Bert Hellinger (1925 to 2019) was a German psychotherapist and former Catholic missionary who developed Family Constellations, a group method in which people stand in for the members of a client’s family. From it he drew the “Orders of Love”, patterns he saw in families that had healed. Therapeutic Shamanism owes a real debt to that insight, and re-worked it in hunter-gatherer terms into its Patterns of healthy groups; his later views are disputed, and on some points Therapeutic Shamanism sees things differently.
Who was Bert Hellinger? #
A priest turned psychotherapist whose life took in war, Africa and a long list of therapies. Anton Hellinger was born in Leimen, near Heidelberg, on 16 December 1925, into a devout Catholic family, and died on 19 September 2019.1 After serving as a soldier and a prisoner of war he trained for the priesthood, taking the religious name Suitbert, from which “Bert” comes. In the early 1950s he went to South Africa, where for sixteen years he worked among the Zulu, a farming and cattle-keeping people, as a missionary priest, teacher and head of a school. There he also trained in group dynamics with Anglican priests running interracial courses.2
He returned to Europe at the end of 1969, left the priesthood, and trained in psychoanalysis and then in primal therapy, Transactional Analysis, Ericksonian hypnotherapy and Neuro-Linguistic Programming.3 Family therapy, and Virginia Satir’s way of setting up a family using members of a group, led him towards the method he came to call Family Constellations, which he developed fully in the late 1980s.4 He wrote more than a hundred books; the first to become widely known in English was Love’s Hidden Symmetry. From 2006 he and his second wife, Sophie Hellinger, taught what they called spiritual family constellations, in which very little is said and the facilitator, not the client, chooses the representatives.5
What are Family Constellations? #
A group method for seeing the hidden shape of a family. One person, the client, asks members of the group to stand in for their father, mother, siblings and themselves, places them in the room, and then steps back to watch. The representatives, told nothing about the people they stand for, say what they feel and may move closer or further apart, and what began as a picture of tension and isolation sometimes changes into something that looks and feels much healthier. Those taking part often describe entering a trance-like state, and the work can turn up surprising information.6 The method has since grown into many forms. What it shows about how we are connected, and what it offers shamanic work, is in What can Family Constellations offer shamanic work?
What are the Orders of Love? #
The patterns Hellinger saw in families where constellations resolved well. He came to think that families follow an ancient order, and that when it is kept, love flows. “Orders” here means a sequence, not rules or commands.7 Writers on his work usually sum the Orders up under three headings: everyone who belongs to the family has the right to belong, and excluding someone leads another member to represent them unknowingly; those who came earlier take precedence over those who came later; and giving and taking need to be in balance.8
How did Hellinger’s work shape Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Through the Patterns of healthy groups. Paul Francis came to Hellinger when looking beneath the childhood layers of his own therapy for the layers of earlier generations, a search that led him to epigenetics, Family Constellations and shamanic ancestral work.9 He could see that Hellinger was on to something, but the Orders as Hellinger described them never felt quite right, partly because at their heart is a nuclear family: a mother and father standing together, grandparents behind, and children in front in order of age. The answer came from asking how the patterns would have worked in hunter-gatherer tribes. Bringing Hellinger’s insights together with what is known of pre-agricultural shamanism gave the Patterns of healthy groups, one of many ways psychotherapy and shamanism can learn from each other.10 See What makes a healthy group or tribe?
Why is Hellinger controversial? #
Because of some of his ideas and his way of working, as well as the question of evidence. Critics within systemic family therapy, including the German Society for Systemic Therapy and Family Therapy in 2003, raised theoretical objections, and a book of 2005 was titled Die Hellinger-Kontroverse (The Hellinger Controversy); health professionals have also worried about one-off workshops with no follow-up.11 Among the sharpest objections are those about what he taught about victims and parents. In his late book Rising in Love he writes that when we hear of incest, sexual abuse or rape we instinctively side with the victim, “and against the offender. However, by doing this we lose our ground”, that the good helper does not allow clients to speak negatively about their parents, and that “Parents make no mistakes” in passing on life.12
His reply is in the same passage: “As soon as we take sides, we cannot help”, and only when everyone involved is equally respected, with their fates and entanglementsEntanglement. An unhealthy energetic tie hooking us into another person, a role, an object or a family story; released by disentanglement. More about this, can the helper stay in their hearts.12 His own organisation adds that much of the criticism comes from people who reject the work without looking at it closely.13 On whether it helps, a systematic review in 2021 found the evidence pointing towards real mental health benefits, whilst judging the quantity and quality of that evidence low. See What can Family Constellations offer shamanic work?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On judgement, on leaving, and on what a healthy family looks like. Therapeutic Shamanism does not ask anyone to stop judging what was done to them: “sometimes it is also fine to judge”, since some behaviours, such as child sexual abuse, domestic violence, cruelty and neglect, are simply not okay, and sometimes this goes for parents too. Nor does it ask for forgiveness before its time; healthy forgiveness emerges from working through the issues, or it does not, and either is fine.14 In the Patterns of healthy groups, the costs of belonging should not outweigh the benefits, and someone who pays more than they receive has the right to leave.15 And the healthy template is the egalitarian hunter-gatherer tribe, not the nuclear family. See What is the forgiveness trap?
