A New Way of Looking (Men and Women)

Bert Hellinger's radical insight into men, women and the family

Bert Helllinger was a German priest who left the church and in the second half of his life became a psychotherapist and went on to deeply influence our understanding of the family. He died a few years ago at age of 94. His insights come from a worldview that is resonant with traditional family but brings another dimension that is profoundly his own. Some of that may be due to his having spent years steeped in Zulu culture while running schools in Africa.

His unique perspective can’t be described in a few words and laying it out is not my aim here. They were deeply helpful to me and changed the course of my life personally and professionally. The “Family Constellation” field is overwhelmingly his. Although it’s surging worldwide, that his approach is not yet better known is mainly because it’s counterintuitive to the usual assumption of psychology that our lives are mainly individual. Hellinger brings a wonderful understanding of the relational field of humanity, how we’re shaped by it and how we can find our place inside the relational web.

Here I’ll share a short excerpt from a lecture of his called How Love Works. Hellinger isn’t primarily a lecturer or a writer; his many books are mainly transcriptions of him working with people and speaking in asides. The “Orders of Love” he talks about refer to the way that love works.

. . . When parents give life, they act in deepest accordance with their humanness, and they give themselves as parents to their children exactly as they are. They can't add anything to what they are, nor can they leave anything out. Father and mother, consummating their love for one another, give to their children the whole of what they are. Thus, the first of the Orders of Love [i.e., what is functional in relationship] is that children take life as it was given. A child cannot leave anything out from the life he or she was given, nor does wishing it were different change anything.

A child IS its parents. Love, if it is to succeed, requires that a child affirms its parents as they are, without fear and without imagining it could have different parents. After all, different parents would have had different children. Our parents are the only possible ones for us. Imagining anything else to be possible is an illusion.

Affirming our parents as they are is a very deep and profound movement. It implies our agreement to life and fate exactly as they are presented to us by our parents; with the limitations that go along with that. With the opportunities we are given. With the entanglement in the suffering, ill fortune and guilt of our family, or in their happiness and good fortune as it may come.

This affirmation of our parents just as they are is a religious act. It expresses our readiness to give up false expectations which exceed or fall short of how the life our parents gave us really is. This religious affirmation extends far beyond our parents, and so, in affirming our parents, we must look far beyond them. We must see through them into that far distance from which life itself comes to us, and we must bow down before the mystery of life. When we affirm our parents as they are, we acknowledge the mystery of life and we submit to it.

You can test the effect of this affirmation in your soul by imagining yourself bowing deeply before your parents and telling them, "The life you give me comes to me at the full price it has cost you, and at the full price it has cost me. I take it with everything that comes with it, with all its limitations and opportunities." In the moment these sentences are authentically spoken, we acknowledge life as it is and our parents as they are. The heart opens. Whoever manages this affirmation feels whole and at peace.

Compare the effect of this affirmation with its opposite by imagining yourself turning away from your parents, saying, "I want different parents. I don't like how mine are." What an illusion, as if it were possible to be ourselves and have different parents. Those who secretly speak such sentences turn away from life as it is, and they feel empty, unsupported, and find no peace with themselves.

Some people fear that if they take their parents as they are, they must also take on their parent's badness, and they act as if they could choose to take only the part of life they prefer. Fearing to embrace the wholeness of life, the good is also lost. Affirming our parents as they are, we also embrace life's fullness, as it is.

You likely recognize this pattern in modern life. The disconnect between parents and and children in the way Hellinger refers to it - children feeling more important and valuable in the family system - is almost emblematic of the modern era. In fact it’s been going on full force since the 60s and, in a less overt form, for a long time prior. It’s more or less coterminous with other hallmarks of the modern era, the decline of the family (in favor of the independent individual), a coherent culture (in favor of a culture determined by brands and the state), the loss of God (in favor of a materialism).

The strong decline of the family bond relative to generations ago is difficult to see because we take our own time’s norm as natural when it’s a strong aberration from the historic norm. And men and women’s view of each other and themselves are directly related to the decline. The better we understand the relational web, the more we’re part of it’s restoration.

I don’t think men and women can be understood without understanding the context in which they arise. I’ll share more of Hellinger’s insight in other posts, looking at the relational context of women and men to understand it a little better. I’ve found that getting a grasp of the systemic dynamics has helped me in my own life and informed the way I look out at the world.