Politicians, businessmen and society in general would benefit from changing their way of thinking, says psychotherapist Eva Gold.

Austria-based Mrs Gold has spent the past 22 years specialising in “systemic constellation” work. Originally developed by German and French psychotherapists in the 1980s, this increasingly popular method is based on the belief that people are trapped by past events and patterns of thinking. Constellation work is used to help people release themselves from the burden of the past so that they can move on to live more authentic and happier lives.

Mrs Gold, 54, holds systemic constellation workshops at least once a month and was recently in London giving talks to introduce the technique and her particular approach.

She tells People: “The aim is to help people digest the past and integrate it into the future.

“The world is in crisis — politics, business, young people, societal and inter-personal relationships — because we are in a thought form that was created during earlier ways of living — through war and the struggle for survival. Sixty years later and our brains are running as if they were still in survival mode with everyone concerned about the future. We are driven by fear, anxiety and wishes. We are never in the ‘now’, yet the ‘now’ is the only place we can live happily.

“Our politicians, and all of us, instead of competing and fighting one another, would do much better if we lived in the present and served people, not driven by ideas of who we should be. If we could change our whole society to this path of consciousness, that would be exciting.”