Using the Orders in Realtime to Orient Facilitation

Richard Wallstein PhD, C.Psychol., AFBPsS, UKC Senior teaching faculty member; with a background in psychology and Gestalt psychotherapy and began studying Hellinger’s work in 1993, working with many practitioners. He has been leading workshops and trainings internationally for many years and has private psychotherapy and consulting/coaching practices in London. He was a founding board member of ISCA, the International Systemic Constellations Association.

What you learn/develop

The Orders are fundamental for forming a hypothesis and initial orientation to systemic work. A capacity to relate what one hears from the client to the Orders is thus essential.

What is the goal when we work systemically? To create an emotional response? To make something previously opaque suddenly clear? These events may occur but are not the aim of systemic work. Systemic work loosens the client’s present understanding so they may experience an alternative present. Thus, we need to understand our client’s issue to support their movement from a state of fixed unease to one of greater ease with respect to that issue. Systemic work bridges these two states. The metaphor is deliberate: Bridges have structure, and, if we wish to work effectively, we need to understand systemic therapeutic structures and learn to utilise them. The Orders are the structure. Absent this knowledge, what tends to happen is that facilitators often imagine that ‘the field’ will supply and apply that knowledge for them. This view leaves the client at risk and is based on a comprehension error – that the systemic field is oriented toward, understands, and provides what human beings (our clients) want and also saves the facilitator in the process. Rather, the facilitator, having learned and understood enough from the client to form a hypothesis, poses an experiment oriented toward the alternate present: the client and the field can then confirm, but not direct, the work the facilitator does.