23Chapter 19. The New Shamans: Bert Hellinger and Family Constellations

On an ordinary evening, about forty people gather in a small hall at one of Moscow’s spiritual development centers. Most are women aged thirty to fifty. A seat for the weekend workshop costs forty-five thousand rubles. The facilitator—a man or woman dressed casually, with a calm and observant gaze—stands ready. At the center of the room lies an empty space soon to be filled with living bodies.

Anna steps forward. Her whole body shakes. Anxiety throbs at her temples, and the weight of her crumbling marriage presses like a stone on her chest. The facilitator locks eyes with her. His voice slices through the silence: “Choose from the group who will represent your mother. Your father. Your husband. Your deceased sister. Yourself.” The puzzle is cast. Anna’s trembling finger jabs at other participants, who obediently step forward. The facilitator arranges them like pieces of a cipher: one facing a blank wall, another turning her back to Anna, a third dropping to her knees. The hidden mechanism is laid bare. Then comes the phrase that strikes like a gut punch: “Let the field speak.”

The figures in the center begin to move. Broken phrases. Sobs. Someone weeps. Someone collapses to their knees. “I feel rage,” grits the woman playing Anna’s mother, veins bulging in her neck, fists clenched. “I can’t breathe,” rasps another—the stand-in for the dead sister—gasping for air as though drowning on dry land. “I’m afraid to look at you,” blurts the “husband.” The facilitator doesn’t miss a beat. He narrates. Interprets. Drives the same point home, unraveling the hidden pattern. The family system rejects her. The dead sister never took her rightful place. The answer lies in ritual. Anna must bow to her, begging forgiveness.

An hour and a half later, Anna is weeping. The facilitator closes the session with words echoing Hellinger’s mantra: “I acknowledge you. You belong to this family. Now you may return to your place. I will stay in mine.” The group applauds. Anna steps outside, feeling she’s undergone something profound—though she can’t name exactly what.

Two months later, her anxiety remains. Her marriage is still strained. But she’s already signed up for another weekend workshop.

You sit in a room. Across from you, a stranger stares through you and whispers, “Stand where your grandmother would.” You obey. Within ten seconds, you’re crying—though you never met her. This is Bert Hellinger’s family constellations therapy. A method that, in the Russian-speaking world, has ballooned into a mass industry. The numbers: One of the largest industry portals reports nearly a thousand certified practitioners in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan—and that’s just the registered ones. The unregistered? Far more. The actual number of facilitators dwarfing official counts. Moscow. St. Petersburg. Yekaterinburg. Baku. Almaty. Thousands of workshops yearly. The market is valued at billions of rubles annually. And this is only the beginning.

The people behind it aren’t outright frauds. Many genuinely believe in what they’re doing. They’ve completed expensive training programs. They read books. They speak at conferences. They see themselves as helping professionals.

And yet the entire industry grew from the biography of a single man—a man whose life and worldview deserve closer examination.

Anton Hellinger. That was his name at birth. 1925. Leimen, southwestern Germany. A deeply Catholic family. Anton, named after Saint Anthony of Padua. Faith became his secret shield. Later, he would claim that his Catholic upbringing protected him from the plague of National Socialism. But how does one resist when ideology bears down on young souls? He refuses to join the Hitler Youth. Risks his life—attends underground Catholic gatherings. And lands on the radar. The Gestapo takes notice. 1942. Seventeen years old. Conscripted into the Wehrmacht. Sent to the Western Front, straight into the slaughter. He survives. But in 1945, at twenty—capture. Belgium. A POW camp, barbed wire, hopelessness. Yet Hellinger doesn’t surrender. He escapes. Makes his way through occupied Europe and returns to Germany.

After the war, Anton joined a Catholic order. Took holy vows. For sixteen years, he lived in South Africa. The backcountry—the rural districts of KwaZulu-Natal. The Zulu people. What kept him there for half his life? The answer lay in blood and soil. Hellinger later claimed he was struck by how traditional African societies pulsed with clan ties, how ancestral reverence permeated everything, how unshakable the hierarchy of lineage was. These were more than customs—they were systems in which the dead gripped the living by the throat, refusing to let them stray. These very themes—the invisible chains of generations—became the core of his method. The revelation was close.

