about
Bert
Hellinger
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Bert at a workshop in Israel |
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| A short autobiography Bert Hellinger has been a family therapist for more than 35 years now. By now, Bert runs mostly international workshops. He is booked out over the year, from Sweden to Russia, from Taiwan to Japan and Korea, from the US to Chile and Argentina, from Israel to Morocco. Bert was born in 1925 in Germany. The catholic faith of his family helped him to get through the Nazi regime and the war without taking in the Nazi ideology. Only 17 years old, he was recruited and experienced the realities of war. Soon he became a prisoner of war in a camp in Belgium. At age 20 when he was released from captivity, he entered a catholic order, realizing his childhood dream. Years of spiritual training and discipline followed. Then he went to Africa as a missionary of his order and lived amongst the Zulus directing schools and acting as parish priest. The time with the Zulus meant a lot to him, he learned so much from them and felt at home there. During that time, he participated in the interracial, ecumenical training in group dynamics run by Anglican clergy. After 16 years he began to feel that his life's direction had outgrown membership in a religious order and he left in a very amicable way. He returned to Germany, got married, and entered the field of psychotherapy. First, he trained in psychoanalysis, and then he added quite a few other approaches to it, as he felt the need to explore different problem areas in search for good solutions. Another important training was in Primal Therapy. Bert sees immediately when a person is caught in an unexpressed primal feeling, and this plays an important role in his capacity to help people. He studied group dynamics, explored the ways of tribal cultures, Gestalt therapy, NLP, Milton Erickson's work, holding therapy, many forms of family therapy and other modalities. |
Bert's approach to healing Philosophically, he has remained committed to Heidegger's approach of "phenomenology". This means aiming at seeing what is really happening right now, as opposed to repeating what one was told or trying to confirm a theory one already holds. With a constellation in progress, Bert perceives issues and then says things as they present themselves to him at that moment. He is willing to be shown something different the next day. The aspects of his work that look like "theory" are more in the nature of: "So far experience has shown this..." He does not expand into explanations for things. He says that would be speculation. He tries to find what works, helping people to live and love better. This he does by being attentive to the soul, and returning things back into the care of the soul. Concerning his religious attitude, he has given up naming or defining anything. Names he uses are just pointers, like "Great Soul". For those familiar with the Tao, one can see affinity. Citing Lao-Tse, he says: "An old friend of mine - he died a long time ago -, said:".. The truths that he perceives and shares with people are about love. Returning from entangled love to flowing love, moving from blind love to seeing love, from stagnation to flow, from separation to unity, from opposition to oneness. Where he goes, he acts in the service of reconciliation, within families, between tribes and ethnic groups, between warring nations, fate, and the source of all. The "Orders of Love" that he found open hearts on all continents. The "Movements of the Soul" bring about reconciliation all by themselves, the space of the "Great Love" is the great field in which miracles happen easily. |
| Now, approaching his eighties, Bert shows more and more that
therapy is a narrow name for his contribution. The tools of the trade
having become a natural repertoire for many, he speaks about his work in
increasing simplicity, of depth and width. Jokingly, he says, in reality
he is a philosopher, and he just applies it somewhat in this work. He is
writing a number of books about what he has been "pondering upon.
" Now, at the end of 2004 he does what some of us have been waiting for : He offers a retreat called "Going with the love of God". |