I owe the method of family constellations not only my encounter with the field of knowledge and its healing potential, but also a deeper understanding of how the family past influences us and of the laws that govern the family soul. For this reason, I would like to express my gratitude to its creator, Bert Hellinger, by briefly presenting his core ideas about healing the traumas within our family soul. These ideas help us understand our relationship with ancestors who had difficult destinies, yet whom we often do not even know; only the records of our spiritual DNA remember them, compelling us to experience hardships in life that have no rational explanation.
Briefly put, according to the theoretical model of family constellations, psychological suffering is understood as the result of violations of the laws governing the family soul: (1) the law of belonging, (2) the law of order, and (3) the law of balance.
Outsiders, stillborn children, those who died young, perpetrators and victims, and people who had particularly difficult destinies are present in the records of family memory and, under the influence of the laws listed above, affect the fate of some members of subsequent generations. The more sensitive members of the family system (the family soul) may unconsciously identify with an ancestor who had a difficult fate or who was excluded from the family because they had committed something unacceptable. This unconscious identification is called “blind love” and manifests itself in the repetition of that person’s life drama, even when there are no real grounds for this in one’s own life.
Psychological suffering also arises from a blocked flow of “love energy” downward to subsequent generations. This occurs when parents were unable to give their children the attention and love they needed because they themselves had not received it from their own parents. Accordingly, healing takes place when the proper functioning of these laws is restored and pathological identifications are recognized:
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Those who were excluded and the outsiders in family history are reintegrated by acknowledging their right to belong to the family.
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Disturbed relationships between parents and children are restored when children take their place as “the small ones,” and parents as “the big ones,” and the interrupted flow of love begins to move downward through the generations again.
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Blind love “comes to see” the unconscious mechanisms of identification and is transformed into a mature form of honoring and love toward the ancestors who suffered greatly.
The concepts without which we cannot understand the method of family constellations are: “family soul,” the “basic needs/laws” operating in human relationships (family systems), and “blind love.”
The Family Soul
Here is how Hellinger defines, in the spirit of his phenomenological approach, what the family soul is:
“It seems that there are forces at work beyond the limits of our usual understanding. Beyond our traditional understanding of the soul, there appears to be a greater soul that unites the living and the dead, or a family soul that connects the dead and the living members of the family. We can actually see the scope of the family soul when we observe that only certain members are affected and may be entangled in the destinies of other family members.”
Those who are included in the family soul or system are:
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the children, including aborted children, stillborn children, and those who died very early;
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the parents and their brothers and sisters;
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the grandparents;
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sometimes some of the great-grandparents, and even ancestors further back;
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anyone—and this is particularly important for guiding the therapeutic process—who gave up their place so that the above members could take theirs. This includes former partners of parents or grandparents, as well as all those whose misfortune or death brought the family privilege or benefit;
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victims of violence or murder by family members or within the family.
Knowledge of the family soul and of who belongs to it is crucial in conducting a family constellation. It determines which of its members will be selected by the therapist in order to explore their relationship with the protagonist.
What I found interesting, as a psychotherapist, is that here one asks only and exclusively about biographical facts from family history. Psychological interpretations of what a given person was like in character are not only unnecessary but also undesirable. In other words, from the very beginning of the constellation the therapist is in the role of a researcher of facts, paying particular attention to those members of the family system who had especially difficult destinies—those who were victims of violence or perpetrators, who died too young, or who were stillborn.
Basic Needs Operating in Human Relationships
According to Bert Hellinger, within the diversity of relationships in the family system there are three basic needs that interact in complex ways:
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the need for belonging, which is in fact the need to be connected;
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the need to maintain balance between giving and taking, i.e., the need for equilibrium;
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the need for the security of social convention and predictability, i.e., the need for order.
Recognizing these needs as basic for successful interaction is the foundation from which we begin to analyze how, from the perspective of family constellations, psychological suffering arises.
“Our relationships are successful when we are able to satisfy these needs and balance them with one another, and become dysfunctional and destructive when we cannot satisfy them.”
— Bert Hellinger
Applied to the extended family system, these needs clarify why, for the healing process, it is so important that outsiders in family history (for example, alcoholics or people who violated social norms in one way or another) be reincluded by acknowledging their right to belong to the system.
In this sense, even perpetrators who are not part of the family but are connected to it through their victims also have the right to belong to family memory. In the final, resolving scene of a constellation, victims find peace when they meet their perpetrators again, but in a new way that brings reconciliation.
The second need—the need for balance in the family system—may manifest, for example, when situations of unjust benefit in the past are balanced in the present through unconscious self-sabotage on the part of a later family member. The interpretation here is that their soul has “decided to include” in the family system those who were wronged by reliving their fate as people who were abused.
And here we arrive at what is probably the most important concept in the theory of family constellations: “blind love.”
Blind Love
The concept of “blind love” describes a mechanism of identification with a family member who had a difficult fate or who, for one reason or another, was excluded from the family system. This identification is called “blind” because of the profoundly unconscious nature of the choice we make. And it is called “love” because it is guided by the wish for the suffering experienced in the past to be honored and remembered.
