Homosexuality

The below is an extract from: Unraveling Family Secrets. Bert Hellinger interviewed on Family Constellations, By Humberto del Pozo in Santiago de Chile, September 1999. [These are the views of BH in 1999 and not necessarily those of Erik Andersen]

What are the patterns you have observed in relationship to homosexuality?

I’ve observed three patterns of systemic entanglements in conjunction with homosexuality, but I don’t know whether they’re actually a cause:

A child was pressured to represent a person of the opposite sex in the system, because a child of the same gender wasn’t available. For example, a boy had to represent one of his deceased older sisters, because none of the other surviving children was female. Or another boy had to represent his father’s first fiancee, who had been treated unjustly. This is the most painful and difficult of the three patterns I’ve seen.

A child was pressured to represent someone who had been excluded from the family system -or who had been vilified by the system -even though that person was of the same gender. Homosexuals living in this pattern have the position of being “outsiders.” For example, a boy was systemically identified with his mother’s first fiancee , who contracted syphilis and withdrew from the engagement. Although the fiancee had acted honorably, he was scorned and despised by the boy’s mother. The boy’s feelings of being scorned were very similar to what the man must have felt -as if they were his own feelings.

A child remained caught in the sphere of influence of the gender-opposite parent, and was not able to complete the psychological movement of taking the same-gender parent.

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