Generational Trauma
There is a period in everyone’s life where they finally discover who they are and who they want to be in the world. To be more clear, this is the point where your conscious mind remembers– for your true self has never forgotten.
This is where we remember our gifts, our talents, and how we are to be of service to the rest of humanity. This is merely being our authentic selves. Our service is utilizing our gifts. Many people do not understand how inspiring it is to be in the presence of someone who is truly walking the path they were destined to walk. It inspires others to walk their own, in whatever fashion that may be.
This is the true mark of divinity, wisdom, and power. It is life-changing and life-giving.
Why don’t more people do this, then?
There are many reasons, and most can be traced back to the fear of rejection. Just like footprints in sand, there are legacies of rejection and fear that exist within the energetic templates of ourselves, and within our lineages. In fact, there are millions of experiences that we have in our lives that shape the person that we are. They have affected our subtle bodies within– and continue to affect our subtle bodies. The modern person understands this. It has been identified as “trauma.”
However, trauma, and I speak notably of fear in this instance, can be so impactful and resonant that it pervades not just an individual’s mind, but alters their DNA in such a way that is passed from generation to generation. This is why we see grandchildren leading eerily similar lives and having eerily similar life experiences as their grandparents, parents, or a distant great aunt who you’ve read about from an ancestry website.
I do not claim this to be an inherently bad thing. Again, I speak of shadows within a lineage that must be addressed and purified.
I was first introduced to this concept in an Indigenous Literature course I was taking in college. I fail to remember the name of the book and the author. It was a series of short stories, essays, and poetry that she wrote about coming to grips with her identity. She reflected on experiences that she had in her life while she was growing up that meant nothing to her in the moment she lived them, but had a significant role in shaping the person that she became. It was beautiful.
There was a chapter entitled “Generational Trauma” that really resonated with me, although I couldn’t articulate why it moved me as it did. The author noted moments of her childhood where her mother would scream and berate her because she suffered from alcohol abuse. As an adult, she looked at her mother’s own experiences in childhood, and realized that her grandmother raised her mother in a similar fashion– she also battled her demons with alcohol.
Her mother treated her terribly because this was simply the only way she knew how. That was how she was raised, and that was how she raised her child. The author understood this cycle of violence to stem from a much greater problem of needing an outlet to express and react to the violence that was occurring in their external world– the many atrocities being committed against them as a result of their Ponca identity and heritage. Fully aware of the context and the reasoning for her mother’s horrible behavior towards her, as well as her grandmother’s toward her own mother, the author wasn’t necessarily able to forgive, but she could understand. She exhibited a profound compassion, and decided that she would end the cycle of violence by becoming aware of these tendencies in her lineage, and noting when they arose within her.
I was so inspired when I first read this poem, and reflecting back on it, I realize that it was the start of my education and initiation into the lineage healing work that I do now. The author was correct when she formed the understanding that we carry the weight and wounds of family within us, but it expands so much further than that. We carry the wounds of not just the immediate family that raised us and that we interacted with– we carry the burdens of our entire lineages. Our past lives.
These wounds can manifest as repetitive events that happen in our lives, presenting themselves as opportunities for us to clear karmic events, and heal trauma that exists within us. I think as Westerners, we’ve become so ingrained with ideologies of individualization and embarking on our own path– which is all true– but we dismiss the effect of other influences in our lives, and entirely dismiss other forces at play that shape us into who we are.
I also suspect this is why there is such a deep rejection of spirit, and so many wounds that accompany religion in this country– but I digress.
Energetic Templates Within Genes
In elementary school, we were taught that genes directly affect our physical attributes: you have curly brown hair because your mother had curly brown hair, and you have green eyes because your father did. This is where the explanation of inheritance in our school systems ended, unfortunately.
As I make my way to my point, I need to discuss a couple of concepts.
- As within, so without, and as without, so within.
This is known as the Hermetic Law of Correspondence, and many people like to utilize it to understand why they’re not manifesting the things that they desire in their life. You attract more of what you are. You’re not getting your dream job because there is an aspect within your subconscious, or within your energetic body, that truly believes that you cannot attain the job you wanted for yourself.
This is true.
If we inherit external attributes of our physical vessels from our genes, why is it so far-fetched to draw the conclusion that we also carry energetic imprints, within these same genes, that influence our internal lives, as well?
