Ancestral Trauma Healing
Do you carry wounds that have come from your ancestors, passed on for generations? What can you do to change their trajectory?
The idea that trauma is passed from generation to generation has always resonated. Everywhere I look, I see the legacy and repetition of trauma acting out. I feel the heaviness of what was not acknowledged. A deep need to meet what wasn’t met at different times in our history. I feel the earth suffering from what we cannot feel. Unresolved trauma disrupts every aspect of life.
We are the sum of our experience uniquely defined by our memories. Our life flows where we are integrated and balanced. Often a simple object or incident summons up a recollection: it can be the door to a forgotten past. There are places within us that we do not want to own but still they keep showing up in our relationships and circumstances.
Intergenerational Transmission
Through epigenetics we inherit historical thoughts, feelings and behaviours from our ancestors. Their response to life threatening conditions and how they survived. The emotional and relational consequences of this trauma is transmitted to us and stored in our DNA, cellular memory.
There is an epigenetic conscious field around our DNA embedded with everything that came before. Consider moving beyond the idea that DNA is held within us: we are the DNA. We are not only the DNA code… we are the writers of the code. Epigentics illustrates how we are influenced and changed by emotional, physical and environmental experiences.
This alters how we function and form connections. A hypervigilant parent using alcohol numbing out emotions. An anxious parent having angry outbursts. Another who isolates or won’t communicate. Each of these situations has an impact on the lives of their children, and so on.
Repeating these past patterns is the unconscious attempt to resolve what went wrong in the first place.
Unprocessed trauma continues repeating until it can be brought into the light of awareness.
Notice that you have inherited both family and cultural wounds as well as blessings.
Where do we acknowledge traumas passed through the generations? How do we find ways to start healing this generational trauma?
Disruption
Our ancestors are always with us. Whether or not we see or believe in them, who and what we are is influenced by these ancestors.
Each family system has its own strengths and weaknesses. Creating an unique culture passed down from one generation to the next. Qualities can be positive or destructive, most often a product of genetic inheritance. They may also provide generational predisposition to artistic, musical, athletic, scientific, academic, etc., cultivation.
Ancestor trauma may manifest as a tendency for addiction, divorce, anger, negativity, suicide, scarcity… unintentionally passing on these states. It is important to identify our ancestral and cultural trauma so we can change the pattern from reverberating across generations.
Identifying
Transgenerational trauma may be subtle, undefined and covert. It differs from family to family and may show up in family patterns. Some of us are so conditioned to living with generational trauma that it is accepted as the norm.
Our ancestral roots have more of an impact than we realize. The influence of their ideas, philosophies, work ethic, religion, politics. So many of their values, from where we were born and grew up to our unique sense of family, identity, traditions, culture… live on in us.
Weaving the Web
Our ancestors are powerful allies in transforming our historical trauma. Their pain endures through the generations.
When we reconcile with our ancestors who experienced life either in victim or victimizer consciousness, we honour them and embody what was resilient, resourced and beautiful from the past. This is where the work of love starts.
As we tend to our wounds, we heal ourselves. When we choose peace and extend that loving vibration to our ancestors and out to future generations, we serve as a portal for healing our planet. We transform generations of ancestors and draw upon their love and support.
Karen Johnson
Ancestral, cultural and collective healing is a spiritually-grounded process empowering you to connect, repair and nurture relationships with your wise and loving ancestors.
Many of us are feeling lost, disconnected and longing for belonging after generations of displacement, oppression, colonialism and the consequences of cultural wounding. These burdens are carried within our bodies and families… we also carry the blessings. The ancestral reparation process opens a path to your roots to mobilize the transformation of inherited burdens and the embodiment of your gifts.
I work with an embodied approach. My work is based on the perspective that you have many dimensions to your being, and many parts, all of them interacting within a living, dynamic, extraordinary and intelligent system. Instead of being one solid fixed thing, you are more like a body of water, music, an emergent event in the universe.
My approach is rooted in the co-creation of a safe, transformative container for deep healing and awakening, in and through the body. Weaving together strands from different approaches and traditions. Offering practices that evolve and develop over time, such as meditation, grounding and embodiment, emotional integration and relational healing, and soul work.
