The following people are offering in-person and on-line Family Constellations.
Laura Martin Essay / Facilitator training 2024/25
Parents
“When parents are honoured and respected and life is taken from them with love, the individual is equipped for anything life brings”. (Hellinger, 2003, p.940)
Before starting my journey in family constellations, I was very moved by Barbara Morgan’s story that after many years of therapy, it was one constellation on her mother that led to her deep and lasting inner peace. Self-criticism faded away. No longer searching for something, she felt she had come home. It seemed that constellation work could touch the deepest parts of our souls in a way perhaps therapy can’t fully reach. So much of the work of psychotherapy is about the relationship with your parents, as our foundational first relationships that shape so much of how we are in the world and what we expect from our lives and contact with others. A lot of the work is in challenging the messages you received from them which may no longer fit for you. Finding out who you are; as in, how you feel, what you want, underneath the expectations of your parents. Facing the reality of needs that weren’t met, or abuse that happened, grieving, and taking in support from your therapist and in your life, finding ways to “mother” and “father” yourself now, as an adult. Bert Hellinger, the founder of family constellations, criticises this focus on separating from parents in therapy; “how can you free yourself from your parents? You are your parents” (1999, p.78). For Hellinger, we can’t find any self-acceptance unless we accept our parents as they are (2006).
Whereas in therapy the focus is on healing any pain experienced in relation to parents, for Hellinger this is not enough. He believed it is only through the connection with our parents that we can truly heal and thrive. He tells participants in his training workshop, “as soon as the client moves in the direction of connecting to the mother and the father, the [helper’s] work is done, very quickly, no other work is necessary” (London, 2008). He emphasizes connecting a person to their mother in particular; “When you have succeeded in this you can do everything… everything else is just unimportant”. On our training, Barbara often quotes Hellinger saying that all you needed to be able to facilitate constellations, is to be at peace with your parents. It can sound so simple sometimes I have wondered if he minimizes the impact of trauma caused by experiences with traumatized parents. Learning constellation work as a newly qualified gestalt psychotherapist, has been challenging at times as though complementary in many ways, they are very different ways of working. I can feel unsure how I need to connect with my parents, or how to best support myself (and my psychotherapy clients) in relation to them. My confusion has inhibited me from facilitating a workshop yet, so I chose this topic to support finding clarity on what peace with our parent really means, why it matters so much, and where I am in my own process.
In Gestalt therapy, health is defined as the capacity to be in touch with yourself and the world around you, able to reach out and meet your genuine needs. There’s no mention about a particular kind of connection with your parents. For Hellinger, we can only “attain wellbeing” when “all who belong to us have a place in our body and in our soul as a part of us, especially our mother and father” (2011, p.138). He sees many issues in life in the context of disconnection from parents. For example, depression may happen when we exclude one or both parents from our heart (1998), not simply the repressing of emotions as it is seen in gestalt therapy. Addiction can be seen as a longing for a parent, rather than only as a creative adjustment to escape from feeling pain. If we have difficulties with money, perhaps we can’t receive love from our parents. Manne summarises Hellinger’s views; “Unless we honor our parents we are losers in every way: in life, relationships, success, health etc for we deprive ourselves of the support that comes from our ancestors over the generations, through them to us on an energy level” (Manne, 2005, p.29). Hellinger speaks often about the sacredness of life coming through your parents, saying “Therapy can’t help when reverence for the greatness of life is denied.” ( 2006, p.119). Disconnection from our parents means disconnection from the source of life.
When I first went to therapy at age twenty-five, I was struggling with so many aspects of my life; low self-esteem, falling in love with unavailable men, minimum wage jobs I didn’t like, and feeling very lost and pessimistic about my future. I had a difficult relationship with my father, (who was adopted as a baby). Through therapy with a male therapist, I started to feel completely different about life, optimistic and expansive. I had a decade full of new experiences and learning, though still struggling for money and not finding a healthy relationship I longed for. Tiziano Sguerso, a facilitator who follows Bert Hellinger, talks about the father representing the “project of life”, which for a woman is often being a mother. Though I would have loved a partner and family, this hasn’t happened. I had a miscarriage and a broken engagement. While I loved my parents, I can see now that I haven’t fully honoured them and so have been disconnected from their full support.
