The Process
Hellinger calls his method “Movements of the Soul.”
Evolved from Moreno’s Psychodrama and Satir’s Family Constellations,
the process uses representatives who are positioned in relation to each other within a circle of seated observers.
Unlike its predecessors, the representatives are not acting or playing a role. In fact, they do not speak.
The only instructions Hellinger gave them on this night was to inform them of who they were
representing, e.g. "Descendants of the victims of the Armenian Holocaust," and to tell them, “You stand (or lie down) here.”
Hellinger began working with Satir’s Family Constellations in the 1980s.
He gradually discovered that the quality and accuracy of the information revealed through observing the
representatives improved as he minimized the action, speaking, and directions.
Thus, he continued to do more with less; the "more" stretching towards the infinite and the "less" diminishing to
virtually nothing.
While the process is not immune to being corrupted by an individual representative’s resistance,
conscious intentions or errant emotional reactions, Hellinger finds that if the participants are quiet and centered,
the emerging movements show consistencies that are accurate reflections of the deeper unconscious motivations
and desires that underlay people's apparently inexplicable behaviors.
On this night Hellinger setup two pieces.
In the first, he began with 5 volunteers to represent victims of the Nazi Holocaust and stood them opposite
5 representatives of the perpetrators of these killings.
For the second piece, he took 10 volunteers to lie on the floor representing the victims of the
Armenian-Turkish Holocaust and 5 representatives each for the descendants of the victims and the perpetrators.
To the perplexed outsider observer, the representatives may seem to be “doing nothing,” “making it up”
or being guided or manipulated by the leader’s intentions.
However, the representatives themselves generally report that the sensations and movements they experience simply emerge,
often with powerful force. While Hellinger offers no theory or explanation of what occurs,
the results are consistent with the Jung’s Collective Unconscious,
Sheldrake’s Morphic Information Fields, and the non-medical healing rituals of many indigenous peoples.
The Soul
Hellinger’s use of the term “soul” is bound to be confusing to those who are not familiar with his work.
For Hellinger, the soul is neither the Christian soul that may achieve salvation,
nor the Hindu Atman that carries karma through multiple reincarnations,
nor the scientific soul-mind that is not a soul at all, only the accumulation of identity and awareness content
produced by cellular activity in the body.
Hellinger’s main point of departure is his questioning whether the soul is indeed something personal.
Both Western religion and psychology begin with the individual.
The Western concept of the soul emerged from early Greek philosophy and while it has furcated through
Judeo-Christian-Islamic theology and the past 400 years of scientific understanding of the physical universe,
it has basically retained it essential function.
The concept of soul exists to mediate the collision between our irresistible will to live forever
and the immutable inevitability of death. The common myth, to both the theist who believes the immortal soul
survives the body and the atheist who insists that death is the extinguishment of all personal identify,
is that the human being exists as an “I.”
Hellinger served as a Catholic priest among the South African Zulus for 16 years.
He came away with another view of the soul, one that is shared in similar form in Taoism, Vajrayna Buddhism,
and the oral traditions of native peoples in the Americas and Africa.
These views have been confirmed by his observation of thousands of group processes
where representatives tune in to deeper forces.
He writes, “When we look objectively it becomes clear that it is not we who possess a soul
but rather a soul which possesses us; and that the soul is not there to serve us but rather
that we are in the service of the soul” (Hellinger, 2003).
In this view, the individual is not an independent entity but more like “links in a long chain connecting
all those who have lived and will live, and those living now, as if we were all part of one life and one soul.
Therefore soul reaches beyond us into another space: into our families, into larger groups and into the world
as a whole” (Hellinger, 2002).
Conscience
In Jewish and Christian theology, and Western philosophy more generally, conscience is seen as a regulator of ethical values
and behavior. A good conscience acts upon the soul to encourage righteousness, leading ultimately to the soul’s salvation.
Conversely, a bad or guilty conscience is the product of thoughts and deeds that are against God’s beneficence.
If not atoned, confessed or absolved, the corrosive effects of a bad conscience lead to the eternal damnation of the soul.
In scientific psychology, conscience serves a similar purpose, to regulate in favor of behaviors
that support mutual survival and to make taboo those behaviors which society and culture have determined
to be destructive or evil. With or without a soul, conscience is seen as an internal driver that praises
what is good and discourages what is bad.
Having grown up in Nazi Germany and experienced war as both a soldier and P.O.W.,
Hellinger was unable to reconcile these views with his observation that the worst atrocities
were committed by people acting in good conscience.
If the soul was analogous to a web of connectedness that contained and moved its individual members,
then conscience must serve another function.
After many years of looking at the function and purpose of conscience in his practice as a psychotherapist,
Hellinger came to understand that there are three layers of conscience: a personal conscience that people can feel;
a systemic conscience that operates below the threshold of conscious awareness; and, a conscience of the Greater Whole
which always wills to bring together what was previously seperated. Further, the systemic conscience, while inexorably
persuasive, is completely unconcerned with matters of good and evil.
Hellinger has written extensively on this topic.
The following excerpts expand and contextualize his spoken words at the Fordham seminar.
“Our conscience demands that we serve and remain subservient to our group,
and it forbids anything that endangers its welfare or severs us from it.
The consciences of people who come from different families or different groups react differently
according to the different values of each different group, for that which benefits one group may harm another,
and that which makes us innocent in the context of one group may make us guilty in another.
“But even within one group, conscience serves goals that both complement and contradict each other,
for example love and justice, or freedom and the law.
“Conscience uses different feelings of guilt and innocence for each of these different purposes.
Thus our experience of guilt and innocence in the service of love and loyalty is different from our
experience of guilt and innocence in the service of justice and compensation.
