Supporting Love – How Love Works in Couples Relationships

by Bert Hellinger

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Bert Hellinger. Supporting Love – How Love Works in Couples Relationships. Phoenix, AZ: Zieg, Tucker & Theisen, Inc. 2001.  280 pp.  $34.95

Bert Hellinger is a wonderfully innovative psychotherapist who developed the family constellation method for helping people release interpersonal and intergenerational issues. In using this approach, the person who is being helped (I will use the term 'focus person' for brevity's sake) states the issues needing help and then invites other participants in the workshop to stage a representation of her or his family members, including the spouse/partner, their children, the focus person's parents. Previous partners, any children brought into the family through marriage, and all significant others are also included. Workshop participants are not familiar with each other, and very few details are shared by focus people about their families. (To this point, this method resembles the 'family sculpting' approach.)

The constellation therapist asks each of the family representatives how they feel in the starting positions that the focus person has designated. Intuitively, the participants cue into the collective consciousness to respond – often with outstanding accuracy, as acknowledged by the focus person (and their spouse or partner if they are also present). The therapist then suggests various shifts in sculpted positions, asking for feedback from the participants after each shift.

For instance, a sculpted child may report feeling uncomfortable positioned next to one or the other parent. The therapist suggests shifts in position and in facing towards or away from other participants until more comfortable feelings are reported by all. In the process of sorting out the discomforts that are reported, in turn, by each family representative, many family relationship issues are clarified. At the same time, conflicts and residues of old traumas and other feelings are rapidly cleared.

At times, the rapidity of positive shifts is sometimes unsettling and difficult for participants to digest and accept.

Hellinger: It’s almost insulting for some people if the solution is too easy.
Steven: Yes, because it questions the validity of everything that has already happened.
Hellinger: You feel that there was so much that was all for nothing. (p. 72)

Several aspects of family constellation work are truly remarkable. First, the participants in the workshop stage the family groupings of people they have never met before. Despite their complete lack of information about the family, they report detailed emotions and cognitions that are verified by the focus person. Second, there are many times when uncomfortable feelings – particularly sadness, depression and grief – are reported by participants. Upon closer questioning of the focus person, a previously overlooked death or other severe trauma in the family is identified that explains these emotions. When these emotions are cleared through verbal interactions between the constellation workshop participants, the focus person often experiences major emotional releases and relief from feelings that had been troublesome for many years.

A family system requires the full inclusion of all of the members. That is, each member of the system must have a place, with the same right to belong as every other member of the system. If a child dies young, as was the case with your father’s sister, that child is often forgotten or is no longer counted as one of the children in the family. Sometimes the other family members forget about loving that child, or don’t say good-bye to the child properly. If something like that happens, then the forgotten person will be presented by another member of the system in order to keep the place open. There is a systemic pull to restore the missing piece through another representative. An innocent family member is then drawn into service by the system. No one chooses this or tries to make it happen, nor does anyone want it to happen. It simply arises from the depths and an identification is established…

The question is how to resolve it. An identification has the effect of making me feel like another person. I can’t see that other person clearly, because it’s almost as if I am the other person. In the constellation, you can stand facing the other person and look at him or her… and you allow love to flow to her. This direct love resolves an identification…

That’s the first step, but that alone is not sufficient. The next resolving movement is for the child to move out of the sphere of the burdened family system… (p. 80-1)

Hellinger was a priest and missionary in Africa for 16 years. His spiritual journeys and awarenesses contribute to the breadth and depth of the constellation work.

A constellation provides an image that you have to let work in your soul. The picture will have an effect and then, all of a sudden, the soul will see which way to go. Then you know what you have to do. There’s no intervention from the outside that determines how you should act, but rather an inner development that comes from your own soul’s taking responsibility. This is true of all constellations. These images are impulses for growth and you have to wait to see how the soul reacts. (p. 148)

The book presents a series of family constellations and demonstrates how Hellinger helped the participants work through the situations that were presented. I find much of Hellinger's work brilliant. Here are just a few of many examples I like:

For the parents, it’s important for them to look at their dead child together and then at each other. They have to say, “This is our child. We wanted this child. Now, we’ll let it go, but we will keep a place in our hearts for this one.” (p. 196)

The basis for a grudge can be summed up in one lovely question: “Whatever have I done to you to make me so angry with you?” The turnabout begins when you can see that you have hurt someone, and when you acknowledge it. Then the partner is honored and can feel reconciled. (p. 22)

A separation works well when the partners can say to each other, “I have loved you very much, and everything I’ve given you, I’ve given gladly. You have given me a lot and I’ll hold that in a place of honor. I accept responsibility for my share of what has gone wrong between us, and I leave it to you to take responsibility for your share. Now, I leave you in peace.” Then the separation is clear and each can go his or her own way. (p. 187)

At times, however, Hellinger makes categorical statements with which I disagree. For example, he states:

When one partner cannot produce children, regardless of the cause, he or she can’t hold onto the partner. He or she has to say, "It’s my fate and I’ll carry it alone.” It’s also necessary, within one’s self, to release the partner and let him or her go free. (p. 193)

Balance cannot be restored by forgiveness. Forgiveness destroys the exchange and the relationship. When my partner does something that hurts me, I tell her, “For the sake of our love, I’m doing something that hurts you, so that our relationship won’t be destroyed. But I’ll do less to you out of love.” This little bit less opens the way for a new exchange of good. (p. 140)

I get the feeling that embodied in these sorts of cut and dried recommendations are opinions of Hellinger that he would like to believe are universally true. In the increasingly common situation of childlessness, my strong preference in couples and family therapy is to help the couple sort out their own preferences and resolutions to such challenges. I see forgiveness as an aspect of compassion, and strongly encourage people to reach into their healing awarenesses to connect with these avenues for healing – not only for their personal relationships, but also for relationships within the entire collective consciousness.

This book and the Family Constellation method bring out wonderful awarenesses of the living, collective consciousness. Constellation therapists call this 'the field.' By accessing this in a group setting, very rapid and deep healings are possible.

The dramatic shifts in consciousness and relationships of the focus person – in response to the identification of unresolved issues from previous generations – invites speculations on how this is possible. This suggests that either through biological energies and/or through consciousness we are connected with others in our family.

My own belief is that this field extends beyond the family, into the collective consciousness of humanity and of the All. Even greater and broader depths of healing are possible when we access these levels of our being.

See also: Payne, John L. The Healing of Individuals, Families & Nations: Transgenerational Healing & Family Constellations, Forres, Scotland: Findhorn 2005. (Book review)

Benor, Daniel J. Using any therapy as an opportunity to heal the collective consciousness and our planet: lessons from Ho'oponopono and WHEE (Editorial), International J Healing & Caring, 2008, 8(3), 1-19.

Review by Daniel Benor, MD
Editor-in-Chief, IJHC

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