The group consciences
According to Hellinger et al. (1998), “conscience bonds us to the persons and groups necessary for our survival regardless of the conditions they set for our belonging. … In the service of belonging, conscience reacts to everything that enhances or endangers our bonding” (p. 7-8).
These orders are the hidden natural laws that shape and constrain the behaviour of human relationship systems. They are, in part, the natural forces of biology and evolution; in part, the general dynamics of complex systems becoming manifest in intimacy; and in part, the forces operating within the soul (Hellinger et al., 1998, p. 28).
Hellinger differentiated between different levels of the soul, which correspond to the three consciences – personal, collective and spiritual. The first, the personal conscience, is a self-regulating system of belonging in the interests of survival. It achieves this through feelings of right and wrong, guilt and innocence, good conscience and bad conscience. Guilt in this sense has little to do with morality and is instead created when actions threaten belonging to the group (Hellinger, 2008; Hellinger et al., 1998). The balance of giving and taking within this conscience leads to suffering because it is determined by instinct and loyalty. After causing suffering to others, we atone by suffering ourselves in order to restore our sense of innocence. If someone has harmed us, we want to return this harm and seek revenge. Hellinger notes how penance is self-centred and does not really serve the person harmed and revenge only causes more cycles of harm. These are bonds of loyalty and blind rather than knowing love (Hellinger 2001, 2008).
The second conscience is a collective systemic conscience (Hellinger, 2008; Hellinger et al., 1998). The collective conscience attends to the family as a whole and to the group as a whole. It is in the service of the survival of the group as a whole even, if it means that individuals are being sacrificed in the name of that survival. This conscience is in service of the completeness of the group and it enforces the norms that best secure the group’s existence (Hellinger, 2008, p. 56). In this way, the systemic conscience recruits later generations to stand in for missing members. This conscience is also limited because it “encompasses only members of the groups that are governed by it” (Hellinger, 2008, p. 55). This conscience is unconscious and experienced and inferred only through its intergenerational effects, such as harm that is passed from one generation to the next (Hellinger, 2008; Hellinger et al., 1998). Balance on this level is a movement of the greater whole, and so it balances rather impersonally, as those who are enlisted to serve this restorative movement are innocent according to the personal conscience … Something that has been injured is being restored under the influence of greater powers. The collective conscience wants to bring back something that has been lost, and in this way restore order for the whole family system and heal it (Hellinger, 2008, p. 59). As a framework within which behaviour and relationships are evaluated as right and wrong, cultural patterns may fall within this span of conscience as we also participate within the systemic conscience of our ethnic, religious and national groups (Hellinger, 2008, 2010; Mayer & Viviers, 2015; Payne, 2005).
Hellinger called the personal and systemic conscience a spiritual field or shared soul, showing that we are embedded in much larger systems of belonging (Hellinger, 2008; 2010). For Hellinger, the terms field and soul were synonymous, and he called this larger system the greater soul (Hellinger, 2003a; Hellinger, 2008). In this view, the inner soul of the individual is attuned to a larger field of systemic intelligence. Individuals, families, communities, nations, and the whole of humanity form systems to bond members of the group together in a larger common context (Cohen, 2009, p. 63).
Entanglements.
Because everyone has a right to belong to the system, if a family member is excluded, scorned, forgotten, scape-goated, or suffered a difficult fate, the collective conscience will ensure that someone else, usually in a later generation, will unconsciously identify with that excluded family member. The later person may take on similarities and live out certain aspects of their fate. This is in to restore balance and repay the debt of a previous generation.
Hellinger emphasized that the most vulnerable members of a system will be recruited by the system’s conscience to provide balance and harmony by standing in the place of, that is ‘re- membering’ the forgotten, excluded or ignored family member or aspect of the system. This is what Hellinger called an entanglement, an unconscious identification by one family member, usually a child in a later generation, with the family member who was excluded. Hellinger understood entanglements to be motivated by the unconditional but blind love and loyalty of children to their parents and other members of the system, as well as their need to feel a sense of belonging, innocence, and stability (Franke, 2009; Hellinger, 2001; 2008; Hellinger et al., 1998).
Entanglement is thought to happen through the operation of the personal and systemic consciences. In her theoretical analysis, Franke (2009) likens this to the psychoanalytic definition of identification as “a psychological process of assimilation” but explains it systemically as an identification which preserves the memory of the excluded person by holding a place for them through their suffering (Franke, 2009, p. 96).
Hellinger (Hellinger et al., 1998) calls it a “systemic repetition compulsion” to repeat the past in service of justice for an excluded family member. This is done unconsciously without needing to know the person with whom they are identified (Hellinger, 2008; Hellinger et al., 1998, p. 166). The exclusion of earlier family members leads to entanglement with their fate.
“In the entangled family members, we can see traits and burdens of the rejected, often also the aggression of those who were responsible for the rejection. In this way their aggression falls on later members of the family and is reflected in them. The aggression of those who rejected catches up with them in their descendants” (Hellinger, 2008, p. 89).
