Non Violent Communication and Family Constellation Systems Part 1 - Episode 28
Feb 05, 2024
Lawrence Joss
Embarking on a healing journey often feels deeply personal, yet it's a path that can resonate with many. My own voyage through the valleys of disconnection to the peaks of joy, love, and community has been marked with profound interactions and insights. In our conversation, Sarah Peyton, an expert in nonviolent communication and family constellation therapy, joins me to unravel these transformative practices, and how they can rewire our relationships and self-perception. Together, we explore the symbiotic relationship between interpersonal neurobiology and emotional healing, offering you a lantern to navigate the often dark corridors of personal change.
Trauma can weave itself into the fabric of our lives, but understanding it's patterns can lead to self-compassion and recovery. We also look toward the light, highlighting the crucial role of embracing life's positive moments and cherishing connections. The practice of family constellation therapy illuminated my relationships with my children, revealing the capacity to support them beyond physical presence.
As we close this chapter, I extend an invitation to you, our listeners, to engage with our ongoing dialogue. Your experiences, questions, and topic suggestions are the lifeblood of this community. We're committed to sharing a diversity of perspectives on recovery and personal growth, and we can't do it without your voice. Join us as we continue to build this neighborhood of dialogue and discovery, and stay tuned for next week's episode, which promises to bring another enlightening segment to your ears.
This podcast is made possible by the Family Disappeared Team: Anna Johnson- Editor/Contributor/Activist/Co-host Glaze Gonzales- Podcast Manager Kriztle Mesa - Social Media Manager Gen Rodelas-Kajabi Expert Kim Fernandez - Outreach Coordinator
Embarking on a healing journey often feels deeply personal, yet it's a path that can resonate with many. My own voyage through the valleys of disconnection to the peaks of joy, love, and community has been marked with profound interactions and insights. In our conversation, Sarah Peyton, an expert in nonviolent communication and family constellation therapy, joins me to unravel these transformative practices, and how they can rewire our relationships and self-perception. Together, we explore the symbiotic relationship between interpersonal neurobiology and emotional healing, offering you a lantern to navigate the often dark corridors of personal change.
Trauma can weave itself into the fabric of our lives, but understanding it's patterns can lead to self-compassion and recovery. We also look toward the light, highlighting the crucial role of embracing life's positive moments and cherishing connections. The practice of family constellation therapy illuminated my relationships with my children, revealing the capacity to support them beyond physical presence.
As we close this chapter, I extend an invitation to you, our listeners, to engage with our ongoing dialogue. Your experiences, questions, and topic suggestions are the lifeblood of this community. We're committed to sharing a diversity of perspectives on recovery and personal growth, and we can't do it without your voice. Join us as we continue to build this neighborhood of dialogue and discovery, and stay tuned for next week's episode, which promises to bring another enlightening segment to your ears.
