It was Bert Hellinger that developed Family Constellations. He drew from many sources like Gestalt and family theory and Zulu family dynamics when he was living here in South Africa in KwaZulu-Natal. Through observation, he developed the idea that there are certain structures that enable love to flow in family systems and also result in love getting entangled. These are structures or orders and it is my view they are a result of our unique position in a family.
The first-born child is the first time parents have experienced conception, pregnancy and birth and the raising of a child and there are certain experiences unique to the first-born child. It is the first time for the parent too. So we honour that position and the same goes for the second-born child, the third, the fourth etc. They each have unique experiences according to their position in the family and birth order.
When a child did not make it and as there was a termination, stillborn birth or miscarriage, that child still occupies their position in the order of siblings. This is because the children that come after that child have a different experience of the system due to child that came before them.
When we move to parents, their experiences are unique in that they have children and the parent responsible for the survival of the family in the world would occupy a higher order. That means that that person has a certain position in the natural structure that is emerging.
Grandparents have ancestors behind them and they have their own children and they have grandchildren. They occupy a unique position. So we can see how these orders and these structures are quite naturally emerging in a family system. They are emergent structures.
In society today, we are now experiencing the evolution of the way we engage with gender and the traditional family structure is shifting. Because these orders are emergent, they are going to also evolve. Which is the reason why it is so important to work with the orders in a phenomenological way. The energy.
I have heard about the orders being called natural laws, and yet much of family constellations developed out of a very different way of living to what we know now. Many of our parents and our grandparents' lives had very traditional family structures. So it is important that we update our method and we respond to the Field.
Soon I will introduce a very useful way of guiding a constellation using a triangle of approach. A triangle of Orders, Energy and Reality introduced by Berthold Ulsamar
When we look at the orders of love, the first order is that we all have the equal right to belong. That means whoever died has their place and belong to the family, whoever was excluded because they were considered to be the black sheep of the family, and all the shadow parts of the family were projected onto them, also belong.
There was a time when people were put into institutions and they died in these places. People went missing during wars and immigration.
Then we have the second order of love, which speaks to hierarchy, and that is the position of a family member in time. Grandparents came before parents in time. Parents come before children in time. So it's really just a hierarchy ordered over an axis of time. In the West, we want to be free, and in many cases this has been rejected. But we'd risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater if we do not honour these orders and these hierarchies. And there is a certain freedom that comes from bringing these orders in.
And the third order is the balance of give and take. Now in a partnership, balance in give and take is important to keep the health and flow of love between partners. You can extend that to friendships.
But when it comes to children, it is different in the family dynamic parents give and children take. When a parent gives their child food at the dinner table, it is the desire of the parent child eat the food. When a parent gives a child education, it is the desire that the child receives it.
In some cultures, the children give back through chores and physical actions. But we have an entanglement when a child takes on the emotional needs of a parent. The love of a child is so big, and they want the family system to survive. Their survival is based on the survival of the family system.
We find that children take on excluded members, and they take on maybe something more subtle, like excluded emotions or minimised emotions. We see this when a child's reaction is far bigger than what one would expect. They are taking on a systemic ancestral emotion. We find this when we explore a family system phenomenologically.
So just to sum up, we have the three orders. The first order is each family member has an equal right to belong. The second order is the order of hierarchy on the axis of time, and the third is the balance of give and take.