Dan Booth CohenI Carry Your Heart in My Heart
Family Constellations in Prison
159 p., Paperback, 2009
€ 24.95 / USD 32.95
ISBN 978-3-89670-631-7
The prisoners in "I Carry Your Heart in My Heart" are serving long-term sentences for violent crimes, mostly life-without-the-possibility-of-parole for murder. They represent society's ultimate outcasts, personifying evil brought to justice. Sharing Family Constellations with them is actually a great privilege. These men have gone through ordeals that we can only imagine and have worked to find a way to their souls.
Systemic Family Constellations are unlike cognitive, behavioral, and interpersonal therapies in their origin, form, and purpose. Constellations succeed by diminishing the unconscious impulses that drive destructive behaviors. The process reaches the invisible clockworks of the mind and heart to reveal – with astonishing specificity – how individual problems nest within a larger tapestry shaped by ancestral family traumas. In a heartbeat, the patterns release, opening the mind to reverence for life and compassion for others. Problems that were frozen yield to new solutions.
Dan Booth Cohen spent 5 years leading monthly Systemic Family Constellation circles with these prisoners. This book tells stories of these experiences. It also includes rigorously researched chapters that describe Family Constellations' historic roots and underlying philosophy.
"In this gem of a book, we are invited to journey with Dan Booth Cohen and the volunteers inside the walls of Bay State Correctional Center in Massachusetts where we meet the men of the Growing Together III programme ... and ourselves. As the inmates' stories unfold, they draw us into subtly exploring our own self-made prison walls. /.../ Dan skilfully interweaves descriptions of individual constellations and inmate reflections to introduce basic elements of the constellation process and to illustrate many of Hellinger's foundational insights. Here, in a prison setting, we are left with a heightened awareness of such key principles as: inclusion and exclusion, guilt and innocence, and healing between victims and perpetrators. /.../ 'I Carry Your Heart in My Heart' conveys emotional depth, clarity, and grace in this new addition to our constellation library."
Mark A. Johnson, The Knowing Field, Issue 15, January 2010
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