In the 1970s, Hellinger returned to Europe, left the order, and married. He changed his name from Anton to Bert—a childhood nickname. He began studying psychotherapy, trained in group dynamics, Gestalt therapy, transactional analysis, and family therapy. He was particularly influenced by Virginia Satir and Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy—both pioneering family therapists of the mid-20th century. Boszormenyi-Nagy, a Hungarian-American psychiatrist, developed the concepts of “generational ledgers” and “contextual therapy,” emphasizing the weight of family debts and loyalties passed down through generations. This was, in fact, a crucial—and largely scientifically grounded—field of family therapy.

By the early 1990s, Hellinger had developed his own method. He began holding seminars in Germany. The method was called Familienstellen—“family constellations.” It quickly gained traction. By the late 1990s, Hellinger was conducting trainings worldwide. In the early 2000s, mass workshops took off in Russia, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa. His books were translated into dozens of languages. He became a cult figure.

What are family constellations – technically speaking?

In Hellinger’s classic version, a group participant steps into the center and asks others to “represent” members of their family. The facilitator arranges these stand-ins intuitively or as instructed by the client. Then, allegedly, the “field” begins to “speak” through them: the representatives feel emotions, utter phrases, move—not as actors playing roles, but supposedly as conduits of information from the client’s actual familial system.

Hellinger claimed families are bound by invisible “orders of love” — Ordnungen der Liebe. But what if this fragile framework cracks? If someone in the lineage was pushed into the shadows? Forgotten. Unmourned. Denied their place, erased from memory, or taken too soon. Hellinger knew the answer: the breach doesn’t vanish. It ruptures through time, embedding itself in the next generations. Symptoms. Illnesses. Failures. An inability to breathe freely or be happy. A family curse? No, Hellinger insisted. A systemic glitch. The constellation’s task is to untangle this dead knot. Restore order. Find the excluded. Bow before them. Acknowledge. Return them to their place. And then, according to Hellinger, the family secret would unravel: “the energy of love” would flow correctly again, and the client would experience healing.

On paper, it sounds beautiful. Even moving. The idea that we’re tied to our ancestors—that forgotten family tragedies shape our lives—has deep roots in human culture. Ancient peoples knew this. Ancestral remembrance rituals are integral to nearly all traditional societies.

But the key question about family constellations isn’t “Is this a beautiful idea?” The key question is: “Does it work? Is there proof?”

This question has a simple, unambiguous answer.

Family constellations. Zero randomized controlled trials. Not one. The entire body of medical literature is a barren wasteland: no published studies in major peer-reviewed journals demonstrate the method outperforms placebo for any specific disorder. Zilch. So why do thousands still flock to it blindly? A glance at the alternative front—a handful of dissertations and small-scale studies. Evidence at last? Hardly. Who conducts these inquiries? Proponents of the method themselves. Where are they published? In niche family constellation journals. A closed loop. And when you strip away the scientific veneer, a shocking truth is laid bare: the methodology of these studies crumbles under even the most basic scrutiny of evidence-based medicine. The effect is revelatory—beneath a thin layer of jargon, there’s nothing but empty space.

The German Society for Systemic Constellations (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Systemische Aufstellungen) — a professional organization in Germany — publicly distanced itself from Hellinger as early as the beginning of the 2000s. In 2004, nearly two hundred certified constellation practitioners signed a declaration dissociating themselves from Hellinger, asserting that he had departed from the fundamental principles of systemic therapy.

Hellinger’s central concept — the “knowing field” (wissendes Feld), which supposedly transmits information from the client’s actual family through the representatives — has no confirmation in physics, biology, or psychology. No physical mechanism explains how strangers standing in the middle of a room can “perceive” information about a person’s family that they are seeing for the first time in their lives.

What actually happens in constellations? The scientific answer is ruthless in its simplicity: suggestion, role-play, emotional expression. A participant steps into the center. Their body is tense, pulse racing. They have already slipped into a hypnotic state — a paralyzing anticipation of revelation. And in this trance, they choose “representatives” by no means at random. Hidden associations, outward resemblance. The brain imperceptibly reads and projects images. But who is directing this performance? The “representatives” receive cues. Implicit, almost imperceptible signals from the facilitator. Barely noticeable gestures from the client themselves. And there they go — playing fiercely, wrenchingly, wringing every last drop of emotion out of their roles. Sometimes this ecstasy helps the client experience something — like catharsis in theater or art therapy. Sometimes it doesn’t. Nothing supernatural is happening here. No mystical field. There is not a single piece of evidence that the effect of constellations exceeds that of an ordinary therapeutic placebo. The illusion is exposed.