That which serves love may be damaging to justice and the just person’s
innocence may be the lover’s guilt” (Hellinger, 2001).
“Conscience ties us most firmly to our group when we are most powerless and vulnerable.
As we gain power in a group both bonding and conscience relax, but if we remain weak and dependent,
we also remain obedient and loyal. In families, children occupy this position, in an army, the enlisted soldiers,
in a church, the faithful congregation.
"For the good of the stronger,
they all conscientiously risk health, happiness, and life and make themselves guilty –
even when their leaders, for what are called ‘higher purposes,’ unscrupulously misuse them.
These are the meek who stick out their necks for the stronger, the hangmen doing other’s dirty work,
unsung heroes holding their positions to the last, sheep faithfully following their Shepard to the slaughter,
victims paying restitution. These are the children who leap into the fray for their parents and relatives,
who carry out what they didn’t plan, atone for what they didn’t do, and bear burdens they didn’t create” (Hellinger, 1998).
“Whenever conscience acting in the service of belonging binds us to one another in a group,
it also drives us to exclude those who are different and to deny them the right to the membership we claim for ourselves.
Then we become frightening for them.
The conscience guarding our belonging guides us to do to those who are different what we most fear
as the worst consequence of guilt – we exclude them.
But as we treat them badly in good conscience, so do they in turn treat us in the name of the conscience of their group.
"Conscience inhibits evil within the group, but lifts this inhibition in regard to those outside the group.
We then do to others in good conscience what is forbidden within our own group.
In the context of religious, racial, and national conflicts, suspending the inhibitions on evil allows members
of one group to commit, in good conscience, atrocities and murder against others.
"Thus guilt and innocence are not the same as good and evil.
We do destructive and evil things with a clear conscience when they serve the groups that are necessary for our survival,
and we take constructive action with a guilty conscience when these acts jeopardize
our membership in these same groups” (Hellinger, 1998).
Love and Forgiveness
Forgiveness processes are commonly used by professionals working to heal the wounds resulting
from ethnic conflicts and trauma.
Similarly, many spiritual leaders and teachers deliver messages advocating love, kindness and hope
as an antidote to the hatred, antipathy and fear that seems to motivate warring parties.
One the attendees at this lecture commented afterwards that he appreciated Hellinger’s
“emphasis on universal love and forgiveness.”
In creating the transcript, I confirmed that contrary to this man’s impressions,
Hellinger emphasized neither of these principles.
The excerpts below express Hellinger’s stance on these subjects.
“I’ve been interested in understanding forgiveness for a long time.
I’ve made some surprising observations and had some important insights.
Contrary to what we usually believe, we may not ask for forgiveness, and no one has the power to forgive us even
if we do ask for it. Forgiveness creates an inequality between the person who forgives and the person who is forgiven.
Instead, when the one expresses genuine remorse, they remain on an equal footing” (Hellinger, 2001).
“Forgiveness carries particularly bad consequences if the victim absolves the guilty party of their guilt,
as if this was the victim’s right.
"There is a forgiveness that is positive.
It preserves the dignity of the guilty person and also the victim.
This kind of forgiveness requires that the injured party does not make inappropriate demands
and that she accepts a reasonable compensation.
No reconciliation is possible without such forgiveness” (Hellinger, 2002a).
Regarding love, Hellinger sees its presence in both the best and worst of human behavior.
Love is an expression of connection, whether it heals or destroys.
The risk in espousing universal love is it assumes that the person who loves greatly is somehow superior to the
person who loves poorly. Hellinger cautions against such presumptuousness.
There are many different expressions of love.
Love transforms the victims in one generation into the perpetrators of the next.
Love drives children to sacrifice themselves in the magical belief that doing so can save their parents.
Love splits marriages apart when one partner leaves to fulfill an irrepressible urge to remain loyal to an
excluded member of the family system. Love is at the root of addictions and many physical illnesses of the body.
“The love that reconciles is a special love, above and beyond a love that strives for something.
Here, love means the recognition that we are equals before a greater power.
Humility means the same thing. Forgiving and forgetting also” (Hellinger, 2003).
Peace
Hellinger gives no suggestion that he is holding out for a Messianic or Aquarian resolution to the problem of war.
He views peace, not as the elimination of conflict, but as a way of addressing conflict without escalating
disagreements and competitions between peoples into catastrophe.
In integrating his views on the soul, conscience, and reconciliation, he says that peace begins
in one’s own soul when all that we have previously judged, regretted, and repressed in ourselves takes
its rightful place next to all we have embraced. “This demands of us that we leave the ideal of innocence behind.
Innocence neither challenges, nor supports, and prefers suffering to acting.
It prefers to remain a child rather than grow up” (Hellinger, 2003).
“If we agree to everything that is within us, then we find peace of mind.
If we don't object to anything that is within us, we have peace of mind.
And if we agree to everything within our families, to our parents, to our siblings, to our ancestors,
to our fates, then we have peace of mind. If nothing is opposed to anything, we have peace of mind.
“If we have peace of mind, we have peace with our family as well.
If you have children and you agree to them as they are, exactly as they are,
to their particular fates, to their difficulties, their talents, their special love, you have peace in the family.
“If you agree to your partner in this way, as he or she is, without any wish to have him or her change,
you have peace of mind. And if you have to deal with other groups that sometimes seem to be difficult or to be opposing you,
and you agree to them as they are, exactly as they are, you become irresistible.
“Of course, you can extend this attitude to different races, to different religions,
to different nations. If you agree to all of them as they are, exactly as they are, there is no opposition anymore.
You are at peace with them and they, certainly, come to be at peace with you and us" (Hellinger, 2001a).
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