“I love you” is probably one of the sentences we most want to hear from someone we love. We say it in moments of closeness, after a fight, before sleep, at airport goodbyes, and in a message in the middle of a workday. We think we know exactly what it means.
Bert Hellinger gives this sentence a different weight. For him, love does not end with the feeling I have toward the person before me. It brings me into contact with everything that belongs to their life: with what was before we met, with the people they came from, with what has already happened and cannot be changed, and also with the fact that I do not know where their life will yet take them.
Perhaps this is why Hellinger describes the soul as trembling when these words are truly spoken. When I say “I love you,” I bind myself to a person whose life did not begin with me and is not in my control.
I translated the following essay by Bert Hellinger into Hebrew several years ago. I bring it here as it is.
Who is entitled to express such a sentence?
What happens in the soul of the person who says this sentence?
What happens in the soul of the one who receives it?
The speaker’s soul trembles, seriously. Something happens in it, something that develops like a wave that sweeps.
He may defend himself out of anxiety that he does not know where this wave will lead him.
The subject of the sentence also trembles;
He feels that the sentence will change something within him,
Afraid of the commitment it represents and how it will affect his life forever.
There is fear here: will we be able to stand up to this sentence?
Will we agree with the consequences it will cause?
It does not matter which of the two says the sentence and to whom it is addressed,
And there is no more beautiful sentence that is able to excite so much and connect us so intimately with another person.
“I love you” is a modest sentence.
It simultaneously diminishes us and also greatly enlarges us.
It makes us deeply human.
I want to tell you something about love that is likely to be different from what you expect.
During the constellations we sometimes hear the sentence: “Let’s continue to love”.
What does it mean to continue to love?
We know the phenomenon called “being in a relationship out of love” – we are connected in a very special love to certain people:
Our parents, our partners, our children.
The very fact that we are so connected to those people – causes us to become separate from other people.
“To continue to love” means wanting everything as it is, accepting it in the soul as it is.
It means that we agree with everything as it is,
That we want it as it is.
It also means that we agree with all of life as it is.
Agreeing with our lives as they are,
With the lives of others as they are,
Agreeing with creation as it is.
The struggle is also part of life;
The lives of some struggle with the lives of others for territory.
When we continue to love – we also want this reality:
The contradictions,
The struggle,
The victory,
The fall,
To live and die,
The living and the dead,
The past as it was,
The future as it will be.
In this love our opinion is open –
We agree with and about everything.
This love means surrendering to everything, it is truly religious.
In this love we are full and peaceful.
Looking quietly at what is happening,
Surrendering to our destiny with confidence and respecting the destiny of others and the destiny of the world.
“To continue to love” means to be in devotion to everything,
This has implications for our daily lives;
Those who continue to love in this way will be able to look peacefully at the world as it is:
Happiness and unhappiness,
Life and death,
The complications and the suffering.
Whoever loves everything and confidently devotes himself to everything acts in accordance with the flow of life, the flow of life, without pretense, in constant agreement and in accordance with life.
Those who look at others in this spirit and do so without worrying about others – will be free.
So are those who will receive help.
Everyone has the same greatness and the same importance.
No one is better than the other and no one is worse than the other.
In summary, we are simply here.
Bert Hellinger, free translation from: Hellinger Magazine, May 2005
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When I return to this essay today, I pause less on the question of whether I can accept this or that trait in my partner. Hellinger asks me to look further.
The person I love did not begin their life the day they met me. They had parents before me, family before me, loves and connections before me. There were losses, wounds, choices, successes, and failures. There are people who belong to their story even if they are no longer in their life, and there are events that have already happened and none of us can go back and change.
When I love someone, all of this comes with them into the relationship. I can want to be home for them, a safe place and meaningful love, and still I arrive at a life that has already begun. Not everything in the person I love began with me, and not everything in them can be resolved through me.
There is, in my eyes, much humility in this recognition.
From Hellinger’s systemic perspective, the person before me does not stand alone. Behind them are their parents, and behind them their parents. They belong to a family and a story that began long before they were born.
It may be that your family is difficult for me. It may be that I see things that were done to you and I wish they had not happened. It may be that something from the home you came from continues to find expression in our relationship and hurts us both. And still, this is the life that came to you through these people.
Recognizing this belonging does not require me to love your family members, to agree with what they did, or to maintain contact with them. It asks me to see a simple fact: These are the people you came from. They are part of your story. I meet you when all of this already belongs to your life.
If I ask you to erase your family, your past, or what you have been through so that you can be the person I want you to be, I am asking you to come to me without parts of your life.
Hellinger offers a different movement: to see the person together with what belongs to them.
Here, in my eyes, the essay becomes especially piercing.
Hellinger does not speak only of the past “as it was.” He also writes of “the future as it will be,” of life and death, of victory and fall, and later of honoring the other’s fate.
When we love someone we almost immediately begin to imagine the future with them. We want to know they will stay, that they will be healthy, that we will grow old together, that the home we built will remain our home. We plan next year and the next decade, and within the planning it is easy to forget something basic: life has never given us a guarantee.
The person I love will continue to live their life. They will change, make decisions, and meet things that none of us can anticipate. Their body will change, my body will change, and our shared life will also meet a reality we do not yet know.
When I read Hellinger, I hear within his words a recognition that is very difficult to bear:
The life of the person I love is not my possession. Their fate is not mine either.
I can walk beside them, love them, choose them, and build a life with them. We can influence each other deeply. I cannot guarantee their fate, and even the greatest love does not give me control over the path life will take with them.
Perhaps this is part of the trembling Hellinger describes.
The word “fate” can sound harsh to the contemporary therapeutic ear. For Hellinger it is essential, and therefore in my eyes it is right to keep it and not rush to translate it into a more comfortable psychological term.
To honor someone’s fate means to recognize that their life belongs to them. I can care for them, help, be involved, ask something of them, and fight beside them when needed. Within all of this remains a boundary that love does not erase: I can stand beside you without taking your life from you.
This is a very significant movement in relationship. When I love you, it is natural that I will want to protect you from pain, that you make good decisions, that you take care of yourself, that you heal, that you succeed. Love can easily turn concern into a supposed knowing of what needs to happen in the other’s life.
Hellinger reminds me that the person before me is larger than my desire to save them. I can be beside them. Their life I leave in their hands.
Precisely in the face of the devotion Hellinger describes, it is important to me to also hold this place.
If I honor the fate of the person I love, I am also required to honor my own. To see you as you are does not obligate me to remain in every reality. I can love you and say that something you do hurts me. I can honor your path and choose not to walk it. I can set a boundary, ask for change, or recognize that there is a path I do not want to be my path.
Your fate I leave in your hands. For my life I take responsibility.
This sentence is especially important to me in couples work. It allows recognition of the boundary between two people without turning it into disconnection: I can be very close to you, and still I cannot live your life in your place, just as you cannot live my life in my place.
After I read this essay, I no longer hear in this sentence only a declaration of feeling or acceptance of the character traits of the person before me. I hear in it something larger.
Perhaps this is the humility Hellinger speaks of. Love does not make me larger than the person I love, and does not make me larger than life. It binds me to them, and in the same breath asks me to remember that they are a whole person, with a past that preceded me and with a future I cannot know.
“I love you” then takes on a different meaning: I meet you with what was, with what is, and with what is yet to come. I walk beside you as long as our paths meet, and I leave to life what belongs to life.
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