According to Bert Hellinger, the creator of Family Constellations:
*“In all our various relationships, our basic needs interact in complex ways:
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The need to belong, which is about bonding.
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The need to maintain a balance between giving and taking, which is about equilibrium.
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The need for the safety of social convention and predictability, which is about order.
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These needs limit our relationships, but they also make them possible because they simultaneously reflect and empower our basic need to communicate closely with other people. Our relationships are successful when we are able to satisfy these needs and balance them with one another, and they become dysfunctional and destructive when we cannot.
With every action that affects others, we feel either guilty or innocent. Just as the eye constantly distinguishes between dark and light, an internal organ constantly distinguishes between what serves and what hinders our relationships. When our actions threaten or hurt our relationships, we feel guilt; and we feel free of guilt, or innocent, when our actions serve them. We call our experience of guilt or innocence—our sense of what serves or threatens our relationships—personal conscience.
Thus, our feelings of guilt or innocence are a primary social phenomenon that does not necessarily lead us to higher moral values. Quite the opposite: by bonding us so strongly to the groups necessary for our survival, our feelings of guilt or innocence often make us blind to what is good and evil.”*
— Bert Hellinger, “Love’s Hidden Symmetry”
It is helpful to make useful distinctions, and the above provides such an opportunity. Personal conscience is the lowest and most common level of conscientiousness. It stems from adaptation to the norms of the group to which we belong and is distinct from the internal morality through which we distinguish good from evil (what Hellinger calls “the conscience of the greater whole”).
“The greatest evils are committed with a clear conscience, while at the same time we feel quite guilty when we do good that separates us from what others expect of us.” — Hellinger
And others expect different things from us, which creates internal conflict. There is one standard for our father, another for our mother, one for the church, another for the workplace…
“Conscience serves all these needs even when we experience a conflict between them as a conflict of conscience… No matter how much we struggle to follow our conscience, we always feel both guilt and innocence—innocence in relation to one of the needs and guilt in relation to another. The dream of innocence without guilt is an illusion.” — Hellinger
When we leave the childish stage of our psychic and spiritual development and enter the stage of maturity, we manage to free ourselves from this illusion. And we continue to live with a greater acceptance of the guilt that remains.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
Note: The quotations are translated from Bulgarian and are not presented as verbatim citations.
