This wry film looks at the Orders of Love from Family Constellations

By Karen Carnabucci, LCSW, TEP

Here's a wonderfully personal -- and wry -- film story about the families, love and generations,  as told by a new father of a boy child. The "Orders of Love" in the title refer to the ideas and observations of Bert Hellinger, the innovative family psychotherapist from Germany who developed an extraordinary new way to understand how family systems operate.

Family Constellations is the name of a newer healing process developed by Hellinger,  As developed by Hellinger, this process originally focused on family systems to disclose the deeper forces that unknowingly influence our thoughts, behaviors and emotional experiences through multiple generations.
 
Family Constellations create a model of the family system to reveal and transform hidden patterns that are difficult to understand and change. Over time, this systemic approach has been applied to other human systems including organizations, our connection to nature and larger issues in our communities and the world, with the name of Systemic Constellations.
 
Together these Family and Systemic Constellations approaches explore ways for understanding our relationships as well as giving us options to resolve our most complicated problems.
 
A  Family or Systemic Constellation session takes place in an energy field that connects family, ancestors, organizational members, the natural world and all of humanity.  This "knowing field" is an energetic field of consciousness that we can enter to experience the feelings and sensations that mirror those of the actual family members they represent and everyone and everything to which we are connected. 

British biologist Rupert Sheldrake explains this field phenomenon, which he calls a “morphogenetic field,” as an organizing force that accounts for patterns of behavior in social groups, such as schools of fish and flocks of birds.  
 
Dr. Albrecht Mahr, a German physician, first used the term “the knowing field" to describe this energy field as it applies to human family systems. He referred to the experience through which volunteers participating in a constellation session are able to access information about a family system as “representative perception."
 
Through the years, Hellinger and other facilitators have repeatedly observed a set of principles that help people and families function in the best possible way.
 
These three principles have been named the Orders of Love:
 

• Everyone belongs to the family system.
  
•  Those who entered the system first have rank over those who enter the system later.
•  What is unresolved from past generations will be repeated in future generations.