If the soul could speak in words, they would be:
“Out of love for you, I will not allow myself to have a better fate than yours. The way I will remember you is by living a fate that is the same as yours.”
The understanding of identification in this case differs from how identification is traditionally understood in the psychological literature. This identification does not pass through our conscious memories of a person who had a difficult fate, but extends to ancestors we have never seen and whose very existence we may not even know about.
It is interesting to note that in the phenomenology of the origins of schizophrenic disorders, a double identification is very often found—both with the victim and with the perpetrator.
The concept of blind love, much like the basic needs in human relationships, leads us to an understanding of “That Which Heals.” What is healing in this case is when we transform blind love into conscious love, honoring the suffering of our ancestors without identifying with it any longer. This differentiation does not break the bond with them but continues it in a new way, because we say to them: “In my heart, there will always be a place for you.”
One of the phrases that also carries the healing energy of disentangling our intertwined destinies is to say to them:
“So that so much suffering may not have been in vain, in your honor I will live my life happily and fully.”
An Illustrative Example
To make the above clearer, I will use an example to illustrate it. I heard it from Suravi, the facilitator of the first family constellation group in which I participated. The case concerns a woman who had suffered for many years from pathological jealousy and had been treated by various psychiatrists and psychotherapists without success. This continued until, in a family constellation group, the facilitator—through information emerging from the roles within the field of knowledge—came upon the fate of an ancestor of whom this woman had been unaware until then: her deceased grandmother. As is often the case with particularly painful stories in our family history, this fate had been carefully kept secret.
This grandmother had a husband who was unfaithful to her, but for one reason or another she did not find the strength to leave him, despite her profound sense of humiliation and jealousy. And so her granddaughter repeated this fate without any real reason for doing so, because she had a loving husband. This repetition is an expression of “blind love.” Love—because this is her way of saying to her grandmother: “Dear grandmother, I remember you. By repeating your fate, I honor your suffering.” Blind—because all of this takes place on a deeply unconscious level: the granddaughter did not even know about her grandmother’s fate.
What is interesting in this example is that this record in the family destiny was first accessed through information from the knowing field in the family constellation group, and only afterward was the truth of this information confirmed by the woman’s relatives. After this family constellation, the life of the woman with pathological jealousy changed dramatically.
From this example it becomes clear that:
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We truly belong to something greater than our personal history—something that Hellinger calls the “family soul,” within which we are connected to our ancestors regardless of whether they are among the living or the dead, and regardless of whether we know their fate or not.
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In the human unconscious, the records of the family soul connected with ancestors who had difficult destinies tend to repeat themselves in the lives of those who come after them. These are often more sensitive people, and this usually happens every other generation. Some would call this repetition family karma. Hellinger called it “blind love.”
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The resources for healing are found at the level of love—when blind love comes to see and the granddaughter reconnects with her grandmother again, but in a different and conscious way. The verbal expression of releasing the unconscious identification with love is: “Out of love, I carried your fate, and out of love I return it to you; but in my heart there will always be a place of love for you.”
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Among the causes of psychological suffering are some that do not arise from our personal history but are expressions of inherited traumas from our ancestors. We understand that the primary source of the suffering is this so-called transgenerational trauma when our suffering, which seems inadequate in relation to the current circumstances of our lives, becomes adequate and understandable when connected to the circumstances of the person whose fate we are repeating. In this example, the feelings of jealousy are appropriate for the grandmother, but not for the granddaughter, whose husband is not unfaithful to her.
Acknowledgements
Although, as a psychotherapist, I do not work with the method of family constellations, I would like to encourage those who recognize themselves in the example above to participate in a family constellation group, through which they can personally experience the knowledge I have shared here. I know that such participation can offer them a deeply transformative and healing experience that may illuminate the unhealed wounds in their family soul and help the healing flow of love to begin moving toward them again.
Personally, my experience with this method came through participation in various groups led by Osho therapists at a time when there were not yet trained constellation facilitators in Bulgaria. For this I am grateful to the organizers of Osho events, and personally to Rumen Yankulov, through whom the book Love’s Hidden Symmetry: What Makes Love Work in Relationships by Bert Hellinger with Gunthard Weber and Hunter Beaumont reached me.
I am grateful to Elena Ilieva and the Family Constellations Foundation – Bulgaria for giving me the opportunity to continue illuminating unhealed wounds in my own family history and to become acquainted with the work of other foreign constellation facilitators.
I am also grateful to Dr. Svetla Stoeva—psychiatrist, homeopathic physician, family constellations therapist, and my friend—with whom I co-facilitated a workshop at the First Psychodrama Conference. The topic was the fields of mutual complementarity between these two therapeutic methods—psychodrama and family constellations—which are based on experiential role work. For me, Svetla is one of the clearest conduits of the healing energy of the knowing field within the family soul.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
Further articles on the theory of family constellations and its creator Bert Hellinger:
