Cologne, May 2007
I would like to start this talk by thanking the organizers for inviting me to speak here today, and by thanking everybody here in the room for choosing this particular presentation. I hope my words will be inspiring to you and that you will not regret choosing this meeting over another. Let me begin by quoting some of the words that the organizers of the conference have used in their invitation:
‘Up until now, the sharing has been rather one-sided: German constellators, headed by Bert Hellinger, travelled around the globe in order to demonstrate the work and pass it on in training courses. It is becoming obvious that, we, too can learn a lot from our international colleagues who introduce the knowledge of their cultures of origin to the work.’ They continue and mention “the pooling of diverse cultural wisdom, of different view points, of different approaches to constellation work and combining the latter with other paths of healing.”
In other words, the organizers have asked directly for feedback from?their non-German colleagues. It is wonderful to be invited, as a?non-German constellation leader, to add a non-German perspective to the?body of knowledge we are all developing together. I am aware that the organizers have put themselves (and indirectly all German constellation leaders) in a vulnerable position by their direct invitation, and I pray that my words will not be in any way taken as provocative or offensive, even when I may seem to be challenging paradigms of constellation work that are seen by some as universal laws that can and should be applied everywhere.
Let me say just a few words about my own background and my place in the constellation landscape. I have been a student and teacher of shamanism for more than twenty years and I have had traditional teachers of various shamanic cultures. In tribal societies, the ancestors are an important and living presence, and through the contact with my shamanic teachers, my own Jewish ancestors became a living presence for me. A little less than ten years ago I go to know Bert Hellinger’s
constellations. In my work, which I do in many different countries and cultures, I use a combination of shamanic principles of healing, prayers and songs that grow out of my Jewish roots, and the older style of constellation work (which includes the use of healing sentences and many direct interventions from the facilitator.)
The family constellations will probably be forever connected to the name of Bert Hellinger. It is he who assembled various already existing methods (such as Virginia Satir’s work with families through representing family members) and in doing so he created what we now call ‘family constellations’. Bert Hellinger’s magic ingredient in his cocktail of already existing elements, has been his insight in the dynamic of belonging. Hellinger’s observations about good and evil and the workings of conscience are in themselves not unique. For example, Hannah Arendt already developed similar lines of thought. But, it is Hellinger who brought them down to their essence and crystalized them into a form which could be understood and digested by all.
Bert Hellinger is a German man, while he developed the constellations he was working in Germany, and he developed the constellations for the benefit of a German audience. The key elements of the work in those early years of expansion in Germany were a few sets of polarities: belonging versus not belonging, good versus evil, guilt versus innocence. It is my guess, and of course you are free to agree with this or not, that one of the reasons why the early type of family constellations became so popular was because they offered a new perspective on the legacy of the Hitler dictatorship.
Germany, first just the Bundes Republik Deutschland and now the greater Germany which has been united with the former DDR, has chosen an unusual strategy, and is doing its best to face up to its guilt. Maybe we can say that constellations were developed as a way to deal with the collective guilt, to touch guilt, to bring it down to its real proportions, to digest it. Bert Hellinger was able to shed light on some important dynamics that were not recognized earlier, and another layer of the past could be integrated.
When a culture is trying to come to terms with its past, either by defending against it, by looking at it directly or by doing both at the same time, that culture will have different needs at different times during that long process. Wherever the constellation work is taken, it will arrive in a place where people are dealing with the effects of collective trauma. And in each place the local population tries to come to terms with what has happened, and has to find a place for the victims and the perpetrators of the past. These will be given a place either openly in the light or they will be hidden in the shadow zones. In the early years of the constellations, representatives of nazis were often sent out of the room by Bert Hellinger. Later, they were allowed to stay. The development of constellations has gone, and will still go, through different phases in regards victims and perpetrators. The specific strategies and solutions will differ from place to place, from time to time, and they keep changing. And so, the methods we use to look at the past must also necessarily differ from place to place, from group to group, and from time to time.
Family constellations are based on a whole set of paradigms about certain orders between people, for example the orders based on age, the orders based on generations that follow each other, and the orders between victim and perpetrator. These orders will necessarily reflect something of the German context in which they were formulated. Students of the constellation method will learn, for example, that children should not try and fix something for their parents. Children should stay small, and confirm to their parents that they just take, and that the parents give. There may be a reflection in this of the traditionally authoritarian German approach to eduction and child rearing. However, in my experience we should not always discard the impulse in the child's soul to reach out and help an adult, be it their own parent or not. Such an impulse can be born out of genuine empathy and can lead to healing.
Recently I was leading a seminar about the colonial past of the Netherlands, specifically about the former Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. For hundreds of years, the East Indies were the most important and the biggest colony of the Dutch, who planted their flag there in the early sixteen hundreds. During the second world war, the Japanese invaded the Dutch colony, and imprisoned all whites and many people of mixed blood in concentrations camps. Many people did not survive, specially in the men’s camps where the prisoners were simply worked to death. When the Japanese were defeated in 1945, they left a power vacuum and the struggle for independence started, with many dead on both sides. I have started a series of seminars for people who have
a direct family link to the former colony, and among the participants are many people who were in the Japanese concentration camps as children. Most of them share, as adults, feelings of being stupid and inferior, of being incapable of acting in a meaningful way or making independent choices. One of the participants described how she, as a young girl, had to stand on a role call together with all other prisoners to watch a woman, standing alone in the hot sunlight. The woman had been beaten by the Japanese for doing something wrong, and was bleeding. For the girl who was forced to witness this, it had been a traumatizing event. Whenever she thought back of this experience, she experienced feelings of isolation, powerlessness and despair.
I asked her to chose a representative for the bleeding woman, whom I put in the middle of the room. Then I asked her to pick someone for a Japanese guard, whom I put a few meters away from the first representative. Finally I asked her to chose two more people: one for herself, and one for her soul. I asked the soul of the woman to go to the Japanese guard and tell him: “In the past you forced me to watch this bleeding woman in the blistering sun. There was nothing I could do
then. Now, we are in the world of dream and the world of the soul, and I am with you again in the camp. But today I am free, and I can pass you by. In the past you did not allow me to do it, but now I will go and touch the woman you punished.” The soul of the client was calm and centered, she had the strength to say this. The representative of the client herself however was crying fearfully as she watched her soul talking to the Japanese guard. I chose a representative for her adult, mature strength to stand next to her. This helped her and she regained strength.
Then the soul went on, and she approached the representative of the bleeding woman, who was standing there alone, trembling. “For sixty years, I have remembered you. When I saw you in the physical world, long ago, we were all powerless. I am the soul of a little girl who saw you standing there alone, and today I visit you again, in the world of dreams – and I find you here. For sixty years, you have been frozen here on role call, bleeding in the sun while the other prisoners had to watch you. I have come to pray for you today, and to touch you, and to let you know that I remember you.”
The bleeding woman started crying, and the soul of the client said: “I will take you out of the nightmare now”. We added family members of the woman, and the soul of the client took her to her family. I also added family members of the Japanese guard, and he was also allowed to leave
the camp and return to his loved ones. Finally, the soul united with the client, who had been a witness to it all, we ended the constellation.
Some days later I talked to the client, who told me that her feelings of powerlessness are no longer overwhelming, that instead of a sense of isolation, she now experiences empathy and contact when she thinks back of the lone woman in the sun. It is lighter for her, and she experiences a sense of opening. The impulse of a young child to reach out and do something, but not being able to do so, was finally honored after sixty years, and it lead to a healing movement. By allowing her soul to pray for someone in need, my client found a kind of completeness and the memory lost its obsessive quality.
In many constellations, I will ask the representatives to say that they are acting in the world of dreams, or the world of spirit, or the world of the soul. For people in so many cultures, the world of the dream is where healing happens: it is in dreams that you meet the dead and hold them, it is in dreams that you re-visit the past and repair it, it is in dreams, that you receive spiritual power and guidance. It is a powerful intervention to define the constellation as a waking dream, as a visit to a world where linear time does not exist in which we can change and heal. For me, the constellation is not a therapeutic method, it is a ritual in which we are dreaming together.
Many constellation leaders put a strong emphasis on the meeting between victim and perpetrator in constellations. I also use this image sometimes, as you could see in the example of the Japanese concentration camp, where both the prisoner and a guard were represented. But I do not always bring victim and perpetrator together in a constellation, and when I do include both parties in the field, I do not always encourage a direct exchange. A lot depends on the circumstances.
I was working for a Jewish community somewhere. As could be expected, several of the participants wanted to look at issues regarding their murdered relatives. The first constellation I did, was for two sisters whose four grandparents had been killed by the einzatsgruppen,(????)
the killing squads that travelled through the eastern invaded territories during the first years of the war. The parents of the sisters had been on a study trip in the USA during the start of the war, and they had stayed there during the war years. After the war, not a single family member was left alive. I placed the two sisters themselves in the constellation and asked them to choose representatives for their parents, their grandparents and some of their ancestors from the times before the war. It was a very touching and very difficult constellation: the sisters wanted to look at their grandparents but their parents could not permit this at first, it was too painful for them. In the end, there was a meeting of the three generations and the ancestors, and a very deep shared grief which touched all the people in the room. The parents of the sisters could finally say goodbye to their own murdered parents and gave them into the hands of their ancestors.
For this family, at that particular moment in time, it would have been traumatizing to bring in the murderers. The two sisters and their parents needed to reclaim their dead relatives for themselves, they needed to face them, to touch them, to kiss them, to cry with them and to take them back into their own arms. The dead grandparents needed to be given a place back in their own families, by their own descendants. I work regularly for Jewish groups and I know from experience that I
should be very very careful to add the nazi’s to a constellation where family members look at their murdered relatives for the very first time. It would not have helped this family to leave their dead in the presence of their killers, it would just have given them more nightmares.
Coming back for a moment to the issue of collective guilt as a factor in the development of family constellations, I can see how the image of a victim and perpetrator that reach some kind of understanding might have a calming or healing effect on those who belong to the perpetrators system or collective. The need of the perpetrators tribe for some kind of reconciliation, which may be individual or cultural in origin, is absolutely understandable. But it can not be demanded of the
victim’s family system to engage in such encounters. Most German constellation leaders will automatically add the murderers to a constellation that includes victims of the war. Of course they do! They should! German culture is still figuring out how to include the nazi’s, it is still trying to find the right place for them. But, the families of the nazi’s victims usually have other priorities. They are still trying to find a way to integrate their missing and their dead. During this part of the healing process, the presence of outsiders can be disturbing. And it is not just so when it concerns the nazi’s and their victims, but everywhere where one group of people has victimized another.
Of course, many Jews and other victims of persecution or collective violence have found healing in constellations that include the perpetrators. This meeting can sometimes be an extraordinary powerful and healing intervention. But, it is my opinion that we should realistically assess what is needed at a certain moment in time, and not automatically work from fixed models when it concerns victims and perpetrators. All of us need to be aware of our cultural needs and biasses, and constantly remember that what works for us is not necessarily always the best solution for the other.
Western people base their identity on a strong sense of individuality, but people in many other cultures base their identity more on a sense of ‘we’ than ‘I’. For a western individual it may be relatively easy to talk openly about things that have gone wrong in the family, but for
people in many other cultures this is not possible. You bring shame on your family by exposing what has been going on behind closed doors. I could give many more examples of attitudes and communication styles that are completely normal in western culture but which are not completely normal in other parts of the world. All of this asks for adjustments of the constellation style.
Recently I worked for a man whose father's family is descending of the Native people from the Córdoba region in Argentina. Their ancestors belonged to the Co-me-chin-gones, who, as an independent culture were extinguished by the Spanish. But not all of them died, and their
descendants are alive today. The client himself told me he had a daughter he did not know, and that his father did not know his father. Maybe a constellation leader who works only with western European clients would ask questions here. Why? How? Who was involved? What happened exactly? Such questions are not necessarily appropriate when you want to invite Native American ancestors in the room. When the ancestors come from a culture with a very strong cultural emphasis on the collective, questions about individual suffering and failure are not helpful. In this cases like this, you have to find a solution that is based on a sense of collective experience.
One of the basic strategies of the colonial powers, was to separate the Native men from their women and children. When the men are not able to protect their families anymore, something breaks in them. Then, many of them become a destructive force in their own communities. We see this in many places where the colonial legacy is strong. In south Africa, for example, many black men were forced to work in mines for long periods of time, far away from their families. When they came home, their pride and dignity was broken, and they became violent and abusive towards their own wives and children. We see this also within the African American communities in the USA, where many boys grow up without a father. These men are not dependable, they are no longer able
to protect and support the family. In the USA, this pattern started in the times of slavery, when families of slaves were often taken apart. You see related patterns in many Native American communities, in the USA, Canada and in South America, where my client came from.
I asked my client to chose a representative for his father, and I put the two men opposite each other. Then, I put a group of six, seven men behind them, and I explained that these were men who did not know their own children, or who did not know their father. I gave sentences to the client and his father to say to the group of men: “We belong to you. All of us have not been able to be a father, or we did not have a father. Others took our dignity away, and we lost the knowledge how to protect our families. For all of us, something is broken inside, still, after all this time.” The client and his father went to meet the group of men, they touched them in silence. Some of the men cried together
for a while. Because the client and his father could now experience that their own personal and shameful stories were part of a much larger story, they could grieve together, as father and son, for what was broken in them.
When there was a sense of calmness in the group of broken men, I placed five small family groups at the edge of the constellation. In each family, there was a father, a mother and a few children. I told these groups they were standing on a time line. The farthest was a family from the pre-colonial time, the next was from the early colonial time, etc, till the last family which was from today. I told the families that they were people who had been lucky, in the sense that the men in the families had not been broken, they had been able to keep their dignity and strength and had been able to be good fathers.
Now I asked one of the broken men: which of these families appeals to you? He pointed at the family from before the colonial times. I then asked the father of this family to speak to his wife and children: “Some time in the future, people from another world will come and take our land. They will try to break our men, so they will no longer be able to protect their families. I want to ask you to receive with me one of these men. Let us welcome him, and let him be our guest for while, so his soul can remember what dignity is, what family life is. He belongs to us, let us welcome him.” The family extended their hands to the man who had pointed at them, and he went to them. One by one, each man in the group of broken men chose a family where he wanted to go, and the father of that family asked his wife and children to welcome their broken relative. The client and his father were the last ones to choose and find a place. There, they were beaming and looked great. The wife of the client was sitting in the audience – pregnant of a son. She described how, when the father of the client connected with the broken men through acknowledgment of the shared wound, she felt a great heat in her belly. By connecting with the ancestors, their strength and blessing directly touched the baby boy in her womb.
In many tribal societies, the ancestors are seen as a primary source of strength and healing. When there is trouble, people pray to the ancestors for help. When there is weakness, people pray to the ancestors for strength. The ancestors are a source of support which operates simultaneously as an internal and an external spiritual resource. Wherever we are – we bring our ancestors with us, they can not taken away from us.
When we deal with effects of persecution and discrimination, either by outsiders or within a certain collective, the first step is to restore dignity and find strength within the system. Often, the ancestors of earlier times can provide these. I learned from my teachers that when dignity and strength are restored the most important work is done, other solutions will follow by themselves. My teachers have taught me that it is the duty of the healer, shaman or rabbi to send their clients home feeling better, not weaker, to strengthen and respect them so they will feel their ability to take care of their own soul again. This attitude I take with me wherever I go, it guides me when I work with people, whatever their background, whatever their history.
The organizers of the conference have asked for stories from outside of the group of German constellation leaders. They have asked me and others to share how the wisdom of our cultures of origin shape our constellation work, and how our approaches to healing are influencing it. In the Jewish tradition,
which is essentially a tribal tradition, spiritual healers must lead a life of prayer. We remember the ancestors, and we include them in our prayers. We remember that a future will come, and we include it in our prayers. We remember the past, and we include it in our prayers, and each day we remember that we are alive, and we pray and say ‘thank you for life’. If there was just one word I could have given you as my contribution today, it would have been ‘prayer’.
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