When Help Weakens: Bert Hellinger’s Five Orders of Helping
When Help Weakens: Bert Hellinger’s Five Orders of Helping
Not all help helps. A therapist can be devoted, sensitive, and full of good intentions, and still do for the client something that belongs to them to do themselves. She can understand their pain so deeply that she stops meeting their responsibility. She can want so badly for them to feel good that it becomes hard for her to bear the pain, the choice, or the cost that they themselves need to carry.
Bert Hellinger was very sharp on this point. For him, the desire to help does not yet make the help good. Help that crosses the boundaries of the person before us may actually weaken the very one we seek to strengthen. This is one of the reasons I return again and again to Bert Hellinger’s five orders of helping. They place before me a question I want to keep asking even after years in the therapy room: When I help now, whom am I actually helping?
Does my intervention serve the person before me, or does it soothe something in me? Can I see a person suffering without rushing to rescue them? Am I able to honor a choice that is not the choice I would make? Can I stay very close without taking the life of the person before me into my own hands?
Hellinger was not a man of many shades. He formulated orders, boundaries, and distinctions in a sharp and sometimes absolute manner. I see more nuance than he did, and yet there is something in his distilled gaze that removes for a moment all the explanations we tell ourselves as therapists and leaves us with a simple and not always comfortable question: Does my help strengthen the person before me, or does it make me more necessary in their life?
I bring Bert Hellinger’s words in my own translation, without softening them and without adapting them to what I think today. Afterward, I will return to his five orders and do what I like to do when reading Hellinger: agree, argue, add the nuances I see today, and examine what I take with me into the therapy room.
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Bert Hellinger’s Five Orders of Helping
Introduction
Let us be quiet, relaxed, and collected, ready for something new.
I would like to say something about psychological disorders.
How do they arise? How is a psychological disorder created in a person?
Psychological disturbances arise from disconnection or conflict, and are usually related to parents.
When a person is disconnected from one or both parents, they lose energy and strength. They weaken and begin to develop physical and psychological symptoms.
The solution is very simple—healing involves reconciliation and connection between what has been separated.
How is this achieved? What is required of the person offering help for it to succeed?—
They must be in contact with their parents and their lineage, embrace their fate and their personal guilt, and most importantly, recognize that they are part of the picture.
Let’s do a small demonstration exercise.
Close your eyes and feel your parents with you, in your body.
Everything we have in us comes from our parents from the beginning.
We are our parents.
Open up from within until you can feel the presence of both your parents as one unit,
exactly as they are and as they were,
without wishing they were different.
Feel the grandparents,
and their parents,
and everyone who belongs and belonged to your family,
those who died young,
and those who were not included.
Feel everyone present in your body.
Accept everyone within you.
Get closer to them and allow them to hug you and unite with you.
Unite together.
Feel your unique destiny, stemming from your parents and your lineage, and also from your actions and your personal guilt.
Say in your heart: Yes, this is my destiny and I accept it.
Now feel that you are connected to something more, coming from your soul, beyond your parents and your lineage.
You are connected to something greater that holds you all together in a timeless space.
From here stem your purpose or mission and the energy to realize them.
Agreeing to this releases you.
You are filled with something bigger and more meaningful.
Now, when a patient comes to you for help, you can look at them and see in them their parents as they are or as they were, and agree to it with love and respect.
You can see their grandparents, their parents, and all who died young or were excluded from their family system.
Everyone is present before you through the patient, and before everyone you bow.
You can ask for their help.
Then the help for the patient is not only on your shoulders, and you become a channel for their lineage that supports them.
Everyone together is a partner in the act of healing.
Now you can also accept the patient’s destiny and fate, and agree to it with an open heart.
What is help?
Helping is an art that requires learning and practice.
It requires observation, insight, and the ability to discern what is appropriate and what is beyond, what leads to a broader understanding.
Help as Creating Balance
We all need the help of others to develop, and we depend on our ability to help others to thrive. Without the ability to help, we become isolated and cannot flourish.
Providing help benefits both the receiver and the giver, and fosters a balanced relationship.
In the relationship between parents and children, there is no equal balance. Parents give and children receive. Here, balance is achieved in a different way, through honoring the gift of life and passing it on.
Giving and Taking
Giving and receiving operate on two levels.
The first level occurs between equals and maintains balance through mutual exchange.
The second level concerns relationships between parents and children or between authority and subordinates.
In these situations, the process of giving and receiving is like a river, including everything in its flow. This form of exchange is deeper and broader, and it looks to the future.
For assistance to be effective, the helper must first receive what they themselves need. Only then does the true ability to give develop in them.
Successful assistance also assumes that the recipient of the help actually wants and needs what is being offered. Otherwise, attempts to help may create distance instead of connection.
The First Order of Helping
The first order of help assumes that we can only offer what we have, and expect only what we truly need.
