Family Constellations: Bert Hellinger Quotes

“The past is not past.  It has effects in the present in many different ways. When there is something that needs to be brought into order in the present, you need to look into the past to be brought into order in the present, you need to look into the past at what has happened. Only when the past is put in order are the living free.

On the other hand, when we do a constellation of what has been left unfinished from the past and when we find a resolution with full respect for the dead, there is also an effect on the dead. They can more easily find their peace. Therefore, this work serves the dead as well as the living.”

Bert Hellinger, Peace Begins in the Soul (2009 - original edition 2003), page 147.

“The family group ‘re-members’ the excluded, the ignored, the forgotten, the unrecognized, the dead. When a legitimate member of the group is shut out, someone is a later generation must compensate for the injustice by suffering a similar injustice. The persons drafted for this service don’t choose their fate. In fact, they usually don’t even notice what’s happening and can’t defend themselves against it. They relive the fate of the excluded person, and recreate the person’s experience, complete with the guilt, the innocence, and all the other feelings that belong to that experience.”
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Bert Hellinger with Gunthard Weber and Hunter Beaumont, Loves Hidden Symmetry: What Makes Love Work in Relationships, (1998), 164.

“When the love that binds together the individual members of family operates blindly, it demands blind obedience, and unless individual members gain insight into its dynamic and transform it, they unknowingly submit to the laws of blind justice—an eye for eye and a tooth for tooth. Then the damage is passed from one generation to the next, and the extended family finds no peace.” 

Bert Hellinger with Gunthard Weber and Hunter Beaumont, Loves Hidden Symmetry: What Makes Love Work in Relationships, (1998), 161.

“I open myself to a situation in darkness, not knowing what is going on. The question is: How do I get to a truth concealed in darkness? I dive into a flowing field; I become part of it, and it reaches out beyond. Things move in the field, some into area of light, revealing something of what IS. I open myself to that and wait for something to come to me. An image for this process is: I feel my way in darkness along walls until I find a door. When I find a place of light, I try to describe what is illuminating me with a word that is full and ripe. When the right word is found, those for whom it came grasp it at a level beyond rational thought. The right word touches and moves them, even when they don’t understand how.”

Bert Hellinger with Gunthard Weber and Hunter Beaumont, Loves Hidden Symmetry: What Makes Love Work in Relationships, (1998), page viii.

A solution brings with it a feeling of being unburdened, of peace and contentment. In a family constellation, one can actually see a family system change and the family find tranquility when an excluded member is returned to a respected place in the family, and order and full membership are achieved."

​Bert Hellinger with Gunthard Weber and Hunter Beaumont, Loves Hidden Symmetry: What Makes Love Work in Relationships, (1998), page 170.

“From a systemic point of view, problems are unsuccessful attempts to love, and the love that maintains the problem can be redirected to resolve it. The therapeutic task is, first of all, to find the point at which the client loves. When I have found that point, then I have therapeutic leverage. By helping the client find an appropriate and mature way to love, the problem dissolves, and the same love that maintained the problem solves it." 

"As a rule, problems are described in such a way as to avoid a solution. That’s why I don’t need to hear all of the description of the problems from people in a group; they’re certainly false. If they had the correct description, they wouldn’t be taking about their problem anymore. The correct description of a problem contains the resolution to the problem."

Bert Hellinger with Gunthard Weber and Hunter Beaumont, Loves Hidden Symmetry: What Makes Love Work in Relationships, (1998), page 220.

“Conscience ties us most firmly to our group when we are most powerless and vulnerable. As we gain power in a group and independence, 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 a company, the lower employees; in an army the enlisted men; in a church, the faithful congregation. For the good of the stronger in the group, they all conscientiously risk health, happiness and life and make themselves guilty - even when their leaders, for what is called ‘high purposes,’ unscrupulously misuse them......These are the children who leap into the fray for their parents and relatives, who carry out that which they didn’t plan, atone, for what they did’t do, and bear burdens they didn’t create. “
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Bert Hellinger with Gunthard Weber and Hunter Beaumont, Love’s Hidden Symmetry What Makes Love Work in Relationships, (1998), Page 9.

“What he found was this: If you want love to flourish, you need to do what is demands and to refrain from doing what harms it. Love follows the order of the hidden Greater Soul. The therapeutic work documented in this book shows what happens when we injure love or ignore what it requires. It also shows the healing that happens when our intimate relationships are restored to order. It reveals how children’s innocent love blindly perpetuates what’s harmful, and how injuries to the Orders of Love by earlier members of a family affect the lives of later members, just as waves and ripples in a river caused by a submerged boulder upstream still twist and swell far downstream.”

Bert Hellinger with Gunthard Weber and Hunter Beaumont, Loves Hidden Symmetry: What Makes Love Work in Relationships, (1998), x.

