, configuring – the issue that concerns us with regard to the sale of a property, we may find that the solution involves acknowledging and honouring a former partner of the seller with whom she initially bought that flat and with whom she ended up in bad terms.
The difficulty may show us something as serious as a worker who died in the construction of the house, whom no one has yet seen or recognised… Or perhaps the disrespected, forgotten ancestors who lived there, and who need to be honoured by the new buyers in order to make the house available to them.
In her book Constelaciones Inmobiliarias: desbloquea la venta de tu casa (which translates as “Real Estate Constellations: Unblock the Sale of Your House”), one of many she has written on the subject, Lola C. Belmonte offers us numerous examples that illustrate, in her words, ‘the emotional and systemic side of property sales’. During the conference, I reflected on the occasion when I constellated my own search for a flat to rent when I arrived in Bilbao. Only a few weeks after the constellation I came across a studio that was a cutie in Las Arenas, in Getxo, Biscay (Spanish State); it exceeded my expectations and was within the rent I could afford. Eight years later I constellated again my search of a flat to rent, and again within a couple of weeks I found a great deal in Santa María de Getxo. In both cases I found wonderful landlords and unbeatable rental conditions. I was also able to recall the successful cases of constellations that I have facilitated, and those that Belmonte also describes in the aforementioned book: cases in which different clients achieved spectacular results in a short time, highlighting the transformative power of this method.
Real Estate Constellations and Systemic Law
In my practice, when I have facilitated Real Estate Constellations, they have often touched the field of Systemic Law (where constellations are applied in the legal realm, because of their great effectiveness in facilitating reconciliation between the parties in dispute). I was particularly struck by a constellation in which the client was facing a long and difficult dispute over the boundaries of his property.
This was a very complex and difficult case that had gone all the way to the courts. The constellation showed a conflict that spanned generations of the family system and was deeply rooted in the political history of the country, culminating in a grand reconciliation.
The client was deeply moved and needed to stay alone in the room for the entire break we took after his session, integrating all that had been shown. A year and a few months after that constellation he sent me his enthusiastic and grateful testimony, explaining that almost everything had been resolved in his favour, and even problems of family members had also disappeared.
The fact is that everything is interconnected. When we resolve the unseen dynamics of the family system that affect a particular issue, we are unknowingly touching several keys at once, and the results are felt like ripples of resolution, reaching further than we could have imagined, for the good of many.
Real Estate Constellations reveal that selling and buying or renting property is something much deeper than it may seem at first glance. We are not dealing with a mere piece of land or an inert habitat, but with spaces of deep meaning at a systemic and human level – our lives are immersed in a metaphorical universe of language, of meaning, as stated by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. These spaces are part of the web of dynamics that govern our relationships, dynamics that we do not see but which we know by their consequences in the concrete reality in which we negotiate them. The systemic view of constellations allows us to see this and to make the decisions that lead to the successful solution.
Do you have a property that you find difficult to sell or rent, problems with neighbours, with tenants who do not pay? I invite you to contact me and see by yourself the effectiveness of the New Family Constellations applied to the real estate sector.
References
Belmonte, Lola C. (2022) Constelaciones Inmobiliarias: desbloquea la venta de tu casa. Independent Publishing.
Brigitte Champetier de Ribes (2014) Beginning to Constellate. Amazon.
Brigitte Champetier de Ribes (2018) Las fuerzas del amor. Madrid: Gaia, 25-26.
Csordas, T. J. (1993) ‘Somatic Modes of Attention’, Cultural Anthropology, 8(2), 135-56.
Hellinger, B. and Hövel, G. T. (1999). Acknowledging What Is. Conversations with Bert Hellinger. Phoenix: Zeig, Tucker & Co.
Hellinger, B. (2006) No Waves Without the Ocean. Experiences and Thoughts, Heidelberg: Carl-Auer.
______ (2006b) Después del conflicto, la paz, Buenos Aires: Alma Lepik.
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