The first disruption in help occurs when we try to give what we do not have, or take what we do not need. It also occurs when someone holds expectations or demands that cannot be fulfilled, or when a person carries a burden that another should carry themselves.
Giving and receiving have limits. Recognizing these limits and respecting them is a fundamental condition for correct help.
This approach is characterized by humility. It includes a conscious decision not to interfere when the intervention stems from expectations or suffering that do not belong to us.
Family constellation reveals the resilience required of both the helper and the one seeking help, and reminds us that humility and self-restraint sometimes challenge accepted perceptions of help, and may even provoke criticism. Yet, this is the correct position.
The Second Order of Helping
Help supports survival and growth, which are influenced by internal and external factors. We must recognize these factors.
The issue is particularly relevant to personal tasks, which are internal factors. Involvement in the destinies of others and unconditional love, motivated by a sense of conscience, are sometimes based on irrational beliefs.
Many people offer help not because they were asked, but because they are unable to bear the situation. As a result, the recipient of the help feels that their acceptance stems from pressure or a need to alleviate the helper’s discomfort.
Thus, the act of helping becomes an act of taking, and receiving help becomes an act of giving.
A more precise approach requires respect for the situation as it is, and intervention only to the extent that reality allows.
This approach is characterized by restraint and strength. When we ignore reality and try to help at any cost, both the helper and the helped are weakened. This is a violation of the second order of helping.
The Archetype of Helping
A basic model of help is expressed in the connection between a parent and a child, and especially between a mother and her child.
Parents give and children receive. Parents are big and strong, children are small and vulnerable. Out of the deep love between them, the process of giving and receiving is almost boundless. Children expect almost everything from their parents, and parents are willing to give almost everything. This is appropriate as long as the children are small. As the children mature, the balance changes.
Setting boundaries does not diminish love.
Boundaries actually allow children to develop and become adults.
When parents gradually withdraw and disappoint their children’s expectations, they help them break free from dependence and become independent. Thus, the children take their place in the adult world, and move from a movement of taking to a movement of giving.
The Third Order of Helping
Many professionals believe that they should help patients as parents help their children. Patients also sometimes expect the therapist to fulfill a parental role, and provide the love and care they lacked. When the therapist responds to this expectation, a prolonged and dependent relationship is created. Gradually, they become a parental figure, setting boundaries and disappointing, and the patient responds to them as they responded to their parents.
Thus, a dynamic of transference and countertransference is created, perpetuating the childish connection and hindering growth. This position hinders both the patient and the therapist.
In certain cases, a temporary parental role may help—for example, when completing a developmental movement that was interrupted. Even then, the therapist represents the real parents and does not replace them. This allows reconciliation with the parents, and the therapeutic relationship ends from a place of autonomy.
The third order of help emphasizes treating adult patients as equals.
The therapist is not a parental substitute. This is a more sober and modest position, and it is fundamentally different from traditional psychotherapy.
The Fourth Order of Helping
The client is not an isolated entity; they are embedded within their family. When we see them as part of a whole family system, their needs and obligations become clear. Looking at their parents, ancestors, partner, and children provides a broad picture of their situation.
The empathy required here is systemic and not personal. The focus is not on a personal connection with the patient, but on the entire system. When we ignore figures that have been marginalized or excluded, we sometimes miss the key to the solution.
Adult patients experience this approach as empowering. They feel supported by the entire system, and not dependent on one person.
The Fifth Order of Helping
Family constellation seeks to connect what has been separated and lead to reconciliation, especially with parents. Reconciliation becomes possible when we stop judging people or actions as good or bad.
When a facilitator adopts an accusatory stance and joins the complaints of the client, conflict and division are created instead of connection. Reconciliation requires an open heart towards everyone.
The fifth order, and the highest of all, is loving every person as they are. True help is given without judgment and without a sense of moral superiority.
A Special Perspective
These guidelines should not be implemented rigidly and intellectually only. Openness to the current context and intuitive listening to what seeks to occur are required. This is a broad consciousness, seeing the person in their entirety, without an agenda, and with sensitivity to the next step.
Guidance arises simultaneously from internal and external sources. Perception and action merge.
A constellation is a short and focused intervention. It reveals the next step and then withdraws, to leave the person free and independent. This is a modest therapeutic method, knowing when to enter and when to withdraw.
Observation, Perception, Insight, Intuition, and Harmonious Being
- Observation focuses on details with great precision, but may miss the big picture.
- Perception creates an overall view and places the details in their context.
- Insight combines both and enables deep understanding.
- Intuition points to the next step in action.
Alignment, deep empathy, is a full attunement to the person in front of us, to their history, to their destiny, and to their limitations. In this state, prejudices and judgments recede, and accurate help is made possible. After that, everyone returns to their path. The connection does not create dependence, but independence.