Loyalty
Boring (2018) explains that there are agreements which underlie these entanglements. We have loyalty at the level of the soul to our parents, grandparents, and beyond. If we have experienced a sibling death as a child, at the level of the soul we may make an agreement with that dead sibling, not to enjoy life. We agree to die as well, in some respect. In making that unspoken agreement, we forfeit healthy relationships, prosperity, comfort, and even joy. If someone in our family system experienced a disabling injury, we may “remember” the pain (p. 11-12). This phenomenon may correspond with current epigenetic research that traumatic memories of ancestors can be passed down to their descendants and misunderstood to be their own (Jelinek, 2015; Welford, 2014). According to Franke (2009) this phenomenon originates conceptually in Boszormenyi-Nagy‘s idea of invisible loyalties of one generation to another by unconsciously taking on debts from previous generations which repeat aspects of their fates in an attempt to restore equilibrium and balance where injustice or entitlements have occurred (Franke, 2009; Welford, 2014). Hellinger‘s philosophy can be differentiated from this perspective in that he emphasized the loving intention behind the entanglement and stressed the importance of recognising this in healing (Franke, 2009; Hellinger, 2001; Hellinger et al., 1998).
Within the consciousness span of the personal and collective consciences, bonding and belonging is to one group and excludes others. Belonging is regulated by feelings of guilt and innocence, and balance is served by justice and compensation rather than love, leading to revenge and atonement as compensatory and balancing mechanisms. The personal and collective conscience is therefore not connected to higher moral values, but instead towards norms that serve, and violation of which endanger, belonging at an instinctual level (Hellinger et al., 1998).
We then do to others in good conscience what our conscience forbids us to do to members of our own group. In the context of religious, racial, and national conflicts, suspending the inhibitions that conscience imposes on evil within a group allows members of that group to commit, in good conscience, atrocities and murder against others who belong to different groups (Hellinger et al., 1998, p. 10). While Ruumet (2006) attributes functioning at this level to cultural conditioning, Hellinger‘s observations are that systems within these conscience fields follow natural laws which if whole, balanced and coherent, lead to harmony and optimal functioning. Trauma and disconnection have led to culturally sanctioned and entrenched imbalances, but because they are unconscious and govern systemic wholeness and balance at the instinctive and survival level, they are not easily transcended. Unless systemic imbalances are addressed, balance, order and belonging within these consciousness spans is unconscious, sacrifices its members, and limits freedom. (Hellinger, 2001; Hellinger et al., 1998).
The systemic conscience creates limits, not only in our belonging, but also limitations based on the consequences of our actions for others. Going beyond these limits threatens belonging, the warning sign being guilt. “This reflects a natural law of systems – that there‘s a limit beyond which a system cannot change without evolving into a different system” (Hellinger et al., 1998, p. 77).
The tribal soul
Hellinger spoke about the greater soul (Hellinger, 2003b, 2010), or what Van Kampenhout (2008) calls the universal soul, as the level at which all paradox and polarities are transcended. Van Kampenhout (2008) differentiates another level of soul, also a collective field, which he calls the tribal soul. He explains that these are collective fields which also influence our belonging and behaviour, and while bigger and stronger than the family soul, are differentiated from the greater or universal soul because they are still separated by boundaries.
The invitation to the heart.
Hellinger emphasized love. The word is found in many of his book and videotape titles (Tucker, 2005). He understood attempts to balance in the personal and collective conscience as motivated by love. That children sacrifice and atone out of love. That hurt is interrupted love. He described this love as blind. Similarly, he viewed healing to come through love, that it is through love that excluded family members are included again, that a person develops a greater love in being able to see and agree to reality as it is, honouring what is bigger than them, and releasing themselves from the cycles of suffering. And that it is by releasing entanglements which perpetuate these cycles of suffering, and submitting to the orders of love, that allows love to flow again. (Georgiadou, 2012; Hellinger, 2001, 2008; Hellinger et al., 1998; Tucker, 2005).
Hellinger identified a third, spiritual, conscience which takes us out of blind instinctive love and systemic processes which seeks compensation, balance and inclusion through atonement, revenge, and sacrifice. This goes beyond the laws that regulate group belonging and expands awareness beyond the perceptual framework of our family and greater cultural groups to a higher level (Hellinger 2001, 2008; Hellinger et al., 1998) “where the opposing forces form a new union” (Hellinger, 2008, p. 189) and guide us towards the greater whole. This third conscience is described as mysterious, ineffable, and takes us out of the laws of the personal and systemic conscience. If we follow this conscience, we leave behind our belonging to family and cultural groups, and our personal and collective identities, in other words all that is known. When we are in harmony with this conscience, the movements of spirit, we are in harmony with universal love (Hellinger, 2008; Hellinger et al., 1998).
Reference:
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