What We Do

As a teaching institute, we offer practical and effective workshops, training, education, individual sessions, phone consultations and brief therapies designed to get to the heart of the issue. Many times, a single session is enough to generate a major breakthrough.

At the Center for Behavioral Genetics, we are not engaged in the search for DNA. Instead, we explore unhealthy family patterns and seek to resolve their destructive influences.

Family Constellations

A Family Constellation is a 60-minute therapeutic process that has the power to counteract generations of suffering and unhappiness. Family Constellations expose the invisible bonds in family systems and unravels their effects on the current generation. Destructive patterns are brought to light and replaced with clear and visceral insights. The results are often immediate and life-changing.

Bert Hellinger, the pioneer of this work, has observed that many of us unconsciously take on destructive familial patterns of anxiety, depression, fear, failure, loneliness, addiction and even illness as a way of belonging in our families. Bonded by a deep love, a child will often sacrifice his or her own best interests in an unconscious attempt to ease the suffering of a parent or another family member. Family Constellations allow us to break these patterns and stand in greater strength, peace and dignity.

The Core Language Approach^®

Family traumas live in our bodies, in our anxieties, in our fears— even in the words we speak. The residues of these traumas can even be experienced intergenerationally. A woman, for example, may carry a trauma of sexual abuse— but it may not be her trauma. A man may live his entire life depressed, estranged from those around him, and never understand why. As therapists, we often encounter clients who carry symptoms of a particular trauma, yet know of no such information in their lives or in their family history. At the Center for Behavioral Genetics, we teach our students how to get to the core of a client's issue.

In our Core Language^® workshops and trainings, therapists learn how to uncover trauma in the family system by exploring their client’s words, fears, symptoms and body language. Therapists also learn how to extract a Core Sentence^® from their client’s “list of complaints,” and develop it into a core image. In this method, therapists use a key inquiry: :"What is your worst fear... the worst thing that could ever happen to you?^TM" With this profound tool, the trauma in the system can surface within minutes and be transformed into a healing resource.

Center for Behavioral Genetics
1824 Murray Ave, Suite 303
Pittsburgh, PA 15217
(412) 422-1955
info@beh-genetics.com

The Boy Without His Father

A father loses his father when he is twelve in a tragic accident. Years later, when his own son reaches twelve or thereabouts, this father begins to distance himself from his family. Perhaps he has an affair or separates from his wife. Whatever the case, he repeats the absence of his father. In an attempt to soothe the sad feelings of his mother, his son begins to carry his mother’s anger toward the father. This creates a conflict in the boy, as both parents are needed for the boy to feel whole and develop in his masculinity. This boy now begins to feel anxious. Perhaps he develops panic attacks, or he becomes defiant or oppositional, or he begins failing at school.

Solutions rarely rest in the hands of our children alone. For therapy to be successful, we must look at the entire system and not focus solely on the child as the problem. Even if contact with the father is not possible, a solution is attainable when the larger system is brought into focus.

In a session, there are specific interventions we can accomplish with the boy alone, with the mother alone, with the father alone, with the boy and his mother, or with the boy and his father. Often a single intervention that enables the child to feel that he doesn’t have to choose between his parents is all that is necessary for the child to reduce his anxiety and reestablish his composure.

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