History of Family Constellations

Bert Hellinger created and developed the practice of Family Constellations. He was born in 1925 in Germany to a Catholic family. He has said that his parents’ faith immunized the family from the distortions of socialism and Hitler’s indoctrination. In his teenage years Bert avoided the Hitler youth and in doing so, was classified as an enemy of the people. Before he could be arrested, he was drafted into the German army at age 17. He became a soldier, saw combat, was captured, and was a POW in an allied camp in Belgium. After escaping the camp he returned to Germany and became a Catholic priest, which was his wish since childhood.

In the early 1950’s he was sent to be a missionary and ended up spending 16 years with the Zulu tribe in S Africa. This experience learning how the Zulu people remembered and respected their ancestors, and how they consulted their spirits for guidance and conflict resolution, strongly influenced his later work. He was a teacher, director of a school and parish priest all at once. After 25 years as a priest he left the priesthood, following his inner growth.

Bert trained in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in Austria, and body-centered psychotherapy and family systems in the U.S. He began to synthesize a wide range of healing modalities to start creating something uniquely his own. One of the most powerful components of his healing approach is the teaching to listen to one’s own soul for guidance and strength, and not to accept what is being said, no matter by whom. Bert Hellinger died in 2019, leaving a legacy of ancestral healing which is carried on by his wife Sophie through his school as well as thousands of practitioners all over the world who either trained with him directly or with his students.

There are numerous important figures who are recognized as important to the evolution of Family Constellations. Some of them are:

• Virginia Satir in the early 60’s and her model called Family Reconstruction, which later became Family Sculpting;
• Salvador Minuchin’s Structural Family Therapy
• The Milan school in Italy working with the idea of problems involving the family as a whole, not just the individual
• The Palo Alto groups use of Strategic Family Therapy
• Milton Erickson's use of hypnotherapy

Bert Hellinger’s work added a spiritual dimension to these approaches, and a number of guiding principles called Orders of Love. Bert’s first generation of students carried the work all over the world, and includes Peter and Jamy Faust of The Constellation Approach in Boston, MA. Peter and Jamy offer a 3-year immersion program, in which we have trained and been certified.