In any standard doctor’s office visitation, especially during adolescence, they give their patient a sort of survey to ascertain if the patient is as risk of harming themselves, or shows any symptoms of depression. These are especially given to people who have histories of mental illness and depression in their families. We have come to the conclusion that these are just “psychological” illnesses that happened to be more prevalent in certain families, and never really bothered to ask why.
2) Energy is never created nor destroyed, just transmuted.
Thoughts, emotions, and feelings are all forms of energy. They don’t just arise, but they are tapped into. There is always, always, always a stimulus. Although discovering what it is may prove difficult at times.
The conscious mind, the tool that we have been trained to use since birth, is a prehistoric mechanism that fails to encompass and comprehend so much of what is. There are so many other minds at work within us that we cannot even begin to fathom. One of them being your body.
In my studies, I have found that illness, or dis- ease in the body, but particularly in the mind, is directly related to the physical manifestation of untreated energetic wounds and trauma that we have inherited from our lineage.
We understand that experiences shape who we are. The body has its own consciousness, and memory. It stores these experiences within you, and is in a constant state of remembrance whenever there is an event that triggers the emotional memory.
This is why the body reacts physically to mere thought. The body cannot distinguish between what was experienced in the past from the present moment. Or even from an event that you have personally never experienced, but someone in your lineage did.
The memory was stored within your physical body.
Your body is a mind of its own, and as such, carries its own memories.
“When emotions begin to chemically flood your body, you detect a change in your internal order (you’re thinking and feeling differently than you were moments before.) Naturally, when you notice this change in your internal state, you’ll pay attention to whoever or whatever in your external environment caused that change. When you identify whatever it was in your outer world that caused your internal change, that event in and of itself is called a memory. Neurologically and chemically, you encode that environmental information into your brain and body. Thus, you can remember experiences better because you recall how they felt at the time they happened– feelings and emotions are a chemical record of your past experiences.”
~~~ Breaking the Habit of Being You, Dispenza, 72
These emotions are not just encoded in your body, but into your genes. We inherit the physical vehicle for which we walk through our lives, but the way in which we walk is also greatly influenced by these energetic echoes of experiences that we’ve never had, but are assigned to heal.
The energy of rejection that your mother felt did not die with her, but was stored within you when you were birthed from her. Along with the genetic blueprint of your physical body, there is very much a genetic blueprint for your energetic body.
“You know that when you repeatedly re-create the same emotions until you cannot think any greater than how you feel, your feelings are not the means of your thinking. And since your feelings are a record of previous experiences, you’re thinking in the past. And, by quantum law, you create more of the past.”
~~~ Breaking the Habit of Being You, Dispenza, 72
I agree with Dr. Dispenza’s statement above, but to better tailor it to the topic of generational trauma– or ancestral miasma in indigenous culture– I would like to amend it by saying “You continue to channel more of previous wounds unless you create a new energetic template.”
The Legacy of Rocking the Boat
My father was a man who was deeply involved in church from a very early age. He was close with the pastor, and was his right-hand man for most matters in the church– something my grandparents were very proud of.
After some time, however, my father noticed the pastor partake in practices that went against his own preachings, and my father confronted him about it. Young and broken-hearted from seeing his father figure, and spiritual father figure, stoop so low, he was rash in his feelings of betrayal.
Perhaps the pastor was enjoying his position of power too much. Perhaps my father confronted him in a way that he felt he needed to defend himself, and there is more to the story, of course, that I omit.
My father’s family was banned from talking to him for years because of this fight, and we fled. For the first few years of my life, I thought my extended family only consisted of my aunt and grandmother on my mother’s side.
My mother and father continued to flee from state to state in a subconscious way of running, perhaps from themselves, or perhaps from the memories that continued to haunt them. They say it was protecting their children from the hurt they experienced, but just like a drop of water into a puddle, energy ripples outward from within.
And you inherit the roles of your parents— unless you rewrite your story.
There was a rejection wound that was created from this experience– a God wound. His relationship with spirituality was never the same. He likes to think for the better, and to his family, for the worse.
For me, his daughter, I viewed it as merely an event that happened a lifetime ago. It was a passing rain that spread in a foreign country, I had only ever heard of it. I thought that it didn’t affect me, other than the affect that it had on my relationships with my father’s side of the family.
“Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.”