This podcast is made possible by the Family Disappeared Team: Anna Johnson- Editor/Contributor/Activist/Co-host Glaze Gonzales- Podcast Manager Kriztle Mesa - Social Media Manager Gen Rodelas-Kajabi Expert Kim Fernandez - Outreach Coordinator
But I just showed up, you know, and I share that with everyone out in the community, because what we're struggling with is, uh, and it's challenging, it's tiring, it's isolating, it's uh, it's it's defeating. You know, and, and as I work with these different modalities, I find joy, I find love, I find community, I find a different way of relating with everyone, and then my whole life changes and I truly believe that doing this different kind of work is going to transform the relationships with my kids. There was a time in my life when I was overwhelmed and underwater. Those days are the inspiration for this podcast. This is by far the ultimate healing journey for all of us. Healing ourselves emotionally, spiritually and physically is paramount to this journey. From this place of grounding, we can all go out into the world and change all our interactions and relationships. We can engage people from an integrated and resourced place. This is a journey of coming home to ourselves. In today's episode, we'll start to explore some of these issues. Let's begin the healing journey today. Welcome to the Family Disappeared podcast. I was in so much pain and, uh, my oldest daughter wasn't talking to me. My life felt like I was falling apart and and I didn't know what to do, you know, and, uh God, my nervous system was crazy and what I started doing is, as different things came across my table, like if something came across my email or conversations or anything twice, I would just show up. You know, and a lot of the modalities that I worked on is just based on that and I'm sharing all this information with you. It's just based on my life experience and me working with my pain and my struggle. So I landed up, you know, at NVC because someone happened to mention it in another training. I didn't read a book, I didn't know what was going on. I had a lot of communication work that I'd done, so I worked within the framework, but I just showed up, you know, and I share that with everyone out in the community, because what we're struggling with is, uh, and it's challenging, it's tiring, it's isolating, it's uh, it's it's defeating, you know, and, and as I work with these different modalities, I find joy, I find love, I find community, I find a different way of relating with everyone, and then my whole life changes and I truly believe that doing this different kind of work is going to transform the relationships with my kids right, and it's already transforming the relationships because I'm not reacting, I'm not doing all the crazy stuff that I used to do. I'm coming from a place that's pretty integrated most of the time, so I'm not creating more harm and I don't have direct contact with my two oldest kids. So I'm actually practicing this on every other relationship in my life and my relationships might not change with my two older kids, but I'm affecting the field that I touch all the time with, with what I'm bringing into the world, and I really believe that's part of the magic.
Speaker 1:
The magic might not be me getting my kids back, you know, and uh, all these different modalities that we're going to talk about today NVC, family constellations, which is really cool and neuroscience, like everything's connected and everything informs everything and they're not separate anymore. They're all part of how you can function in the world. So we're going to jump into the conversation with Sarah Payton, who's a just a really, really cool, wonderful superstar, and I just want to remind everyone out there please like, share, please subscribe to YouTube. We're really trying to get to a thousand likes so we can start doing a bunch of live events and live questions and answers. We need you to participate in order to do that and remember, in the show notes there's links to PAA, which is parental alienation, anonymous.
Speaker 1:
If you want to join some meetings and the family hope project and all Sarah's stuff will be there, and I'm really excited for this list. Let's jump into the show. We have an incredible guest on the show today and her name is Sarah Payton and I'm actually going to let her introduce herself to you because she just has an incredible plethora of skills and talents and wizardry. So, sarah, please, please, introduce yourself to the community.
Speaker 2:
Oh, thank you very much, lawrence. Well, lawrence and I met doing nonviolent communication at a big old conference and it was really fun. So that's part of my world is nonviolent communication. And because I really love to know why things work, I got kind of obsessed about what they call it at the time interpersonal neurobiology and more commonly now it's called relational neuroscience, because people were starting to use fMRI machines to look inside of brains and see how relationships changed brains. And this was just so marvelous for me because when I was little, the going idea was that whatever brain you had by the time you were three, you were just stuck with which my brain was not good. So I was very sad about this for a long time until I was like, oh, relationships changed the brain. So then I started to write about it and so I have a couple books out about it. And then I also learned family constellations, which is a beautiful modality for healing, and that's a part of my world as well.
Speaker 1:
Thank you so much, sarah. And for folks out there that are familiar with the show, we talk about nonviolent communication a lot and it's an empathetic base form of communication that's just life changing and, I think, a really pillar of what we as parents, grandparents and even kids, you know, need to do to navigate all relationships. And so you have a little bit of information about that. And then the relational neuroscience is just how our brains are wired, and I'm just going to share something that Sarah taught at that first conference that we met at. And you can tell me, sarah, this is what my brain remembers and it might be wrong and it might be right, and you were talking about the amygdala. An amygdala is a part of our brain that's fight, flee or freeze, and what I heard you say back then is that our amygdala has no sense of time. So a lot of times we're reacting to something in the present that has already happened in the past. Is that?
