In my previous blog I invited my readers to consider their destiny by first considering some definitions of destiny and how many of our core beliefs about our destinies originated from the messages we received from our parents and caregivers early in our lives. I referred to Muriel James’ powerful 1981 book Breaking Free: Self-Reparenting for a New Life in which she described how parents and caregivers often transmit their beliefs as spells that become core beliefs stored in a person’s brain that in turn can determine a person’s destiny.
In this blog I am inviting you to consider how we also are deeply influenced by the messages transmitted to us by our ancestors, beliefs that are passed along to us and influence our destinies.
An excellent resource for this information is the book Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma by Dr. Mariel Buqué.
Dr. Buqué describes her journey to determine how a person can carry traumas that were handed down from previous generations. “Intergenerational trauma is a force that flows from one generation of a family to the next. The emotions that don’t get resolved or attended to in one generation risk being passed down, again and again. Your family’s trauma has become a social inheritance that eventually made its way to you. It’s a legacy that perpetuates because most people don’t know how to identify it, claim it, or do the work to resolve it.” [p. 69] She states that “Intergenerational trauma is the only category of emotional trauma that transcends generations and could be experienced by multiple members of your family.… There are two modes of transmission. The first is through your biology, or more specifically, through your gene expressions, which are inherited from each parent. That means that if either of your parents experienced trauma, that trauma could have altered them so fundamentally as to appear in their genetic code. You may have inherited those genes, making you more vulnerable to stress and trauma.
The second mode of transmission is through experiences that impact your psychology, like misattunement with caregivers, invalidation, harmful relationships, extreme adversity, oppression, and suffering that you experience in your own lifetime. This is how trauma is passed from a caregiver to a child or from society to a person, through behaviors and practices.” [pp. 4, 5]
“Intergenerational trauma is a wounding of the soul. It is a multilevel emotional injury that impacts a person’s mind (their thoughts and emotions), body (the way they carry suffering physically), and spirit (a disruption in their inner knowledge and connection with others).” [p. 5]
From this she realized that healing from all this intergenerational trauma must be multidimensional. “It has to heal every layer of a person in mind-body-spirit— meaning, it has to heal their soul.” [pp. 4, 5]
The rest of her book invites the reader to explore more deeply specific types of intergenerational trauma and their impact. She describes a process she calls intergenerational reparenting. She says there are many ways to approach it including starting with reflections of what you needed as a child but didn’t get, and then offer these to yourself now, in the present. “Reparenting is how you provide yourself of what you needed but didn’t get as a child. It’s how you soothe your inner child and reconcile the wounds that have been there since you developed an emotional arrest…. It is the way in which you can repair insecure attachments and develop healthier relationships”. She recommends that a person practices what feels truest to their inner child’s needs. She says you should think about the affirmations you wish you had received. Give yourself a loving embrace that you didn’t receive when you needed it. Offer yourself daily gifts of encouragement and love. [p.139]
Throughout the book Dr. Buqué talks about the importance of being willing to become a cycle breaker. She talks about how difficult it is and often painful, and yet this is a way to stop being trapped in unhealthy destinies that originated from your ancestors. She notes that making changes often causes a person to grieve because it feels like you are leaving a family behind, even a dysfunctional one, and that means you are not only abandoning them, but abandoning yourself. “It requires time and work. It requires patience. It requires giving the secrets a voice, rather than keeping them quiet. Silence is rarely an effective strategy for healing transgenerational trauma, because even if you are able to stifle the suffering by keeping quiet, it will creep up in later generations. And the impact becomes more powerful with each generation of silence. If you keep the diseased part of the family tucked away, it will only continue to fester and mature, until eventually it infects each one of its members. Therefore, the more you unearth those secrets…the less control that trauma has over your family.” [p. 182] One way to translate this is to appreciate that interrupting these cycles can stop the potential destinies that you would have inherited if you did not address those that are unhealthy.
I encourage you to do the work of addressing transgenerational legacies in order to interrupt inherited legacies. You (and all of us) deserve to be freed from unhealthy destinies. And by breaking unhealthy transgenerational legacies, we also can free our children and grandchildren.
Invitation for Reflection
- Was the information about transgenerational legacies new for you? How did you respond to it?
- Can you think of any specific transgenerational legacies that run in your family? To what extent are they healthy or not so healthy?
- If they are not healthy, what can you do to begin changing them?
Diane Wagenhals
Director Emeritus, Lakeside Global Institute