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Healing depression with family constellations

A full chapter from my book: 'Depression, a Stepping-stone towards Bliss', available at

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In family constellations - a process developed by Bert Hellinger and which I will explain later in this chapter - we see that depression is often a part of something that is much larger than the person who has the depression. The depression can arise for example because we may carry - out of love - the fate of someone in our family who didn't want to live any more, perhaps because that person wanted in turn to follow another person into death, again out of love. This all happens unconsciously. Seeing such an entanglement within your family system makes it possible to get out of the identification you have with the other family member. When the family member with whom you were identified is recognized and honoured, you feel in harmony and often from that moment on this person gives you strength and support. Now you are free to lead your own life and are no longer determined by patterns that are not yours.

Identification is an unconscious phenomenon; when someone from the family system is not recognized or appreciated, someone from a later generation takes over his or her role, to still ensure that this person is included. There appears to be an invisible 'law' in life that everyone is of equal value and significance and that everyone has the right to belong . This is not a theory in itself. It's something that shows experientially in the family constellations.

When you are depressed you can ask the question in a family constellation what lies behind the depression. You then come together with a group of people from amongst whom you choose individuals (representatives) to represent some of your family members. You also choose a representative for yourself. You position the representatives in the room according to your feeling, without giving them instructions. What you can then see is a portrait of your family that expresses something about the level of feelings of intimacy, pain, love or abandonment that the family members have in relation to each other.

When they are positioned in place, the representatives of the family members start feeling things that in reality the original family member feels or has felt. This is possible because we are all part of a large energy field, that is also called 'the great soul'. The representatives follow the impulses to move which arise in their body. This is not something they think about, but something that just happens, driven by the energy of the field in which they find themselves. A facilitator leads the family constellation, tuning-in to the energy field in which all representatives are present. He looks at the points when as a child your love was interrupted, and what can be done now to complete the original movement of outreach (in particular to the parents). In the end, where possible, a solution is found that feels right for all family members.

Bert Hellinger has discovered experientially (through the many family constellations he has facilitated) 'that depressions usually develop when one of the parents is excluded; if that parent has no place. For example, if the mother is excluded because she is sick. The child then takes care of the mother, instead of taking the mother. In this way the mother has no active force in the heart of the child. 2 Bert Hellinger describes 'taking' as follows: "When I take, I take what is available exactly as it is. This kind of taking is humble, and acknowledges the parents as they are. In taking I also acknowledge myself exactly as I am. It has a deep conciliatory quality - a coming to rest. It's beyond judgement of good or bad. Boasting about one's parents is also a sign of not having taken them. Idealizing shuts out the essential as well." 3

Because when you don't take the parent you are not nourished, you cannot lead your own life; you keep looking back then to the parent, in an attempt to be able still to receive from him or her.

I recognize myself in the above. As a child, I wanted to carry the pain of my mother, who had had such traumatic experiences in the Japanese concentration camp. I therefore took the role of mother-of-my-mother which meant I didn't take her as mother and could not receive from her. In this way the void arose in me which was to become my depression.

In Meera Hashimoto’s Art Therapist Training this becomes very clear to me in an exercise. Meera asks us to form groups of three people. The first of the three represents the child that you used to be, the second your mother and the third the fate of your mother. When it is my turn I myself represent the fate of my mother. The two others represent me-as-a-child and my mother. Then we move without words, in whatever way our feeling guides us. Later we share with each other what each of us has felt. The representative for me-as-child wants to go to the mother but is afraid and tiptoes very carefully around her all the time. The mother does not look at her fate. I represent in this constellation the fate of my mother, and feel that I am a Japanese from the concentration camp, in which she had to stay as a child. As the fate-of-my-mother I feel the agitation of wanting to reach the mother, who doesn't look at me, and I feel irritated by the child. The child indicates later (when we share our experiences after the constellation), that she made an effort to get her mother to look at her fate. In the constellation the mother does all of a sudden look at her fate. As the representative of this fate, I feel an enormous anger towards the mother and grab her by the wrists, which I almost squeeze. The mother then feels that she cannot escape and she relaxes. I feel how the power of me-as-fate enters her. With this, I can let go of the mother and feel calm. The mother goes back to her child and takes her under her care. The child then rests with the mother.

Seeing and experiencing this is an important turnaround for me. Now I am grateful for the fate of my mother (that is, for the Japanese occupier) because I have seen and felt how much strength he has given her. It is courageous of me to dare to face this. Previously I have wanted to support my mother by rejecting the Japanese. In the place of blaming my mother as I did before in many therapies for what she had not given me, I now feel proud of her and of the fact that I am born to such a powerful woman. I am also proud of the child in me who made her look at her fate in this constellation. She didn't want this before because she wanted to focus totally on caring for me, but unless she looked at her fate she wasn’t able to take care of me. I now see that she needed her fate to become strong . For this she had to go into the concentration camp. It was completely wrong for me to try as a child to take her fate away from her. It feels very good that I have seen in this constellation that my mother has owned the power of her destiny, and has taken this power into her body. Now I can rest in being-my-mother's-child and I can own my own destiny.