Now, on to what is more concerning.

In the early 2000s, Hellinger made a series of public statements that shocked even many of his own students.

On victims and rapists. Hellinger insisted, methodically and mercilessly. A victim of rape or incest must “bow down” to the rapist. Accept him as part of her family system. Forgive. Acknowledge him as her “equal.” Refusal of such “acceptance,” according to Hellinger, blocks healing irreversibly. But how? How do you acknowledge as an equal the one who trampled your will and embodied your worst nightmare? This stands in direct contradiction to everything contemporary trauma literature says. In evidence-based trauma therapy — whether EMDR, prolonged exposure therapy, or cognitive processing therapy — the ironclad first rule is: never force a victim to forgive the rapist. Forgiveness, if it comes at all, is always a late and deeply individual process. Imposing it is not healing. It is re-victimization. A blow struck exactly where the wound is already open.

Hitler. Norway, 2007. Hellinger walks onto the stage — and says what critics will immediately label as apologetics. He has read poems about Hitler. His own poems. In them is a line documented in academic dissertations: Hitler “was no better or worse than any other human being.” Not better. Not worse. Just — like everyone else. Then it goes further. Hellinger speaks of the need to “accept Hitler.” Not to condemn. Not to curse. To accept. As part of the German “family system.” And right on its heels — a comparison that chills the blood: just as a r••• victim must accept her rapist. One phrase. One image. And a whole abyss of questions. What lies behind these words — a philosophy of reconciliation or a justification of evil? Where is the line between acceptance and forgiveness? And who has the right to draw it?

On homosexuality. In a number of public appearances, Hellinger claimed that homosexuality is a “systemic disorder,” usually connected to a person occupying the place of a forgotten deceased relative within the family. Contemporary scientific psychiatry classifies homosexuality not as a disorder but as a variant of the norm (the diagnosis was removed from the DSM as early as 1973 and from ICD-10 in 1992). The notion that homosexuality can be “cured” through constellation work is a form of conversion therapy, which is banned or condemned in most developed countries as harmful pseudomedicine.

On incest. In several works, Hellinger claimed that incest sometimes serves a “systemic function” within the family — for instance, preserving “order” or “compensating” for an absent man. This is, to put it mildly, a dubious interpretation. To put it bluntly — it is a dangerous idea that potentially justifies the sexual abuse of children as a systemic “necessity.”

On women. Hellinger systematically asserted that in a “properly” ordered family, a woman follows the man; that her place is “below” the man; that violating this “order” leads to family misfortune. This is patriarchal ideology, not psychotherapy.

It must be said honestly: not all practitioners of family constellations share these views. Many, especially in Russia and the West, work with gentler, modified versions of the method. Many do not repeat Hellinger’s openly misogynistic or homophobic statements. Many insist: “We use the technique, not the ideology.”

But here an important question arises. If the technique is separable from its author’s ideology, what, exactly, remains as its technical core? Arranging figures in space and reading their “responses”? Yet this device is used in classical family psychotherapy (Virginia Satir, Minuchin’s structural family therapy) without the mystical overlay. These evidence-based methods require no belief in a “knowing field” or “orders of love.” They work through recognized psychological mechanisms: visualization, role-play, communication training, systemic reframing.

When Hellinger’s students claim they preserve the “technique” while rejecting his “ideology,” what they’re often preserving is the mystical core of his method, while discarding his most publicly objectionable statements. Yet, it’s this mystical core that turns constellation work into pseudoscience. Remove it, and what remains is simply a role-playing exercise—hardly something worthy of charging forty-five thousand rubles for a weekend session.

The professional evaluation of family constellation therapy in contemporary scientific literature boils down to several key points.

First, the method fails to meet basic criteria for psychotherapy: there’s no structured diagnostic process, no clear contractual agreement, no supervision, no confidentiality standards (constellations are conducted publicly, in a group of strangers), no alternative methods when the approach proves ineffective, and no mechanism for informed consent.

