What Another Self Gets Right About Family Constellations

A woman walks into a room and tells a healer she has a life-threatening illness. She has been doing the medical work, she says, but she wonders whether an alternative approach could help too. That moment, from the Turkish drama Another Self, is the one that two family constellations facilitators, Rachel Alexandria and Liza Miron, chose to open their reaction video, published in October 2026. Their premise is simple and a little unusual: more people have been showing up at their workshops because of the series, and many of them arrive with the same question. Is this real, or is it just television? Across nearly 39 minutes, the two facilitators walk through the show's depiction of the work scene by scene, separate what looks accurate from what is compressed or dramatized, and explain how a live constellation actually unfolds in a room of people. Their answers say as much about the discipline's ethics as about the drama.

Why are workshops filling up because of a Turkish drama?

Rachel Alexandria introduces herself as a former psychotherapist turned executive coach who has been facilitating family constellations since 2010. Miron, a facilitator and trainer, says she has been doing the work since 2014. Both describe the same pattern in their practices: viewers who watched Another Self, which follows three female friends through setbacks involving illness, relationships, and inherited patterns, began turning up to workshops. The series, Rachel notes, is a "really wonderful, rich drama," and it has run for three seasons. The show does not use the phrase "family constellations" for what its healer does. Rachel points out that the character Zaman, who leads the work, never names it that way in the first season, which is part of why viewers go searching online and land on the real practice.

That search is the spine of the video. The facilitators are not trying to debunk the show. They describe it as a generous introduction to ideas that are central to the work, and they want the people who arrive through it to understand what they are walking into.

Can family constellations help with a life-threatening illness?

This is the question the opening clip raises, and the facilitators answer it with more caution than the drama does. Miron says she has worked with many people living with different illnesses, but she is clear that no outcome is fixed. "There's nothing that's written in stone," she says. "Everybody's gonna be completely, completely different," because each person has a different family system and different histories of trauma. She describes a range of results she has seen: some people with chronic conditions improved significantly and, in consultation with their doctors, stopped medications; others still live with the illness but feel far more at peace with it; and some saw little change at all.

What recurs in those stories, Miron says, is a shift in how people relate to their condition and a willingness to look at what she calls the root cause. Crucially, she adds, that work is never the only thing they are doing. "They're with their doctors, they're with a nutritionist, they're doing meditation." She frames it as a combination rather than a substitute.

Rachel makes the same point more bluntly. Neither of them would recommend family constellations as the sole approach to a medical problem. She notes that in the United States, claiming a non-medical practice can heal people carries real legal exposure, so practitioners have to be careful about what they promise. Her own experience is more personal. She says she has "absolutely healed things for myself" and has done so through constellations "probably in addition to other interventions." Asked how she would respond to someone who came in with cancer, she laughs at the thought of the question but answers it plainly: "Well, it can't hurt." Her point is that the work may offer perspective and support, and may help shift the course of what is happening, but it should sit alongside treatment, never replace it.

The facilitators also reference a connection between stress and illness, noting that stress is something medicine does recognize. That framing lets them talk about emotional load as a real factor in health without claiming that a room of people can cure a disease.

Is the show's Zaman doing real family constellations?

Rachel reports that a client once told her she knows the actor's character in real life and that he is a family constellations facilitator in Turkey. She can't confirm the details herself, but she argues that a show this specific in its handling of the work would have required many people behind it who knew the practice well. Both facilitators say the way Zaman works looks like a variation rather than the form they learned. Rachel and Miron come from somewhat different lineages, and they say their own styles resemble the show's in places but not others.

Rachel welcomes that diversity rather than treating it as a problem. "Everyone gets to innovate it with how it works for their system, as long as you're still in integrity to, to helping people," she says. She acknowledges the purists in the field, people who insist that the founder's version is the only legitimate one, and she disagrees with them. The work, in her framing, is meant to be adapted.

Did Bert Hellinger want family constellations to have a fixed format?

One of the richer threads in the conversation is a story Rachel tells about Bert Hellinger, the figure most associated with the modern form of family constellations. She is careful to say she was not present and cannot vouch for it. According to what she has heard, people asked Hellinger to codify the work into a set format with clear steps. He refused. "That's gonna put like a jail into the format of family constellations," she recalls him saying, and he wanted the work to stay flexible and responsive. Rachel says she thinks of that refusal as a gift, and that the practice will keep evolving.

That tension between structure and responsiveness is useful for understanding the show. A television drama needs a clear shape for each scene. Real constellations, the facilitators say, resist that kind of neatness.

How do real workshops differ from what TV shows?

The most concrete differences the two facilitators draw are about process. In the clip where Zaman invites a participant to pick a representative and then reads what he sees, Rachel and Miron point out that a constellation is built from people in the room, not from a script. Representatives, the people who stand in for family members or parts of a system, are invited into the setup, and the facilitator watches how they respond.

Miron describes her own starting point. She does not meet a client beforehand and talk through the story at length. Instead, she says she is "just looking for enough to get the sense of where to start." Then she invites people in the group to say healing phrases on behalf of the client, and she tracks what happens. She is careful about expression: "sometimes cutting off that expression does more harm," one facilitator says in the video, which is why she lets a person finish speaking rather than rushing them toward a resolution.

The show compresses time. In a dramatized scene, a shift can appear in minutes. The facilitators describe real sessions as something that unfolds more gradually, closer to a movie than a single shot. Information comes out over time, and the movements can be subtle. Miron talks about the facilitator's job as something like a ringmaster, because several people are all doing something at once, each with their own timing and attention. She compares it to cooking a complicated dish: a lot of elements must be tracked simultaneously. Sometimes a constellation that seems to be stuck is really just waiting for the right representative to speak up, and sometimes the facilitator's own eye needs checking.

The facilitators are also honest about uncertainty. Rachel mentions that she sometimes represents herself in a constellation and that the process is not always clean. Some of what the show presents as breakthrough is, in the room, a slow accumulation of small changes, and not every session produces an obvious result.

"I'm just looking for enough to get the sense of where to start."

Liza Miron, in her reaction video to Another Self (October 2026), describing how she begins a constellation without a long pre-session interview.

What should viewers take away from the show?

The conversation does not ask viewers to reject the drama or to treat family constellations as a miracle. It asks them to hold two ideas at once. The first is that the work addresses real patterns: family systems, unresolved grief, inherited loyalties, and the ways a person can feel their history in the body. The second is that those patterns are not solved by a single dramatic moment. Healing, as Rachel and Miron describe it, is a process that sits beside medical care, therapy, and daily life.

For someone curious enough to look up the practice after watching, that means treating a workshop as one tool among several and asking hard questions about any facilitator's claims. Both women push that point consistently. They are, in effect, offering the kind of caution a good practitioner would give a stranger who arrives at the door with a serious diagnosis.

Where to go from here

If the show sent you looking for the real thing, start with the source material: the reaction video itself, which runs about 38 minutes and includes the facilitators' own accounts of their workshops. Rachel Alexandria's constellations work is described on her site at rachelalexandria.com/constellations/, and Liza Miron's coaching and constellations work is at coachingandconstellations.com. Read both with the same questions the video raises: What does this practice claim to do? What does it leave to medicine? And what does a responsible facilitator say when someone brings a serious illness into the room? Watching a drama can open the door. The facilitators' answers, as they describe them, are about what happens after you walk through it.