Family Constellation Therapy Criticism: How the Work Has Changed Since Bert Hellinger

17 Oct Family Constellation Therapy Criticism: How the Work Has Changed Since Bert Hellinger

When Systemic Family Constellation landed in Europe, brought by the godfather of this work, Bert Hellinger, from the Zulu community in South Africa, it was done with one aim in mind: that this work needs to help people by not only looking through the lens of the personal experience and the personal system, but the whole family system in the person’s life.

It looks for the entanglements and traumas, the secret loyalties, the orders of love. And if they are not running in the natural flow, then the entanglements can last up to seven generations before they naturally dissolve in the system.

This new way to look at the therapeutic approach was absolutely mind blowing, and people started to resonate with that very fast.

Why family constellation therapy landed so fast

Systemic Family Constellation showed that it is not a cognitive therapy. Things don’t necessarily have to make sense. What’s important is that what’s happening in the therapy lands on the issue holder, aka the client’s body. Does it shift something, does it move, does it talk to the body directly? It is not meant to be a therapy where the head needs to convince the body how to feel. It is almost as if the head, which is the middleman, was cut off, and we went directly into the source of the entanglement.

The principles have not changed, the delivery has

Over the last 30 years this work has been developed since Bert Hellinger was bringing it to our lens. But what is fascinating is that, like every therapeutic approach and every new system, the work is evolving. So what have the last 30 years been bringing, and how much have the systems, the way we are doing this work, actually changed?

Although the principles of this work, their absolute foundation, have not much changed, the way we do this work has had a fundamental change.

The criticism of Bert Hellinger nobody dares to say

Bert Hellinger as the godfather of this work has been praised and held up with a huge amount of positivity, and I almost feel that no one dares to say that his original tactics, compared to our today’s understanding, were not actually the correct ones.

One thing which I have noticed over the years, working with some facilitators who were trained by Hellinger himself, was that type of what I will describe as tough love. And I understand entirely why. Because the only way to make a difference in this work is when we are staring at the absolute truth in the system, and not at any political correctness or ethics or how it should be morally correct. We need to look at the truth, even if the truth is extremely inconvenient or extremely incorrect morally.

But the key distinction has to be how we deliver this therapy. We can seek the truth without offering the tough, tough love.

Is family constellation therapy safe? Trauma is real, and we know that now

One of the wonderful things which has been attached to this work by those facilitators who have been properly trained, and very often people who have a psychotherapeutic training in the background, is that we understand now the importance of trauma in this work, and that the work itself can cause retraumatisation or new traumatisation.

We need to ensure that if this work is giving us information, then not only have the issue holders been dealt with sensitively, but even the people who come to the workshop to support others have their safety reassured by the facilitator.

A workshop I have not forgotten

I remember being in one of the workshops run by one of the facilitators originally trained by Hellinger, and as the workshop developed it was obvious that the issue holder was in a deep victimhood position, and the facilitator had the aim to get the issue holder out of this.

What she did, even though the issue holder was already in tears, her voice severely shaking, lying on the floor, was that the facilitator started to shout at her, asking her to repeat, “this is my fault”. And then, when the issue holder repeated it, the facilitator shouted even harder, “I can’t hear you, tell them, tell them loud, this is my fault”, which ended up with the issue holder getting even more anxiety and starting to cry her eyes out.

Although I can see that the intention was very good, in my opinion these kinds of approaches are absolutely unacceptable, because they can really lead people into tapping into the trauma, or into a newly experienced traumatisation.

A remark attributed to Hellinger

Another example of Bert Hellinger’s own approach was once when a constellation took place in front of a huge audience, with a thousand people in a conference hall. One of the audience members who was handed the microphone said to Bert Hellinger that she had come into existence because her mother was raped, so her father was the rapist. She literally came into this world as a result of the trauma.

Hellinger, after thinking for a few minutes in silence, looked at her and replied, “how lucky for you that your mother got raped”.

I must say clearly that I am repeating this from hearsay. I have absolutely no evidence that this actually took place, but it comes from a very trusted source, a person who was there and who I know well.

Now this is a very big thing to analyse. The reality of the situation is that, although Hellinger was pointing at something true, even though it breaks every single moral barrier here, the issue is that saying something out loud like this can really feel like a kick in the teeth to many. I am not asking the facilitator just to sugarcoat it, but sometimes some things can be left unsaid, or they can be done in a much more sensitive way.

