The Tenents of Constellation - Orders of Love

Hellinger et al (1998) gave the world a unique way of viewing personal, familial and organizational systems.  The prominent tenets of family systems are: belonging, giving and receiving and conscience.  The explanations of each of these tenets follow.

Belonging

Simply stated, everyone who is born (or conceived) into a family system has a rightful place, the right of belonging. No one, regardless of deed may be excluded.  All those who are excluded, disrespected, not honored or spoken of exert pressure on the family system to be acknowledged.  Nagy and Sparks’ (1973) Invisible Loyalties as well as The Ancestor Syndrome provide a foundation for this axiomatic truth.

Giving and Receiving

Everything is relational.  There is always the possibility of balance through giving and receiving.  One initiates and one responds, one gives and the other takes.

Giving and receiving is a reciprocal event between the two members of a couple or a partnership.  Without balance and reciprocity, a couple begins to separate.  An “overgiver” places him or herself in the couple as a martyr or a beggar. 

“Overgivers” beg for love and inclusion.  With each act of over giving, doing more and more, he or she is saying, “Have I done enough now for you to love me?” 

With each act of additional giving and begging, he or she places the self in the position of total disrespect for the self and the partner.  Without respect, there can be no love.  In this formation, a couple will part ways.

Giving and receiving between parents and children is a one way street.  Parents give and children receive. 

The job of all parents is to “give” all that they are to their children.  This is imperative as it fills the child full.  This full child can go into the world prepared. And, the cycle of fullness and emptying, generativity can and will repeat itself.

It is very clear when a child has become the head of a family system (a position for which modern therapy has many terms: parentified child, adult child, entitled child, abused child), or is in the wrong “order”. 

Children who, out of a profound love for their parents, try to “help” their parents’ lives, almost always carry very predictable struggles. 

These children are:

• Depressed
• Multi-talented
• Feel fraudulent
• Have certain arrogance about them
• Cannot ask for help
• Solve everything for themselves
• Have difficulty bonding with a partner in adulthood.

Conscience

The axiom of conscience is perhaps Hellinger’s most important contribution.  This term has many common meanings, none of which apply when used in the context of family constellations. 

Conscience is the way in which one feels and knows that he or she belongs to a group.  Conscience has two “controlling” emotions: guilt and innocence.

If one is behaving like the group or family he or she comes from, then he or she feels great innocence.  S/he is behaving and thinking and feeling like the group behaves, thinks and feels.  We are in concert with the norms of the system.  If the price of belonging and being innocent is drinking until drunk, then we do that which is required for belonging, regardless of the price we are paying.

If one is behaving, thinking or feeling in a manner not in concert with the family system, the group, then he or she feels guilt.  When a group member starts to feel guilt, the person is being told via guilt that they are not acting in concert with the norms of the family.  In essence the guilt signals the person that they are in jeopardy of losing their right to belong.   If the family norm is: we take our shoes off before we enter the house, and we leave our shoes on, we feel guilty and instantly “remember how to be here”: we take off our shoes at the door.

Conscience, in the vernacular of family constellations, has nothing to do with morality or good and evil.  Conscience is about bonding and belonging. 

There are multi-layered loyalties taking place within each of us every moment of our lives.  We are simultaneously someone’s child, with a certain set of norms; someone’s partner with another set of norms; an employee, with yet another set of norms; a male or female with yet another set of norms; an outcast with yet another set of norms; a drug user with yet another set of norms; a gay man or lesbian woman with two very different sets of norms. 

We are nested within multiple and competing conscience groups all day long every day of our lives.  When some of us smoke dope, we violate the norms or conscience of our family, church and state and we feel guilty.  We may quit smoking dope in order that the guilt disappear, thus we re-align ourselves with the norms of our family, church and state. Or, we may endure that guilt, jeopardizing our belonging to our family for another toke and belonging to the group with whom we are smoking.

Conscience also plays a vital and powerful role in couples.  If the two individuals in any couple or partnership have not sufficiently shifted their loyalties away from their families of origin and to the partnership in which they live, the bonding will not be strong enough to aid coupling. 

For instance, couples can often have the most intense battles over such ‘seemingly’ unimportant issues.  One person may really believe that toilet paper must come off of the roller over the top.  One person in the very same couple may really believe that the toilet paper is only “right” if it comes off of the roller underneath.  I cannot tell you how many times couples have come to the office and toilet paper over or under is their topic of stress (toothpaste tubes are also incredible loyalty issues). 

Naively, we can all say, “Come on, is this what you really want to talk about?”  But informed about conscience, we could really know that what they are talking about is feeling as if they are abandoning, being disloyal, to their family ways and it threatens them and us on some deep level.  Thus we fight to get our way, so we may belong, always, somewhere. 

It is imperative to have each member in the couple or partnership switch loyalties to the partnership and not with their families of origin.  The switching of loyalties is a very painful and courageous process.  Every change of loyalty automatically feels both guilt producing and grief producing, even if it is toilet paper hanging.  Change like this makes one disloyal and guilt ridden and sad as it is a loss of belonging.