Hellinger is very specific about the kind of connection between parents and children than enables love to flow from the parent to the child, giving the child the strength to live their life. He discovered three “orders of love” outlined fully in Love’s Hidden Symmetry, as follows (1998, p.95). The first relates to belonging; we must feel deep in our soul that the parents we have are the right ones for us, exactly as they are. If a child refuses to take their parents as they are, love cannot flow (Hellinger, 1998). Next, we must remain small in relation to our parents; no matter how traumatized they are, the order of love relating to hierarchy, is that they always come first, parents are big and children are always small in relation to them. Parents must hold their place as the parent, not seeing themselves as friends/equals or becoming like a child. And finally, the balance between giving and taking between children and parents can never be equal; parents give and children take. A parent must not take from their child, and they child must not try to give something to the parent that is not theirs to give. The flow of love can also be blocked if a parent tries to give the child and that child takes, something harmful. Reading Love’s Hidden Symmetry, I got the sense it is something severe, such as in the example used of sexual abuse. In cases of severe abuse like this, Hellinger talks about it being important that the parent carries their guilt, and not ask for forgiveness from the child. Even if the parent has abused a child badly, the child must still be able to accept them as their parent, and take them into their heart. He suggests healing sentences for the child such as “what you did was not okay for me, and as a consequence I need to stay away for a while”. There is no judgement, only acknowledgement of what is. Hellinger says we must not criticize our parents, that this is not our place and to do so makes us bigger so interrupts the flow of love.
Following these orders of love, you would be at peace with your parents and able to thrive in life. Hellinger writes a lot about how when we accept our parents as they are, and fully take our lives from them, this separates us from them. It is a painful but freeing process. Constellation facilitator Stephan Hausner often talks about this aspect of Hellinger’s work, where we accept what we will never get from our parents as childhood is over (2011). We release our parents, knowing they have given us enough. Hellinger says we can let our inner images of what we would have liked from them work in us instead (1998). If we are carrying feelings for our parents, because they cannot face them in themselves so someone else in the system has to carry them, we can honour how our parents have managed their pain, and try to gently give back those feelings. If the parent is not ready to take the feelings back, then we have to accept our fate is to carry them, because we are part of a system, we’re not only individuals. The heart of Hellinger’s teaching is the strength in consenting to life exactly as it is, to our parents exactly as they are, to ourselves, exactly as we are. We cannot have any other life than the one we have, and any pain we have as a result of our parents’ trauma, is simply part of the ‘cost’ of our lives. It does feels so deeply healing to take in Hellinger’s teachings “my parents are right, I am right, life is right”. If we can take that in, even before we have worked through our pain in relation to them, we can be “bigger than our trauma”, as Barbara says, and experience inner peace despite also having pain. My father’s adoption is part of me.
Stephan Hausner says it is a challenge to ‘grow beyond’ our parents, without becoming bigger. He summarises Hellinger’s views “Children often may have difficulty in honouring their parents because what they are looking at are their parents’ personal characteristics or actions…respect and honour are possible if we look at our parents in their totality, and also beyond them in their families and their fate” (p.137). Hellinger writes; “Many of our difficulties stem from the fact that we treat our parents as though life came from them rather than through them; as though it were in the hands of our parents to bestow life…keeping our eyes focused beyond our parents, far away, whence life springs, empowers the parents on the one hand, and also frees us as children to take life fully from them, as it comes to us, from far beyond” (Hellinger, 2006, p.119). On my first constellation camp, we did “the bow” exercise, where representatives for life, your mum and dad stand before you, and you can experience whether love is flowing from your parents to you. Seeing life behind them and being able to feel small in relation to them was incredibly moving. Constellation work has expanded my awareness of how much I have been carrying for my parents, making me bigger and blocking the flow of love from them to me. I felt I needed much more of this. I still need much more of this. I’m starting to see that to really be smaller, I need to express my rage. I was incredibly moved seeing a constellation where a someone expressed deep rage to their parent. Tiziano Sguerso often mentions it being important the child can express anger to parents, from his or her place as smaller, and that not doing so can mean you are actually being bigger. I am unsure how Hellinger worked with anger towards parents in clients though. I understand he did work with the interrupted reaching out movement to reach the core of our pain in relation to our parents, though I’ve not seen this.
Working with a woman really struggling in her life, in his London workshop (1998) Hellinger seemed to empathise more with the client’s mother than the client, though as far as I’m aware, he knew nothing about how her mother was with her. He was absolutely clear that this client’s rejection of her mother was in the way of all her dreams; “no mother, no life…rejecting the mother is rejecting life”. He then shared that being tempted to facilitate a constellation can prevent some clients making the “basic movement” towards their mother. He continues; “It doesn’t matter what happened. It doesn’t make any difference. There’s a mother and there’s a child. The mother’s great, and the child is small. The mother gives, and the child takes. That’s all. And unless she moves herself in this direction, I fear I’m not permitted to try anything else. I cannot because I have too deep a respect for her mother”. He asks her to write ten pages of what her mother did for her. No matter who the mother was or what she did, Hellinger holds her in reverence, as all mothers risk their own lives to give birth to us, they are all in service of life.