Speaker 2:
is that how you apply it? Absolutely yeah.
Speaker 1:
And the reason that I bring this up to the community is so many of our nervous systems are so overtaxed that a lot of times we're just like in these ruminating thoughts and this fear and stuff like that, and we're not really in the present moment, we're in a memory or a feeling or a sense or a smell or whatever is triggering this, and we get sucked into this, this deep hole. So, with this idea of this, like amygdala has no like time or sense of time or anything like that. So I'm going to talk a little bit about this here and explain it to, like the parent, people that are really like in emotional taxing situations, how that would show up in their lives.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, well, one of the things that Marshall Rosenberg, who created nonviolent communication, always used to ask people does, he always used to ask them what's alive in you? And whenever we ask that question what's alive in you we're actually asking where, what's your amygdala working on? So, because, whatever kind of intrusive memory we're having, whatever is still bugging us from last week, whatever we're celebrating, whatever we've celebrated in the past and not been caught for all of this kind of lives in our brain sense of present time. So, for example, if you remember a scary teacher when you were little, somebody who was shaming, and you know, I mean a lot of people had scary teachers. If you didn't have one, thank goodness, but if you did, you can even just remember your scary teacher and feel your heart rate increase. You can feel yourself stop breathing, and that's the body in relationship with the timelessness of emotional memory. So inside the brain there's this little guy named the amygdala, which we've been talking about, but it's got an accompanying organ that sort of shaped like a seed that is called the hippocampus, and the hippocampus does time stamp memory.
Speaker 2:
And so one of the things that happens with empathy, with non-violent communication, empathy is that any time that we have a sense of like. Oh, this other person understands what it was like for me. We're actually time traveling into the amygdala and we're changing the way the brain holds memory. We're changing the brain from being amygdala, timeless, to becoming time stamped and contextualized and a part of our life. And my colleague, olga Nguyen, who lives in the UK, she says this work changes traumatic memory into life experience. So it brings us our resonant accompaniment of traumatic memory, gives us life wisdom really, because it starts to change and we make sense of it. We're like, oh, no wonder I've been, no wonder I've sweated and run the other way whenever there's been a dog barking. You know this is connected to when I was three and I got bit. Of course, I would be afraid there's new self compassion that's born with the contextualization and understanding of our lives, of the structures of our families. So there's so much wisdom hidden inside of our traumatic memories.
Speaker 1:
I love that part. I didn't remember that part, that that empathy is kind of like an access point to humanize it and contextualize the time and with that we start to work with the trauma and it starts to resolve or change or at least we can identify it and not get so wrapped up in it, right, exactly? Well, I gotta tell you my first Sarahism for the day is what is your amygdala working on? I think I'm going to get a tattoo. I love that. I love that you're amygdala working on.
Speaker 1:
A funny thing that I experienced, and a lot of parents and grandparents that I've spoken to experience, is we experience fear of the male, right, like fear of getting the male, like because we've got different court documents and different stuff and you never know what's going to come, and just relating that to the amygdala like the amygdala is reacting to the male. That's coming three years after an event and I'm going to get the male and I'm still scared that I'm going to get served with divorce papers even though I'm already divorced, right, that's like breaking it down to something more simple.
Speaker 2:
Exactly. And then we get to say to our amygdala is what you're like a little acknowledgement that something bad did come in the male? You've got a very good reason for being afraid. You don't have to be afraid, but you've got a very good reason for it.
Speaker 1:
And I love what you just did. Which is another really important thing about MVC is the self-compassion, the self-empathy Like we can actually work with our own nervous systems using empathy. It doesn't necessarily always have to be with another person. So the MVC connected to the neuroscience is awesome. And then Sarah has the next layer, which we're just going to introduce briefly and then we'll get into some questions. So the third part that we're just going to introduce to you have a basic understanding is family constellations, and I was lucky enough to do a family constellation with Sarah in Portland. Well, why don't you describe what family constellations are, how they work, and then I'll talk about a little bit of my experience and what happened there.
