The Orders of Love
Bert Hellinger describes an ‘ancient order that works inside us, that controls much more than we are aware. Good order comes about when peace has been made for the whole system.’ When ‘peace has been made’ and love flows, so too does the energy (peace) within a family. When love stops, so does the energy stop, get stuck, shunted or repressed. Family members hinder love from flowing when they experience pain, trauma, grief and loss — and peace is nowhere to be found. Someone near and dear dies – a parent at too early an age, a child at birth. Someone else is forgotten – an uncle missing in a long ago war. Perhaps a new and unfamiliar country is now called home. All families experience similar events and, generation after generation, often there remains no workable template available for the family to feel genuine love, to move forward, to evolve beyond survival to come-to-peace.
The Orders of Love offer the family a way to let love flow again, to untangle from its knotted web, to assist the energy, love, care and compassion to move along the family’s life path. When applied to constellation methodology these ‘orders’ are not superficial or ideological. Recurring patterns become evident and’re-ordering’ becomes necessary for movement and growth to occur. We call these orders, the Order of Precedence, the Order of Inclusion and the Order of Balance.
The Order of Precedence means that whoever comes first takes the first place, and the others follow in order. The parents come first and then the children. An older brother or sister comes before his/her younger siblings. A first wife comes before a second. Each person is considered in their chronological appearance within the family system.
The Order of Inclusion holds that each member of a family belongs equally to the family and is respected in the same way, regardless of any personal qualities or particular fate. This belonging is independent of whether they are talented, feeble-minded or ‘normal,’ whether they are handicapped or mentally ill, whether they have died at an early age or committed suicide. Every person belongs equally.
The Order of Balance shows that each member of the family has their own fate, regardless of how difficult or terrible it may have been in some cases. Each person has to carry their fate completely, with all its burdens, with every turn of events and with all the feelings that accompany it. Hand in hand with one’s individual fate, each person carries their own personal responsibility for all they have done in their life. No other family member can take on another’s fate.
Those who come later in the family are us, the children. We are the ones who take up these energies and feel and behave like our ancestors. Often, we are ‘entangled’ in the form of our attitudes, beliefs, values, opinions, morals, ethics and principles like those before us and we too, aren’t able to allow love, energy or peace to flow. These energies are very powerful, work unconsciously and determine a great deal more than we recognize in our everyday waking consciousness.