"In family constellations, the work of reconciliation begins in the individual soul and in the family. When reconciliation is achieved there, it can spread to larger groups and contexts. Therefore, we have to remain modest and aware of our limitations when doing family constellations. A deep and lasting peace is beyond the reach of our good intentions. When it occurs, we experience it as a gift."
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Bert Hellinger, Peace Begins in the Soul, (2009) page 12.

“The Orders of Love aren’t rigid structures. They’re always changing; they’re different from moment to moment. There’s something richly varied in them, a profound abundance that we can glimpse for only a brief moment. That’s the reason why every family constellation is different, even when the issues in the families are similar. When I recognize that an order is a certain way, then I say what I see. Some people who are accustomed to thinking in terms of “true” or “false” or “right” or “wrong” have tendency to hear what I say as a statement about a general truth. It’s not! It’s only a recognition of the truth that could be glimpsed in a certain moment. It applies only to that moment, and in that moment, it has full truth. If someone isolates what I’ve seen from its momentary context and makes a general principle out of it, then it appears dogmatic. But others do that with what I say – I don’t.”
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Bert Hellinger with Gunthard Weber and Hunter Beaumont, Loves Hidden Symmetry: What Makes Love Work in Relationships, (1998), page 91.

“Illnesses very often are connected to the fate of another member of the family that has been excluded or forgotten. Health on the other hand, is restored when this excluded person is welcomed back into the family. Illness results when one person becomes entangled with the fate of another family member, who might have died generations before. Thus, health is made possible when the neglected family member is recieved back into the family with love and when reconciliations with that person has been achieved.”
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Bert Hellinger, “Spirtual Dimensions of Illness and Health”, Messagers of Healing: The Family Constellations of Bert Helliger Through the Eyes of a New Generation of Practitioners, Edited by J. Edward Lynch and Suzi Tucker, (2005) page 269-270.

“When I work with a family, I confront them as they are, without any intension, even the intension of helping. And without fearing the consequences of what I may say or do. Because I withdraw so completely, I am able to see where it is leading. At the same time, I am restricted too. But this is a phenomenological way of working. It does not rely on any theory, or an earlier experience, but rather on a willingness to deal only with the moment And that is very difficult because each therapy represents a new risk."
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Bert Hellinger, No Waves Without the Ocean: Experience and Thoughts, (2006), page 23.

“With phenomenological truth it is completely different. This sort of truth emerges briefly, in the way we have often seen it here. Something comes to light and one perceives a glow. But alas, when one reaches out to grasp hold of it, it disappears in a trice. The desire to work through an issue is actually a desire to hold onto an old truth. Likewise, the fear of what may be revealed is a desire to hold onto an old truth, although of a different sort. In this case one wants the glow to go away. If I take a phenomenological stance, however, the truth can come as it will. I will look at it, bow down before it and let it go. It is far more effective than if I talk about it. It is simply there and then gone again.”
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Bert Hellinger, No Waves Without the Ocean: Experience and Thoughts, (2006), page 22.

“An identification can be resolved when younger persons who are repeating the fate of earlier persons realize what the problem is, Then they can look at the shut-out person, or stand by that person and give him or her a loving place in their hearts. This love creates a relationship and then the excluded person becomes a friend, a guardian angel, a source of support."

Bert Hellinger with Gunthard Weber and Hunter Beaumont, Loves Hidden Symmetry: What Makes Love Work in Relationships, (1998), 169.

"Rupert Sheldrake speaks of morphogenetic fields, by which he means that particular patterns, which have established themselves in the past, continue to compel family members and are thus repeated. He views the natural laws in this way, as memories of the time when an organism first developed. These memories continue to have resonance to work and repeat themselves. It is probably also true in families that particular patterns repeat themselves. There is no impulse from the forcefield to break through them. In order to break through it is necessary to step outside the field, perhaps to place oneself on a more elevated level from which one can courageously confront and embrace what is new.”

Bert Hellinger, No Waves without the Ocean: Experience and Thoughts, (2006), page, 174.

“A family constellation is a result of a phenomenological stance. A phenomenological stance means, philosophically speaking, that a person holds herself back and is without intention, without fear and without wish to help someone else. The constellation unfolds in front of the therapist; something happens outside of the therapist. By holding back she does not engage with it.  It is this way of holding back that creates the space in which decisive movements can come to light. The representatives move under the influence of the soul and find solutions that lie outside the influence of the therapist who basically doesn’t need to do anything. She isn’t passive, however.  She is not passive, however. In holding back she is completely present and so sees when it is appropriate to intervene and does so. One also withdraws and clearly gives space to whatever arises of its own accord. “

​Bert Hellinger, No Waves without the Ocean: Experience and Thoughts, (2006), page 175.

“When the objectives of a child’s love and the means to achieve them are brought to light, they lose their magical powers because they are rooted in magical beliefs that cannot survive in the adult world. The love, however, endures. More discriminating when combined with reason, the very same love that once caused illness now seeks a different enlightened solution, and it it still possible, to fulfill the goals of love, making illness unnecessary."

Bert Hellinger, Loves Own Truths: Bonding and Balancing in Close Relationships (2001), page 317.