The Endarkenment: why we shouldn’t impose New Age beliefs or practices on others
On the use of Family Constellations in the legal system
I read this month that Brazilian politicians are seeking to ban the use of Family Constellations Therapy in the Brazilian judicial system. And my first thought was ‘wait, they’re using Family Constellations Therapy in the Brazilian judicial system??’
Family Constellations Therapy is a New Age alternative therapy invented by a German called Bert Hellinger in the 1980s. The idea is you can explore a person’s life-situation through a form of psychodrama. Various volunteers are asked to represent aspects of the family situation - eg the person’s father, mother, husband, child, boss, or more abstract notions like ‘money’ or ‘heroin’ or ‘World War II’. There is a facilitator who then goes around asking how each of the volunteers feel in their role, and how they feel towards others in the ‘constellation’. The process can last 30 minutes or longer, watched by the person or people whose situation is being explored. Hopefully, insights arise, emotions are released and resolutions are reached.
But how does this work exactly? How do strangers ‘know’ what is going on in a family situation, even when it involves people absent or long-since dead? How could they know better even than people in the family itself? Through magic, basically, or as they call it in the New Age, ‘quantum energy’ / collective unconscious / ancestral trauma / morpho-genetic fields.
Family Constellations became very popular in Germany in the last few decades, and still is. “Bert Hellinger is Germany’s most prominent family therapist,” the newspaper Die Zeit declared in 2003. “He is a kind of Dalai Lama of the psychoscene.” It’s also popular in Mexico, South Africa, Spain and Brazil. Training to be a Family Constellations facilitator can last anything from a weekend to three years and costs up to $5000 a year. It’s used in organizational psychology and HR to resolve issues in companies. It’s used to help pets (‘pet constellations’). You can do it on water, do it with horses. Some people even use it as a method for psychedelic integration.
I went to a Family Constellations session once in London, run by a friend (if the friend is reading this, I think you personally are great). I was on a date and I thought it would be fun to drop in and see what was going on. We found ourselves immersed in a stranger’s intense family drama of generational abuse. I was plucked out of the audience to play the role of this poor woman’s abuser. ‘How do you feel?’ the facilitator asked me during the session. ‘Awkward’, I replied. ‘That’s interesting - you don’t want to be here? You want to run away?’ ‘That’s right’.
It was certainly dramatic. And also kinda nuts. People in New Age culture love a bit of drama and emotional catharsis. In fact, the entire field of religion / spirituality could be seen as a sort of play-acting for adults. But what struck me most was how much power the facilitator had to steer proceedings and shape outcomes. He was like the ring-master of a circus. It seemed quite an authoritarian role, very different to the non-directive role of a psychotherapist.
Come to our free online event on (ex) Mormons and psychedelics on March 18. The psychedelic scene in Utah is buzzing, the state government just passed a bill for state research into 5meoDMT for PTSD, new churches are growing, and many Mormons are leaving the church and finding a substitute of sorts in psychedelics. But there’s also a dark side. Come, learn and discuss with our panel. Free tickets here.
Now, personally, I love New Age woo. I sometimes consult online Tarot or the I-ching and even, on occasion, psychic mediums. People should be free to believe in and take part in whatever far-out healing modalities they want. Many find insight, consolation and community in faith-based modalities, including Family Constellations. There’s also a basic truth in the idea of it - we are indeed shaped by family dynamics. Who knows, maybe past generations’ trauma affects us as well. (Family genetics certainly do, though that’s less fun to explore in a weekend workshop.)
But it’s a huge leap from ‘family dynamics are real’ to ‘strangers can be randomly selected, put into a role, and they will magically channel another person’s feelings, so that decades of family trauma are resolved in an hour of psychodrama’.
Kneel to the Pater Familias
Although it calls itself Family Constellations ‘therapy’, it is not evidence-based therapy so much as vibes-based magic. As a result, the vibes-based process is easily dominated by the personality and biases of the facilitator. And the entire modality is shaped by the personality and prejudices of the founder - Bert Hellinger
Hellinger, who died in 2019 aged 93, served in the Nazi army as a young man, then became a Roman Catholic friar. While working in South Africa, he became interested in Zulu rituals and ancestor reverence. He came back to Germany, left the church, and developed his alternative therapy. He studied psychology but was never licensed as a therapist. He was, it appears, a somewhat conservative, authoritarian and patriarchal figure, and his biases are embedded in the dogma of his therapy.
