Pockets of Consciousness - Family

2 of More to come

Ancestral – Generational

As I sit and write this blog, I am sitting and thinking of family as a new granddaughter was born to our family and what she will bring to our family and I start to ponder.

This past summer has been about really sitting with gratitude and watchfulness the dynamics of a family and what we bring to our families, whether biological or our families of friendships and love. Seeing a wonderful mentor and man dealing with the loss of his mother, how eloquently he did it, and then seeing myself as the mother and watching my sons and my daughter with their little children and how my heart sang to watch them as fathers and mother, how grateful I was just to experience this interaction between them and their children, and I thought of him and how blessed I am sure his mother was to see him with his own children as he has done his healing.

Then I began to ponder and I believe I am starting, and I stress starting to understand what is meant by generational trauma and what happens when this is broken, grandparent to parent to child and so on. There has been so much in the media about our Native peoples and the genocide of their children, and I am not going to speak of that as there are much more versed people than I that can speak of this. I am just thinking of examples of generational and ancestral trauma, we can also think of the many generations of trauma in Northern Ireland, we can always find trauma in many cultures, not to belittle any of them as the wounds are very deep and no they cannot just get over it.

I am hoping to speak of the commonality of our traumas and what it creates, the many patterns that have been created by the traumas, not only the ones that have experienced the trauma directly, but the ones that had to watch the trauma and could do nothing about it. Sometimes I think that it is the ones that have to watch the trauma that have the deepest wounds as they have no voice for their wound, as it did not happen directly to them, but they have lived it indirectly as it changes the dynamic of the family. The ones that experienced the wound directly have a voice for it, they can reach out for help for it when they are ready, what does that silent witness have, they just know that their family is broken in a way and how do we heal it.

What do they then bring to the family? How does it show up in the family and how is it projected forward in that family. They learn to parent from a traumatic state not a healed whole state, so it perpetuates to the next generation. As my Teacher says there are four main issues in life, Abandonment, Rejection, Betrayal and Self Worth, and if you can’t pin it down, it is usually Self Worth. Alcoholism is something that is very present in my family, I now know that addictions are usually generated from abandonment issues, you heal the abandonment and then you usually would heal the issue itself. How do you heal that enabler though, that silent voice that watches and waits for the issue to reappear in some way, feels that this is their lot in life and that they deserve it on some level. How these fears are then passed onto the next generation and the next generation as it is now part of our Ancestral DNA. They are still living the trauma, stuck in a pocket of consciousness that needs to come into present consciousness to be healed … sometimes it is not up to us to understand, it is to know that there is a need just to be listened to so that the trauma doesn’t seem so real and hold a hand so that they can walk through it.