Bert Hellinger (1925)

"One of Europe's most visible—and controversial— psychotherapists and authors, Bert Hellinger has also become a leading voice in the healing arts internationally. A former priest and missionary to the Zulu in South Africa for 16 years, as well as an educator, psychoanalyst, body therapist, and family therapist, he brings vast and diverse experience to his work. Helping professionals everywhere have embraced the new possibilities that his innovative approach offers to their clients. The family constellations, which have become the hallmark of Hellinger's approach, as well as his observations about—and insights into—family entanglements and their resolution, have touched the lives of thousands throughout the world."

Bert Hellinger, Insights—Lectures and Stories

"Family constellations started as a method and through it we have gained important insights. In the meantime this method has developed and new things have shown themselves in family constellations.

It becomes more and more clear that something beyond our thinking and intentions takes over. I have felt it in the field: that beyond the individual soul there exists a greater soul that has a single direction. And the direction in which this greater soul moves is towards uniting what was previously separated or in conflict. So there is a growing integration or reconciliation of what was in opposition before. This is a great movement towards peace, exactly in this sense.

This greater soul effectuates in our life that we reconcile ourselves with what we rejected or excluded, perhaps because we believed it was without value or even impure. We have to learn that the dark side also belongs to us. The dark side is the foundation for what is above—and if it is not integrated, then everything that stands on it will collapse and become worhthless.

For this reason, family constellations and what has developed from it are more and more about the dark side: looking at it, seeing it and taking it into our heart. And suddenly we feel enriched indeed if we really accept it. We accept the people whom we considered bad before, or even criminal. And then all preconceptions that we had about 'good' people do not apply any more. Then we realise that we are all equal. Nobody is bigger; nobody is smaller.

Whatever we do, we are enlisted by something that takes over from us. I think we can sense that in the work here, we can experience it and learn how to embody it."

Bert Hellinger, Introduction to the training "New Developments in Family Constellations" in Santa Barbara, USA, 28 July 2002.