Bert asserted the existence of natural laws called the Orders of Love, in which everyone is part of the traditional family hierarchy, governed by the pater familias, and all families are part of the state, governed by its ruler, and on top of it all is Fate, absolute and immutable. When the universe is in harmony, everyone respects their place in the family unit, and respects the authority of the pater familias and the state. When this does not happen, illness and adversity occur, and you need a session of Family Constellations therapy to restore cosmic harmony.
Bert had some eccentric views. He suggested homosexuality arises in a family when a young man is forced by the family constellation to take on some hidden family secret or trauma, for example, the death of an older sister forces a young man to compensate by becoming effeminate. Perhaps, if this is brought to light in a Family Constellations session, the young man can stop filling his sister’s role and be healed of his gayness.
Bert also thought that incest arose because the wife was not fulfilling her sexual duties to the husband. He wrote:
Where there is incest, usually there are two perpetrators… Very often, the mother wants to go away from her husband, she breaks the relationship… Then the daughter substitutes for her… That is often the secret dynamic of incest.
But this could be resolved in a Family Constellation session, which might end with the daughter kneeling and asking forgiveness from the father who abused her. This from a 2005 article on Family Constellations in Dutch anti-fascist magazine Alert:
Years of terrible trauma and victimization are completely denied, and during family constellations these problems are “solved” by means of the following ritual: the practitioner orders the representative daughter to kneel down in front of her representative father [frequently in public!] and is then told to say: “Thank you Dad, I am very grateful to have been able to do this for you”. Hellinger believes that the distorted family balance will be restored in this manner, but critics point out that this ‘therapy’ is extremely humiliating to the victim and will in no way contribute to a solution of such a serious problem. German writer Elisabeth Reutter, sexually abused by her father during her youth, writes in her autobiographical bookGehirnwдsche [Brainwash] , that Hellinger’s incest-therapy almost expelled the last remainders of her human dignity.
Family Constellations is often practiced by people with no therapeutic training. As with sessions in the psychedelic underground, there is rarely any aftercare or follow-up. What is edgy and fun for the mentally stable can be destabilizing and dangerous for the vulnerable. The Alert article says:
In 1997, a woman committed suicide after taking part in a family constellation in Leipzig. She was suffering from serious depressions and relational problems and hoped to find a solution through Hellinger’s therapy. Hellinger’s evasive comment on the matter ran as follows: “It didn’t occur to me that she might have been suicidal. I only saw her for three minutes.”
Family Constellations became particularly popular in Germany, partly as a means of processing guilt from World War II. Hellinger, who served in the German army, apparently felt Germany was wrong to blame soldiers for obeying Fate and serving the Third Reich - they were fulfilling their natural role in the state’s constellation, as were other members of the regime. He once said:
In this country, a broad public opinion still exists that these nazi criminals were personally responsible for their acts and took decisions of their own free will and that they are therefore to be blamed for those crimes. But that is wrong, because at the time a stupendous force had enveloped them.
Even Hitler could not be completely blamed. Wasn’t he merely serving Fate? Indeed, Hellinger seems to have had a fascination for the Fuhrer. He and his wife - a young psychic called Maria Sophie Erdudy - bought a villa once owned by the Fuhrer in Berchtesgaden, near the Austrian border. In one of his books, Hellinger wrote a postcard to Hitler:
Some people consider you to be inhuman, as if anyone ever deserved that qualification. I look upon you as I look upon myself: namely as a human being with a father and a mother, and with an extraordinary fate. Does that make you any greater? Or smaller? Are you better or worse? Because if you are greater, then so am I. And if you are smaller, then so am I. If you are better or worse, then so am I. For I am a human being like you. If I respect you, then I respect myself. And if I loathe you, then I loathe myself. Am I then permitted to love you? Am I perhaps even supposed to love you, since otherwise I could not love myself?..I cannot pity you, because your rise and fall has its origin in the same cause as mine. I worship it in you as in myself, and submit to all it brought about in you and to everything it brings about in me as well as in every other human being.
And so on.
It’s a reminder that you don’t need to dig very far into New Age culture to find hints of mystical fascism, especially in Germany. As I wrote in my 2020 piece ‘Nazi hippies’, the Nazi movement itself arose out of a petri dish of occultism, conspiracy theories, anti-science, irrational illiberalism and mystical volkisch ethno-nationalism. You can find strains of ‘the Cosmic Right’ in Latin America, in Brazil, Argentina, Chile and elsewhere (remember the ayahuasca church that promoted Bolsonaro’s coup?).
So how exactly did Family Constellations become part of Brazil’s judicial system? And what’s the problem with bringing New Age beliefs and practices from the private into the public sphere? More after the paywall.
