Generational Trauma: Identifying and Healing Ancestral Patterns
When we talk about generational trauma, we often think of major events like slavery, holocaust, etc. These certainly have a massive influence, but individual traumas on smaller scales throughout our family tree can also contribute to our ancestral trauma patterns.
We often focus exclusively on the experiences of our parents and grandparents. This is important and can give us a hint at what we might find were we to go back generations before them.
But to stop there is limiting. It puts us at risk of missing the important threads of deep-rooted trauma that came from deeper ancestral lines. These roots are essential to understanding and, ideally, breaking the pattern.
Going through my family tree, I find repeating threads of trauma placed strategically like dark mirrors throughout the generations.
Three in particular keep popping up: abandonment, mental illness, and physical illness. Often, these are bundled together in single events throughout my family history.
Physical Illness and Abandonment by Death on my Mother’s Side, Maternal Line