Unlike a psychotherapist, Hellinger is not focused on any pain this client may have experienced in relation to her mother, or any details of her story. He only focuses on the “orders of love” he discovered operating in all family systems. I felt uncomfortable, as if he might minimize my pain in the way I already do to myself. I watched the clip again to try to understand what was happening, and realised, that once we understand what happened to us with our parents, and we find compassion for ourselves, we still then need to find our ability to reach out and take what we need from life. We can’t change our parents, only ourselves. This client had done years of personal development, and Hellinger may have intuited that her next step was to find this agency. In our training, Barbara said a lot of us know our ‘victim’ well, and it is in finding your ‘perpetrator’ that we can change. I hear Hellinger saying, that focusing on what your mother gave you, and taking it, actively, love can flow in you again, because this is the order of love, parents give, children take. Even if she gave you up for adoption, focusing on her giving you life allows you to connect with your mother and with the source of life, giving you access to your life force. Hellinger is not interested in the details of the client’s story because he’s working with these deeper soul movements in the system.
I am starting to understand Hellinger as speaking from a completely different perspective to a psychotherapist; a more spiritual place beyond the ‘laws’ of psychology. Whereas In therapy, we focus on an individual’s lived experience of our parents, in constellations we work systemically on allowing love to flow, from its very source, through the generations of ancestors, to us. In his London workshop he refers to this source of life as “spirit mind”. While Gestalt therapy theory sees everything in life interconnected, with a sense of the intelligence of the whole, there is no reference to the importance of acknowledging this source of life. In connecting with our parents, Hellinger sees that we connect to this energy of life and love. This offers the possibility of profound change happening quickly when we are ready to fully open our hearts to our parents. This is where I get into a scramble sometimes about how to work with our difficulties. I know we have to work through pain if we were traumatized by our traumatized parents. Finding peace with them may be a long journey of healing, and I know Barbara understands that. There is no bypassing pain on our training. And at the same time, as I heard Stephan Hausner say to one of my peers in her constellation, “sometimes when there has been so much trauma, a meta-solution is needed”. Rather than focusing on the pain she experienced with her violent father, he focused on her taking in the abundance of her father giving her life. When would find a meta-solution be “bypassing pain” and when is it actually a necessary support to be able to face the pain? The dilemma I am describing here, I think is the difference between the spiritual power of constellation work; the deep soul work of connecting to your parents love, and the psychological reality of the incredibly painful impact parents can have on their children.
If we see life as sacred gift, our experience of our parents in relation to us, no matter how awful, even if our parent gave us away for adoption or violently abused us, is such a ‘small story’, when considered against the sacredness of their giving us life. The power of accepting how it was and agreeing to it, and being able to thank your parents for at giving you life, gives you access to your life force, and so while you would still have pain, it can become more manageable. It’s hard to feel the sacredness of life, when you’re deeply traumatized, though. I wonder, can someone who has been neglected, abused, or completely abandoned by their parent really find enough strength in life simply through following the orders of love with their parents? I haven’t yet heard Hellinger talk about the need for additional therapeutic support. Is it possible to take in the greatness of your mother giving you life, and that be a great support for you, without ever understanding the pain she caused your first? I realise I may be looking too hard for cause and effect answers. When Barbara described the movement with her own mother, she said of course she can never know how much her years of psychotherapy prepared her for this movement, “I don’t like to use the terms cause and effect. It’s more that’s where I was, that’s where the field was, and there was some readiness in my soul, and maybe in my mother’s soul for that to happen”. She often reminds us the soul moves slowly and I notice my impatience to “know what I need to do”. Perhaps there is nothing to do but feel my body, my truth, and trust the field, the constellations that happen and when.
References
Hausner, S (2011), Even if it costs me my life - Systemic constellations and Serious Illness, GestaltPress, Santa Cruz
Hellinger, B (1999), Acknowledging What Is, Zeig Tucker & Theisen Inc
Hellinger, B (2003), Peace Begins in the Soul - Family Constellations in the Service of Reconciliation, Carl-Auer-Systeme, Verlag Germany
Hellinger, B (2006), No Waves without the ocean, Carl-Auer-Systeme, Verlag German
Hellinger, B (2011), Getting Well, Staying Well, Hellinger Publication
Hellinger, Weber and Beaumont (1998), Love’s Hidden Symmetry, Zeig Tucker & Theisen Inc
Manne, J (2005), Family Constellations. A practical guide to uncovering the Origins of family conflict, North Atlantic Books