When I walk out of the group room, I meet - in my imagination - my mother. She stands in front of me next to the garden path on the Amalurra site. Next to her I see my father standing in his full height and strength. Very relaxed I stand before them as their child and look up to them. I feel safe and secure, with deep respect and gratitude for them. In the past I have sensed that my father felt helpless because he could not do anything for my mother with her pain. Because of this, to me he seemed to lack a certain strength. Now that my mother has owned her own strength by accepting what has happened in the war, she has become available to my father and they are each present for me and together as powerful parents. Taking my parents gives me a feeling of self-worth; my parents are behind me now with their strength, and support me. That my parents have long since died is not important here; for me they are alive in the present. I can now turn around and focus on my own life path. For the first time in my life I experience a calm, content happiness and a deep relaxation.

Bert Hellinger names this happiness as one of the two ways we can experience happiness: "If someone delivers good work, if he succeeds well in something and if what he does works well, then he becomes happy. This happiness feels like fulfillment, it is independent of the so-called 'feeling of happiness'. It has something essential, something full. It makes happy, even if you are in an unpleasant situation in which you are not happy. Then there is also the feeling of lightness; also this is happiness. I can have it with others together but also independently of them. This light-hearted feeling occurs when I have taken my parents, and when they live in me. And just as a whole, exactly as they are. Who takes his parents in this way, experiences that all the good that they have flows from them to you and that everything you feared or rejected in them remains outside. Who succeeds in this, notices how his sense of happiness grows. 4 This last kind of happiness happens to me after this family constellation.

Svagito Liebermeister, husband of Meera Hashimoto, with whom I later train in family constellations, has written a book about family constellations called 'Roots of Love'. I now feel personally what this title means: taking my parents in love gives me roots in the earth. For the first time in my life I feel really connected to the earth and I am grateful that I live on earth. Svagito: "You can only flower in your life when you feel that you have the best parents you could have. You cannot force this; it can only happen to you."

From a systemic point of view, there is harmony when everyone in the family system takes their proper role. This is not a rule or a theory, but something that shows itself in the family constellations. It is not easy to adopt the position of being the child again in relation to your parents when you have invested so many years in wanting to look after them; it has become part of your identity. You have to let go of your ego then. You have to be able to bow your head. At this point it can look like everything you stood for is gone without knowing what will happen instead. Sometimes several constellations are needed to take this step. Meditation is essential here, because meditation allows you to be able to stand alone in yourself. A second thing that is difficult when letting go of the parental role you had adopted is that it is accompanied by guilt. The feeling of guilt arises from the fear of no longer belonging if you give up your caring role. Not to belong can be experienced as life-threatening. Here too meditation helps; it helps you to endure this guilt, which is inevitable.

When someone who is depressed feels he is entangled too much with his parents, he is often invited in a therapy situation to express his anger towards them . It is thought that this is a way to become free from one’s parents. In his book 'Acknowledging What Is' Bert Hellinger describes that in family constellations he sees that when someone does this, "he will punish himself for this. His self-punishment may be expressed in some kind of failure: in work, perhaps by losing a job or being unable to find work; or in relationships, by losing a partner; or by losing a lot of money. “As a rule, someone is only depressed when he has not fully taken one of his parents. If someone expresses his anger in the way described above, he pushes the parent even further away, which can only lead to increased depression. “Apart from taking care of one's parents, also demanding how they should be is a form of not taking and rejecting them. When a person makes demands about how his parents should be, or what his parents ought to do for him, it prevents him taking from them what is essential, by which he remains empty." 5

Psychiatrist Gradus van Florestein, who works a lot with family constellations, says: "When we respect those with more experience, with more strength and wisdom than us, and know them to be behind us with their knowledge, strength and wisdom, then we live more fully and we are capable of more." 6

Before asking for a family constellation, you don't have to know with which family member you are identified or where you have stepped into an inappropriate role. You can't know this, because it all happens unconsciously. It becomes visible by what you see happening before your eyes in the constellation. The seeing in itself is healing, because it helps you understand your own and your family members’ situation. One constellation is often sufficient. You take in the image you see before you of the 'solution' -the establishment in which all family members feel harmonious - and that image often goes on working inside you for years. Hellinger says: "the soul goes slowly"; it is a process that needs time. You don't think about it anymore. The newly acquired insight will lead its own life.

The link to the book ‘Depression, a Stepping-stone towards Bliss’ is:

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And the link tot he podcast about this book is:

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Footnotes Bert Hellinger - The wisdom is continuously on the way Bert Hellinger - Acknowledging What Is Bert Hellinger - Acknowledging What Is Bert Hellinger - The wisdom is continuously on the way Bert Hellinger - Acknowledging What Is Gradus van Florestein - The Depression from Shifting Perspective