Simple Truths ®
A card deck for rethinking your relationships
Coming soon - June 2025
About the deck
Simple Truths is a deck of cards designed to help you think about your relationships. These can be relationships with people such as a partner, friend, family member or colleague; or they can be relationships with things in your life such as money, health or career.
The deck is made up of two 'suits'. There is a suit of 100 'tangled' cards, and a suit of 100 'untangled' cards. Each card has written on it a simple sentence.
The sentences on the tangled cards are in red. They name a hidden dynamic or underlying issue that might exist in the relationship you are focussing on. For example, 'I am a little bit better than you' or 'I will take your pain for you'.
The sentences on the untangled cards are in green. They suggest a more helpful way of thinking about the relationship. For example, 'I played my part' or 'I will let you see me'.
You are invited to draw up to three tangled red cards and three untangled green cards. The sentences you draw will encourage you to reflect on the relationship and how it could be improved.
How to use the cards
A short video explaining how to use the digital version of the cards
The story behind the deck
Sometimes we carry things that don’t belong to us —
a grief that isn’t ours,
a fear we didn’t choose,
a pattern that keeps returning.
These burdens often come from the systems we’re born into — our families, our histories, the unseen ties that shape our lives.
Systemic Family Constellations is a practice that reveals these hidden dynamics. Instead of analysing the individual in isolation, it looks at the wider system — ancestors, loyalties, losses, and the unspoken rules that echo through generations.
Philosopher Robert Rowland Smith first encountered systemic work while writing a book on Freud. Freud had helped him think about the self — but Constellations showed him how much of the self is not just ours. It broadened his thinking from the personal to the ancestral.
Robert began practising Constellations in 2007, and has since guided hundreds of sessions for people around the world. Over time, he noticed something remarkable: in many constellations, a single sentence could change everything.
A sentence that revealed what had been hidden.
A sentence that softened a knot.
A sentence that brought peace.
In 2022, he began working with Miri O’Connor, whose background in education and passion for making deep ideas accessible helped spark a new idea:
What if these powerful sentences could live in a deck?
What if people could work with them on their own, at home, in their own time?
Together, they created Simple Truths — a card deck that brings systemic insight into your hands.
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The tangled cards reflect the sentences that name what’s stuck.
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The untangled cards offer the healing sentences that often arise at the end of a Constellation, when something begins to move.
You don’t need to know anything about systemic work to use the deck.
You just need a willingness to listen — to yourself, to your history, and to the simple truths that are waiting to be heard.
