The Gift of Family Constellation - How it Helped to Validate my Sexual Trauma

I’ve long struggled with doubting IF and WHEN I was sexually abused by my uncle and my dad.

When the memories started coming back in 2023, I was deeply traumatised and confused. When I first saw my uncle moving his hands underneath my swim suit in a short hypnosis meditation, I felt the full wave of dread that my toddler self was trapped in.

Though it felt crystal clear, I could not stop questioning myself — did it really happen?

Did it?

Since then, I’ve uncovered a few more memories, but somehow, I was never fully sure. It helped that some of my friends and sister believed me and listened to me. It hurt that my mother lived in her own denial and even blamed me for not wanting to go to my uncle’s place for Chinese New Year, and even pushing me to contact my dad for admin things after knowing they’ve done.

Today, I joined a Family Constellation gathering hoping to resolve the blocks in my spiritual business. I wanted to understand why I had been facing so many obstacles with getting it off the ground. What unfolded was beyond what I expected, but exactly what I needed.

Just a quick introduction: Family Constellation is a healing modality where human participants help to verbalise and even act out the underlying relationships and dynamics causing dysfunction. Each participant will take on a role, for instance, the client, the client’s problem, the person the client was having an issue with etc. By flashing it out, the clients gain awareness and the facilitator guides the different parts to shift and bring healing to the situation.

The representative for my spiritual business began seeing a toddler, then infant self. Her role morphed really quickly to represent my younger self. She started sharing about feeling weird feelings at her vagina and it became clear that we would be working on my sexual trauma.

“How old are you?” the facilitator asked the representative.

“5 to 7…I feel completely dissociated from my body… I feel very unsafe, I don’t want anyone near me or to touch me,” she said.

What was curious to note was that the representative for my adult self didn’t want to go near the wounded child. At this point, I sat beside wounded child who didn’t want me to touch her either. So the facilitator called another participant to take the role of my ancestral guardian to support the wounded child. Suddenly, I felt I was taking on the role of the uncle who had abused me and I almost wanted to apologise to the wounded child, but kept quiet.

“I feel so dirty…I can’t move, I feel frozen…” said the wounded child. She said many more things but I couldn’t remember because I was sobbing by then. The moment I saw her verbalising her pain, I began breaking down.

“I feel a lot of rage now. I want to stab my mother,” she continued. She was right, I felt so much rage and even hatred towards my mother for failing to protect me, then and now.

“I want some water cleansing, some sprinkling of water,” said the representative for the wounded child. And I know, this time, it was the higher self of the representative talking. As the facilitators carried out her request, much of the heaviness went away, and the adult self representative was willing to move towards the wounded child representative.

I had a tearful conversation with my wounded child representative, and then I just bawled my eyes out. Even the representative for my ancestral guardian was tearing too.

I felt much better, much lighter at the end. But what healed me most was not the release, but the presence of 7 other women, acting out the dynamics of my trauma. Each of them, verbalising things I never told them or had repressed, but each other inaccurately representing the parts of me. It felt like, now, I can really believe myself. That shit really happened to me. And I was so held by the strength of all these women, all mothers and older than me.

During the debrief, each representative shared their own realisations and insights. I was really touched when the wounded child representative said that she could feel the ancestral support at her back, strongly holding her, literally keeping her back straight. I know it, because I can feel them too. And I’m so grateful.

The representative who represented my consciousness shared that she sensed that I was not really scared about something, but the thought of it made me scared. And I was encouraged to dive in deeper to look at my sexual trauma completely and heal it. Yes, there are some details that I want to uncover, such as more details of the abuse. I’ve decided to be brave and go for a hypnotherapy session. While I can try to uncover things myself like previously, there is so much comfort in allowing another to support me. I don’t have to go at it alone.

They also explained when trauma happens, the soul leaves the physical body temporarily so that it will remain intact. It really makes sense why I had to heal through a spiritual path, because it was about reclaiming my soul essence.

It was heartbreaking to later learn that many of the representatives had been sexually abused by an uncle in childhood. Why these happen so much makes me fucking furious.

I honestly feel a lot of rage now because I’m no longer suppressing it. But strangely, I also feel so much calmer because I’m not repressing anything too. The adult self is taking control of the situation, no longer running away. And I know, this is what is going to make me a better healer.