Speaker 2:
Well, what do family constellations do? Is they allow us to take a question that somebody has you know why am I so sad all the time? Or I'd like to improve my relationship with my partner, or I'd like to improve my relationship with the divine Any kind of question? And we take it. And because we're doing this family constellation work, we can take it apart into its different elements and let the different elements begin to kind of see where they are in relationship to each other and where they're stuck. Because a system sort of like the brain the brain is supposed to always be contextualizing and processing and digesting our lives and our systems are supposed to be moving and flowing and becoming more and more complex and integrating, linking and differentiating. But when there's some element in a system that's caught, then the system can't move anymore and that's where we'll get stuck, that's where we'll go. Gosh, you know, there's something stopping me from having a closeness with my partner, and what could it be? And in traditional family constellations we look at the family the family now, the family with the partner, the birth family, and then subsequent I mean previous generations of ancestors whose relational experiences may be contributing to our stuckness in this time. So our family constellations. Let us look with a wider lens at the impact of the history of the family on people. Like we could bring in the grandfather and the grandmother when they come in and we acknowledge their relational difficulties. What changes for the person who's having the constellation, for example?
Speaker 2:
We can also do family constellations with the brain parts. We can actually have somebody's amygdala be in the constellation. We can have someone's hippocampus be in the constellation. So we can work with whatever system we choose to work with and we can put lots of different parts.
Speaker 2:
And if we're working in a group with other people, as we got to do with Lawrence, then you get to choose different people to be different parts of the family system. So even though my mother's not there, I could say Angela will you be my mother and George will you be my father. And then all of a sudden, because they're paying attention to the client, the clients, what happens on a neurological level is whoever we pay attention to, we begin to reproduce their brain with our brain and their body with our body to some extent. So we begin to what's called the read, the field that we're in, just by virtue of our attention, and what it's like to be human and how much we change each other and how much we know each other even without knowing each other. So there's a starting point, lawrence. How did I do?
Speaker 1:
You did great. I loved what you shared and also, like the amygdala, can be there and you can work with any part of the family system. And just to share a little bit of my experience, a friend of mine actually invited me to go to Sarah's retreat and then my friend ended up not being able to make it. So I show up there. I've never done any deep constellation work like a three, four, five day retreat. I've done a little bit here and there. So we sit down. There's about 10 different people, really diverse, eclectic group of people, and I'm like this is weird. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:
I remember talking to Sarah for the first day or two. I'm like I'm leaving. I'm leaving because you're watching people in a circle deal with different trauma, different issues, different feelings that are going on and different people in the circle playing different family members, different emotions, and it feels very ethereal at first to me at least where I couldn't quite grasp what was going on. So I stuck it out and then I got to do a constellation and I actually did a constellation around parental alienation. So this is why I think this modality is so incredibly important for the community. So I was talking about my daughters and my ex-wife and stuff. So I picked someone to play my youngest daughter, I picked someone to play my middle daughter, I picked someone to pay my oldest daughter and someone to play my wife. And then, as you're going through the constellations, you might call in a father or a mother or something else might be added as the energy changes.
Speaker 1:
And I wasn't expecting much, but I don't know if I've ever shared this with you, sarah, but the person playing my youngest daughter was sitting next to the person playing my ex-wife and I couldn't quite reach my youngest daughter.
Speaker 1:
I couldn't quite get to her emotionally and what was happening is the person playing my ex-wife actually had her legs around her and had her in like a scissors lock, like my youngest daughter couldn't move towards me, and that really represented the measurement in the relationship. But to see it viscerally acted out with people that I've never met was fascinating. And then my middle daughter was stuck in this world of going back and forth between two places. She couldn't quite get to me and she couldn't quite get back to my ex-wife and she was that place where she couldn't find her own feet. And then my oldest daughter was just not accessible. So it was phenomenal how it showed me my family system in a way that my brain couldn't process, until I saw people acting out the scissors lock, my middle daughter stuck in this like limbo thing, my oldest daughter having nowhere to go. She was just in her box on the side, and is that generally what people experience, Like just the life force of it. It's just amazing.
