Breaking Generational Trauma: Unearthing one skeleton at a time

Each of us is born with imprints of our ancestors’ experience of life, good or bad.  If our ancestors experienced trauma, and most of them have, and they had no opportunity to heal, it is passed down to us.  From a western medical point of view, this trauma alters the molecules around our DNA, which blocks our ability to mitigate inflammation in our bodies.  We are discovering that inflammation is the basis of for many physical diseases. This field of research is called epigenetics. 

From a shamanic point of view, intergenerational trauma leaves us with a mythic imprint which affects the way we live our lives and see the world.  For example, those people whose ancestors faced starvation or deprivation will live in a grip of scarcity.   In this part of the world, people whose ancestors lived constantly in survival mode doing the back-breaking work of homesteading in the Midwest, have real difficulty expressing emotions. 

This intergenerational traumatic imprint lives differently in each member of the family.  In the modern world, we confuse these ancestral influences as merely being aspects of our personality.  But they aren’t.  This becomes clear as we do ancestral healing.  As we unravel heal and release the ancestral traumatic imprint, we can find our own internal essence and the inner resources to balance or lives.

In shamanic healing, we reach into the spiritual world of the ancestors and go back in time to address the original trauma.  This may mean healing a specific ancestor, or it may mean bringing healing to the whole lineage as the trauma could be present for generations.  By doing this is becomes much easier to release the traumatic imprint from the actual physical body of the client.

Often there is one person in a generation that holds the intergenerational trauma more potently than other members of the family.  They are in a sense chosen by the ancestors to help them heal.   This person often is the most intuitive and sensitive person of the family and often is the person who is most interested in their ancestral history.  So for instance, that person may hold an extreme sense of shame or scarcity or fear related to what their ancestors went through.  This chosen person can also carry the burden of a particular ancestor who never had the chance to heal. 

There are also gifts that our ancestors bring to us.  This happens most commonly with cultures that continue the human practice of ancestral worship and healing.

For example, Maria came to shamanic healing with chronic pelvic pain which she had since coming back from visiting her family in Kenya.  During the session, her mother, who had passed, came into the room and did a healing on her.  Her pain went away and to this day, 6 years later, she is still pain free.  Alice is from a local Native American tribe.  She came in with extreme anxiety.  This was related to the trauma of her ancestors who died by fire.  But it was one of these ancestors, who was a healer, who came to release her from carrying this burden in her body.

Everyone is affected by the experiences of their ancestors.  So the healing is not just about releasing the traumatic imprints, but also to connect to the veins of gold, those gifts, that come through the lineage.  Whether we are healing the traumatic imprints or tapping into the veins of gold they hold for us, it is done in a space of unconditional love for them.