Thirty years on, family constellation therapy is still not regulated

I also realised that this work is still, 30 years later, not regulated by any authority. On the one hand that is wonderful, because it gives huge freedom not to be limited by guidelines that sometimes do not deserve to be there. But what we could also say is that this allows any Joe to walk into the room and claim that they are a facilitator.

If the person is not properly trained, or even if the authority of the training needs to be looked at from a different point of view, are they capable? Because lots of even the people who are trained don’t understand trauma, and sometimes don’t even have the basic understanding of what we are actually doing there.

The individual lens or the family lens

There are some well known facilitators, even in the UK, who are claiming that the whole healing of the system is all about the person’s own system, whilst the Hellinger trained therapeutic world holds the completely opposite view, which is that it is not an individual, it is the family systemic lens, and we need to make sure that we are not only seeing it from the small microscopic individual point of view.

Although the truth is that if the issue holder individually doesn’t land what the system shows, then the whole exercise is pointless. Because we are not trying to heal the whole family system, we are only trying to heal the lens of the issue holder, but we must always do that from the whole family lens as a whole, not the individual.

The hardest example: when a mother chose

The old system, for example, treats the women who had to make a decision about abortion as though this is their fault, that they made this decision. It has been encouraged to say to a woman who had an abortion that she should tell the lost child in the constellation that this was my choice and my fault, and I will live with this guilt for the rest of my life.

Which is, in my opinion, absolute absurdness, and can be extremely insensitive when we are talking to a client who has already had a massive cost in their life. No mother will make such a huge choice in her life if she did not know that there are very serious reasons behind it. To start blaming them for that is absolutely unacceptable, and that is not the truth. We need to recognise the bravery of the cost the mother must carry, to step against every maternal instinct.

And although this is a controversial thing to say, choosing abortion is sometimes the greatest act of love.

So what I am trying to say here is that, although we are tapping into the truth, the truth can be dealt with with kindness, and it can be honoured from a sensitive place. We are not brushing away the truth, but we also need to understand what the people who are in this work are going through. They have been dragged through the mud, and they are at the end of the day still human beings. We need to be kind to them.

A family constellation facilitator is not a guru

We must also understand that the facilitators are not some sort of geniuses or gurus. They should never, ever think that they know what is happening with the issue holder. They must only read what the field is showing and what the work is showing to them.

If the work doesn’t go by the narrative of the facilitator, and then they start to push their narrative, then this is not a constellation. This is a theatrical show, which is already a failure.

Where that leaves us

So we are lucky that we have this work in our lives. But we are also lucky that the leading issues have been left to Hellinger’s generation to deal with, and that we have come to the times when we can now tap into this work with the dignity of kindness, realising that trauma is a very real thing, and that we have to understand how trauma works if we do this work.

Frequently asked questions

Is family constellation therapy safe?

We understand now the importance of trauma in this work, and that the work itself can cause retraumatisation or new traumatisation. Not only should the issue holders be dealt with sensitively, but even the people who come to the workshop to support others should have their safety reassured by the facilitator.

What is the main criticism of Bert Hellinger’s approach?

A style I describe as tough love. The only way to make a difference in this work is to stare at the absolute truth in the system, but the key distinction has to be how we deliver this therapy. We can seek the truth without offering the tough, tough love.

Is family constellation therapy regulated in the UK?

No. This work is still, 30 years later, not regulated by any authority. That gives huge freedom, but it also allows any Joe to walk into the room and claim that they are a facilitator.

How has family constellation work changed since Bert Hellinger?

The principles of this work, their absolute foundation, have not much changed, but the way we do this work has had a fundamental change, above all in our understanding of trauma and how sensitively the truth needs to be delivered.

What should a family constellation facilitator never do?

Facilitators should never, ever think that they know what is happening with the issue holder. They must only read what the field is showing. If they start to push their own narrative, then this is not a constellation, it is a theatrical show.

If you would like to experience family constellation therapy held with this kind of care, you can book a one to one session.

Ivo U. Aulik

Certified Systemic Family Constellation Facilitator

Although Ivo’s journey started in 2015 with studies in psychology at UCL, his four years of training with the Centre for Systemic Constellations was the pillar of his education in systemic family constellation therapy. Ivo has been practising since 2021, with hundreds of clients including A-list celebrities, CEOs of some of the largest companies in the world, and many well-known politicians. However, status means nothing in this work, and every client is treated exactly the same.

More about Ivo