Bert Hellinger
After Hellinger: What Do the Five Orders of Helping Demand of Us as Therapists?
There is something almost seductive about the role of helper. Someone comes to me because they are in pain, I have experience, knowledge, and tools, and they ask me for help. It is very easy to move from here to the feeling that I need to know what is right for them, to want the change for them, and even to work harder than they do so they can reach it.
Hellinger brings me back to a different place. The person sitting before me arrived with a whole life before entering the room and will continue living it after leaving. I can accompany, ask, reflect, confront, and offer a perspective. The life itself remains theirs. This, in my view, is the great demand of the five orders of helping: to be very significant in another person’s process, and to know where I end and they begin.
Am I Helping You, or Is It Hard for Me to See You Suffer?
This is one of the places where Hellinger hits, in my view, a painful precision. He invites the helper to examine whether the help arises from what the person before them truly needs, or from their own difficulty bearing reality. This is a question I want to keep asking myself as a therapist.
Can I sit with pain without rushing to erase it? Meet a couple in crisis without needing them to stay together? Accompany a person who chooses differently than I would choose? The ability to bear the client’s reality can be a very deep form of respect.
Here too the boundary is delicate. I want to be involved, sensitive, and present. I want the person before me to feel that I am with them. And within this closeness, I want to leave in their hands the power to meet their own life.
I Am Your Therapist. I Am Not Your Mother
Hellinger is also very sharp about the danger of the therapist becoming a substitute parent. I understand the pull toward that very well. When a person tells me they were not seen, not protected, or had no one to lean on, something in me can want to give them what was missing.
A therapeutic relationship can be very deep and beneficial. I also want it to strengthen the person’s ability to meet their own strengths, choices, and responsibility. I can acknowledge your pain without making you helpless, and be close to you without taking responsibility for your life.
Perhaps here lies one of the most important distinctions I take from Hellinger: Empathy does not require me to rescue you. It requires me to be able to meet you.
Understanding Your Pain Without Joining Your Narrative
This is the most important part for me in couples work. A person tells me they were hurt, and I want to fully acknowledge their pain. Alongside this acknowledgment, I hold another distinction: Their experience is real; their interpretation of what happened is still worth examining.
When a client tells me “He doesn’t love me,” I want to understand what happened between them that led her to feel this way. I want to know what he did, what she asked for, what she heard, and what she felt. And I leave in the room the possibility that “He doesn’t love me” is the meaning that formed within her from what happened, and not the only possible fact.
I can stand beside you without standing against someone else.
In couples work, this sentence is especially important to me. If I join one partner against the other, I have lost the couple. My role is to succeed in seeing the pain of both, even when they themselves still struggle to see each other.
Seeing the One Who Hurt Is Not Erasing the Harm
There is a point in Hellinger’s words that I want to sharpen, because it is easy to understand it differently than I understand it. When he asks us to stop dividing the system into good and bad and to give place to everyone who belongs to it, he is not asking us to deny what happened or cancel the harm.
This is one of the significant things for me in the systemic view. A person can belong to the system and also be responsible for an act that harmed another person. I can see them as a whole person, be interested in their history and the place from which they acted, and leave with them fully the responsibility for what they did.
This distinction is especially important when it comes to violence, abuse, exploitation, or deep harm. Acknowledging the perpetrator’s belonging does not require the harmed person to approach them, forgive them, or renew contact with them. Seeing everyone is not a demand to treat everyone the same way.
This is one of the places where Hellinger demands that we hold two truths together: to see the person and not erase them from the system, and to see clearly also the harm and the responsibility for it. There is no need to choose between the two.
It is possible to give the perpetrator a place in the system, and leave the harm exactly where it belongs: in their responsibility.
Good Help Leaves Something in the Hands of the Person Before Us
In the end, the five orders of helping bring me back to one question: Do I know my place? Can I be significant without being the center, offer without needing my offer to be accepted, see pain without becoming a rescuer, and accompany a person without taking into my hands the responsibility for their life?
This is not a distant position. For me, it holds a great deal of trust in the person before me and in their ability to carry their life, to choose, and to grow. Perhaps one of the hardest things we learn as therapists is that good help is not measured by how much we did for the person before us. It is also measured by how much we managed to leave in their hands.
For Therapists
The five orders of helping are also questions I bring with me to supervision: where does the therapist stand within the system, what is activated in them, and when does the desire to help begin to take from the client something that belongs to them.
If you work with couples or individuals and want to reflect also on your position within the case, you can read more about the professional supervision I offer to therapists.
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Nice to meet you, I'm Sivan Avni
Expert in couples therapy for relationships without a supportive family safety net.
Developer of the Couples Constellation approach: a systemic-emotional therapy that brings the couple’s relational dynamics into contact with unspoken family patterns, alongside practical tools that enable movement, connection, and the creation of a deep partnership.
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