~~~ The Prophet, Khalil Gibran, 79
It was a thing of the past– but there was always an understanding deep within me that I would never be able to share all of myself with them. As I became more aware of myself, of my Higher Self, and formed an intimate connection with this divinity, I realized that this is not something that everyone will understand. Or want to understand.
Maybe because I was aware of his experience. He found a break in his stream of understanding divinity in such an abrupt way, so I was very protective of this newfound aspect of myself. The teachings and experiences that I had and learned gave me such a profound understanding of life, and a meaning that I would have never comprehended had I stayed in a strictly “this is the only way” religious setting.
The Power of Language
My parents were too scarred to bring their children to a Christian church every Sunday, but they did manage to stock my library with picture books of bible stories.
I know a few. One that comes to mind is the Tower of Babel:
“Now the whole world had one language, and a common speech…they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that they were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.”
Genesis 11: 1-13
This is most often interpreted as a tale of man’s downfall as a result of their hubris. Their divine punishment for trying to reach the heavens.
I had an interaction the other day where I felt that I could not use the right language to get through to someone, no matter how hard I tried. We both spoke English, but because I was not using the right terminology, and the religious lens I needed to be peering through, there was a part of her that automatically dismissed me.
I was wrong, no matter what I said. She never spoke this, but some things don’t need to be said. They’re apparent enough within you.
I stammered my way through sentences, grasping and failing to form coherent trains of thought. My heart beat painfully loud in my chest. I grew cold and began to sweat at the same time. My body was remembering what it felt like to be rejected.
The Tower of Babel is a cautionary tale of daily occurrences that happen within our subconscious understandings of others. The ruling component of our minds, our biases and templates that form as automatic processing within us, tell us when someone does not speak our language. Or rather, it shuts down your understanding of their words because you do not want to understand.
I find this especially to be true with spirituality and religion. There are so many schools of thought and religion on what is true and what is fiction, with each school claiming that their way is the only truth. Consider the vastness of the universe, and the cosmos, the seen and the unseen. All that we know, that we don’t know, and even that which we don’t know that we don’t know. It’s not even possible for just one explanation to be true. They’re merely different interpretations and understandings of the same concepts.
“And a man asked,
Speak to us of Self-Knowledge.
And he answered, saying:
Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.
But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart’s knowledge.
You would know in words that which you have always known is thought….
And it is well you should.
The hidden well-spring of your soil must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea; And the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes.
But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure; And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.
For self is a sea boundless and measureless.
Say not, ‘I have found the truth,’ but rather, ‘I have found a truth.’
Say not, “I have found the path of the soul.” Say rather, “I have met the soul walking upon my path.”
For the soul walks upon all paths. The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed. The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.”
~~ The Prophet, Khalil Gibran, 55
There was nothing that I could say to her that would make her understand. And I accepted that. We are all guilty of this to some degree. When I find myself shutting down and not listening to someone, I always stop to consider why. Not why they are wrong, but what is it about their language that upsets me? It is always a reflection of where you are mentally and spiritually more than where they are.
You can’t control the language someone else uses, or the templates that their thoughts run on, but you can understand and grow from the effect that it has on you.
And in that moment, of misunderstanding with her, I felt that panic growing within me. The ancestral rejection and alienation that my father had felt when he first started his journey of self-discovery, and re-evaluation with his relationship to his true essence.
People don’t step into their roles, or their missions, for their entire lives because of this same fear. And as I sat across the table from this woman I thought would support me, who clearly could not, there was a break within me.
They say that the eldest child inherits most after their father, and the youngest after the mother. This was the nail in the head that confirmed my inheritance of my father’s legacy.
There will always be people who disapprove of you and your calling. Your work in this life. It is not your responsibility to try to convince them of your knowledge, of your experiences, or even of your beliefs. There will always be people out there who need you to prove yourself. Do not be concerned with those people.
For as many people who are out there who think you are wrong, and cannot fathom an understanding about you, there are also people who completely understand you. You must have faith that your spirit will guide you to them.
There will always be naysayers. There will always be a million reasons not to do what it is you feel called to do.
I was fortunate enough to be guided to one of my biggest supporters from a very early age.
Immortal soul, know this: You are always supported, guided, and loved. Especially when you feel that you are not. Trust your intuition, this is your spirit guiding you. Listen to your dreams– this is your Higher Self providing you with knowledge. Honor your feelings– they are there for a reason.
The Wayward Minds Collective 
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