Speaker 2:
Yes, that's generally what people do experience An unusual degree of resonance or echoing between what happens in the Constellations Room and what has happened in their life.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, that was amazing. It totally blew me away. And your story is you came to NVC first. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:
Yes, I came to NVC first. I was brought to both NVC and Constellations because my husband and I adopted a 16. I thought he meant, yeah, he was 16. And I guess he was 15. A 15-year-old who was living on the streets and had lived through tremendous family trauma, and I so wished to be able to do good things for him. He fell in love with us and we fell in love with him and stayed together for the rest of his life. He died when he was just 33 from advanced alcoholism because of the trauma that he'd lived through and I was just trying everything to find what might save him. I wasn't able to save him, but I learned a hell of a lot about trauma and we had a hell of a ride with this young man because the love never stopped. I mean, even as he was dying, the love never stopped. It was just extraordinary. So I went into an all-about communication. I went into an all-about communication because I was thinking about social justice, but then when I got in I was like, oh my God, this is an incredible tool for personal healing and I sort of started to turn down the trauma healing route. And then that's what I've been on ever since, in part also because of him, as I said, and then in family constellations also, I was like, is there something we can do to help my kid, my beautiful kid? And there's been a lot of stuff that's really helped. I remember one of the things that happened was we just loved him so much that we were all devastated with his death. My birth son was born when he was 18. And he actually came into the birthing room when my birth son was born. He was just so connected to us and he loved my son. I mean, that was the only when he was dying of alcoholism. This was. The only regret that he had was that he was leaving my boy behind and we were really all very impacted by his death.
Speaker 2:
And I remember a constellation that was done for me in Southern Germany. I was, I went to an international conference and a wonderful Romanian facilitator was working for me and what happened was they had my dead son and my live son and me in the constellation and I kept turning towards the dead son instead of turning towards my live son, who needed me, right, I mean. And that was just a huge insight that I couldn't do that anymore. I mean I couldn't turn toward the dead one anymore. I needed to turn towards the alive one, for God's sake. You know that needed to be where my focus and my energy was going, instead of pouring it into the child who had died. So this is the kind of thing that constellation work can do for us. It can kind of give us self-compassion and an ability to see patterns. What kinds of after effects did you experience from doing that constellation in Oregon, lawrence? What was that like for you?
Speaker 1:
Thank you for that question. I just want to reflect first of all.
Speaker 1:
You know that I'm so sorry for your loss that sounds like an incredibly challenging journey and heartbreaking and painful, and I really appreciate you sharing your constellation because, you know, a lot of us are looking backwards at the glasses that are spilt instead of looking forward at the glasses that are still full, you know.
Speaker 1:
So I really appreciate that and what a horrific thing to go through as a parent and for anyone out there listening that's struggling with not seeing your kids, your grandkids, and not seeing your parents like, yeah, it's challenging and you know there's a perspective taken where we can actually concentrate on the positive life flows that are going on.
Speaker 1:
So, yeah, thank you for the question, for asking me what were the realizations. There was an incredible amount of softening around my relationships with my kids. There was some understanding and compassion for their lived experience, because I got to witness this game played out in this play in this family constellation and I got to see how stuck they were and how the mechanism of the family system and the measurement and the parental alienation and all the generational trauma was just holding them in these places and they were just these young beings struggling, trying to just get through this muck and this mud that was not created by them. So it really opened my heart up to what they're going through and those images still, I associate them with my daughters and I can see them through those images and their struggle, where usually I'll miss that stuff because I'm just hurt, you know, that's a beautiful description, yeah.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and I had a really interesting experience when I was in Bali. I did some breathwork, which is really cool and we'll get this to this into a later episode. But you do this holotropic breathing, where you get your body and a lot of energy moving through your body, and after the holotropic breathing I sat in meditation and it's the first time I was being with my three daughters at the same time in like, in like 10 years, and the interesting part about that was the same ethereal plane or whatever was the same plane that I was on when we were doing the constellation. It was a place that I'd been to before, but this time I got there through the breathwork instead of the constellation, but was still this ethereal plane where I got to be a parent, I got to show up, I got to love my kids, we got to share this incredible time and space together.
