WELCOME
‘Simple Truths’ is a deck of cards designed to help you think about your relationships, be those relationships with people (partner, parent, colleague, etc) or things (money, work, the future, etc).
The deck is divided into two suits, each made up of 100 cards displaying a single sentence:
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The red ‘tangled’ sentences represent the thoughts that may be holding you back in a relationship. For example, ‘There’s a limit to my love,’ ‘I would rather dream than act’, ‘I don’t deserve to win’.
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The green ‘untangled’ sentences express thoughts that may be more constructive. For example, ‘I will open the door’, ‘I will share my secret’, ‘No more theories, just the facts’.
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You are invited to focus on a particular relationship, and then choose up to three red ‘tangled’ cards and three green ‘untangled’ cards. You read the sentences and reflect on how they apply to the relationship in question.
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In some cases, the sentences might confirm what you were already thinking. In other cases, they might name something of which you were only dimly aware. They might challenge your assumptions. They might even get you to rethink the relationship altogether.
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There is no limit to how many relationships you can think about with the cards. The two hundred sentences should give you everything you need to express what is hindering those relationships and how to help them.
Our Story
Having been an Oxford fellow in philosophy, Robert first encountered ‘systemic’ work in 2000. He had been working on a book on Freud, and the systemic approach broadened his thinking. Where Freud analyses the individual in relation to immediate family members, systemic work looks further back into the individual’s ancestry - their family ‘system’.
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Such systemic approaches come alive in the practice known as ‘Constellations’ or ‘Systemic Family Constellations’. In it, an individual’s family is set up by means of using unrelated people to act as representatives of that wider system. What results is a living picture of the system’s hidden dynamics.
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During the Constellations process, representatives are sometimes asked to voice a simple sentence. The point is to name those hidden dynamics. It is such sentences that form the basis of the red ‘tangled’ cards in our deck, Simple Truths. The green ‘untangled’ cards, by contrast, pick up on the healing sentences used towards the end of a Constellation, when a resolution is in view.
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Robert began his own Constellations practice is 2007. He has gone on to run hundreds of Constellations on myriad issues, for clients all over the world. When Robert began working with Miri in 2022, it became clear that Miri’s background in education and her ability to relate to a less specialist audience, would be invaluable for making systemic work more accessible.
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Together, Miri and Robert came up with the idea of a deck of cards that would capture the ‘systemic sentences’ used in Constellations. The deck puts the deep work of looking at relationships directly into the hands of those who wish to untangle hidden issues. Hence, ‘Simple Truths’.
Simple Truths Cards
We are working on publishing as a physical deck. If you have any advice, please get in touch!