Second, the method is dangerous for individuals with serious mental disorders. Participants with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, severe depression, or PTSD experience intense emotional stimulation without any psychiatric support. Documented cases include acute decompensations following constellation sessions, including psychotic episodes and, in rare instances, suicidal attempts.

Third, the method violates the fundamental ethical code of psychotherapy. The facilitator puts on a quasi-therapeutic mask without possessing any actual qualifications as a psychotherapist. What do they do? They expose the client’s most intimate family secrets. And to whom? To a group of strangers. Outsiders stare bluntly at raw, uncovered wounds. But that’s not all. They pass judgment. They issue direct commands: “Bow to your mother!” “Forgive your father!” “Leave your former partner!” On what are these harsh verdicts based? Solely on subjective “field perceptions.” None of these practices has the slightest chance of surviving within evidence-based psychotherapy.

Fourth, the method’s commercial success stems precisely from its ineffectiveness. A paradox? No, just the cold logic of the market. Imagine if a single constellation session solved the problem—the client would leave forever, disappearing into obscurity. But it doesn’t solve anything. So the client returns. Again and again. Why? “Apparently, I need to work more on my family system,” whispers the inner voice. “Apparently, there are forgotten ancestors.” “Apparently, I need to do a constellation with other representatives.” Every phrase is a new hook. Every doubt a new twist. Participation turns into a years-long dependence on the facilitator. And dependence becomes a steady, inexhaustible source of income for them.

Finally, and most painfully, there are the consequences for psychiatric patients.

In my practice, they come back repeatedly. People who have attended constellation sessions for years. A thirty-five-year-old woman. Early signs of bipolar disorder. For three consecutive years, she attended workshops. For three years, they “worked on her lineage.” For three years, she was told: “You need to accept your ancestors. You need to forgive your mother. You need to take your place in the system.” But what if the symptoms aren’t a “call of the blood”? Periodic hypomanias with the risk of escalating into mania. Depressive episodes. Sleep disturbances. All of this was mercilessly interpreted as “ancestral messages.” For three years, her true illness was masked as mysticism. When she finally crossed the threshold of a psychiatric office, it was a full-blown manic episode. No insight. A real risk to her job. A real threat to her family. She heard her diagnosis for the first time in her life.

She’s thirty-five. Three years ago, she could have been prescribed lithium or another mood stabilizer to regulate her condition, allowing her to live and work normally. Instead, she spent all this time being told about “family constellations.” She left my office with a prescription—and the bitter realization that three years of her life had been stolen.

Bert Hellinger died in 2019 at ninety-three. His commercial empire lives on. His method continues to be marketed—especially aggressively in Russian-speaking regions, where weak regulation of psychological services makes it a lucrative industry.

Every time I see an ad for yet another “Hellinger Constellations—Transform Your Family Legacy in One Weekend!” workshop, I think of that patient. Of her three lost years. Of all the others like her who haven’t made it to my office yet. And of those who never will.

I’m writing this chapter not to offend any particular practitioner. Most are true believers—people who paid dearly for their training, convinced they’re helping others. I’m writing this for patients and their families. For those facing a choice: where to turn with psychological distress, anxiety, depression, or family struggles.

If you’re reading this—stop. Don’t go to a constellations facilitator. It’s a trap. Go to a clinical psychologist. To someone whose training is backed by evidence. Go to a psychotherapist practicing cognitive-behavioral, systemic-family, psychodynamic, or another science-based modality. Unsure about the professional you’re about to see? Vet them. Ask to see their state-certified diploma, professional association membership, publication record. A real specialist will hand you the documents—calmly, without offense or evasion. A pseudo-specialist will balk. Their face will twitch. They’ll redirect the conversation, steer you away from the point. Fear that shadow.

Constellations won’t “heal your family legacy.” Such a thing doesn’t exist. What does exist is your mind, your body, your family, your present environment. These can be worked with. A “family legacy” can’t. Because it isn’t real.

RED FLAG. If a practitioner blames your current symptoms on your ancestors—“generational trauma,” “systemic entanglements,” “unresolved family history”—you’re not in therapy. Your struggles aren’t buried in dead people’s biographies. Walk out.