Speaker 2:
Wow, that's. It's really fun that there are different avenues for, you know, connection, even though we're separated. One of the things that I've done a lot of is I've done a lot of constellation work in a women's prison that's south of Portland, oregon and before the pandemic I would go in three times, two or three times a year with a group of volunteers, because in constellation work we can often represent parents who are angry, or parents who are abusive, or grandparents who are angry or abusive, and it can be hard on women who are in prison to hold those roles the roles of people who are angrier because they're already having to hold so much for their own body. So stepping into somebody else's angry body is like a little more than they can take. So it's really good to go in and do this work with a group of volunteers.
Speaker 2:
I would have six to 10 people who would go in with me and we would do constellations for the women in prison and many times what they would ask for is they would talk about the pain of being separated from their kids and we would do constellation work for them, holding and moving toward the idea that, you know, even if we're physically and emotionally separated from our kids. Even if people are telling our kids that we are bad, we still get to love them. We still get to stand in the right place in terms of a constellation which is right behind our children, and so that they have our, so that we have their back and they get to move into the world. They're looking forward into their lives, but they've got us behind them. Nobody can take that away from us, and that's been just a really important and healing movement for many of the women that I worked with to be able to really claim that love for themselves.
Speaker 1:
No, I love that that sounds like incredibly powerful and necessarily useful work and that a group of people going in and do.
Speaker 1:
That just just just makes me really happy and grateful for people doing this kind of work in the world. And I would say again, for folks out there that are struggling and missing their kids and not connected to their parents, you know whether it's a strange man alienation, you know, erasure whatever it is like. We can still love our kids and they are healing modalities, like family constellations, where we can see how to love them and still parent and not necessarily have the access that you would traditionally have. But I really feel like I'm doing an incredible amount of parenting through these different modalities because I'm still showing up, I'm energetically there, we're connecting and I believe that it has an effect and it changes my life. So you know, if your life is small and you're struggling and you're in a hole and you're lonely and you're isolated, this is a way or another tool. It's just another wonderful tool and I'm curious you came to NVC and constellations to save your son, to give some different tools to work with it, but how has it changed all your relationships? How has it changed your life? Like, what has this done to make Sarah's life something? Wow, what a great first half of the show. So much information and just talking about NVC and family constellations and remembering my experience with family constellations just gives me goosebumps, because I can visually see how locked up my kids were through random strangers just acting out my story. As I'm talking about my story, you know it's a really neat thing and family constellations might resonate with you. It might seem a little bit ethereal, but try, try different things and this might not be the thing that you try, but it lets you know that there's a world of possibilities to deal with your hurt and pain and there's so many ways to transform the relationships and by doing this work I'm the best possible pair and I could ever be.
Speaker 1:
So if you like the show, subscribe, share. My email is in the show notes family Disappeared at gmailcom. If you have a question for me, if you have a question for Sarah or any past guests, please, please send them out and I'll answer what I can. I'll send stuff out to other people. If you're requesting anything else, and if there's any topics or any conversations you'd like us to have on the show, please let us know. We have some awesome stuff coming up and some short form content from a bunch of different people from the community so we can see more and more faces and diversify the message and the recovery so you can relate a little bit more. So thanks for coming out, thanks for listening. I will see you around the neighborhood somewhere. The part of the show is really cool too, so please check that out next week.