What We Mean When We Say Trauma is Passed Through the Bloodline
I am haunted by a video I watched on social media a while back of an 18 year old girl (South African) telling her grandmother that she hates her and she hates her mother and she doesn't feel loved.
I'm haunted cos that girl reminds me of me at 15, except I loved my granny to death but I remember being in my teens and telling both my parents I hate them and all I wanted was to leave home and never see them again (actually this was common for me to say to them).
I remember how my dad was almost in tears one day, listening to me and I could not be bothered.
For me it was either death or get out - I was a runaway teen cos home was never safe.
So I wanted out.
I was in pain. So much emotional pain and it could only come out as rage and self destruction.
The pain I felt was something deeper than I could even explain.
There were days when I would cry and it would feel like my heart was breaking.
Looking back now, as I continue to heal, I see how I was feeling it all - how I was constantly sensing the adults around me - their nervous system dysregulation and how I really was feeling the trauma passed on in the bloodline.
Being in my body felt awful because I was constantly feeling things.
I didn't know what to do with that pain because I was a child, a teenager, so I acted out.
It looked like rebellion. But it was painful and the adults around me (except my grannies) didn't know how to regulate themselves so they actually fueled my anger and my desire to get away. I wanted to stop sensing their nervous systems.
[Thank God for my maternal grandmother, I only finished school because of her. ]
People in the comments section of that video say that the girl in the video is possessed and they said so many other things and I remember people also said such things about me.
How else could they explain why I would leave home to go stay in a house with sex workers?
Why would I leave a private school in the Northern suburbs of Johannesburg to go live in Hillbrow?
So of course people said I was rude, ungrateful, possessed etc…
Pain and depression in teens sometimes looks like rebellion.
But it often has a root cause. As a society we are not willing to fully acknowledge what it looks like when we don't heal trauma and it is passed down from one generation to the next.
At some point, someone in the bloodline feels all that trauma and when they are young they have no tools to process it and it can overwhelm them so they "rebel" or look for ways to escape.
And the sad thing is the people who feel most of that generational trauma are the sensitive kids, the creatives, the healers, the out of the box thinkers because they tend to be connected to the spirit world and so feel everything.
The kids who are labeled difficult or different.
May we truly heal our ancestral trauma so the next generation doesn't have to spend their childhood trying to escape their bodies because they are feeling everything.
May we heal so we can regulate our nervous systems and hold the next generation when they do feel it all and we meet them with love and compassion instead of anger and frustration.
Healing ancestral trauma is not honey and roses, it can be painful AF, but I can say from experience, it can change generational patterns because it changes how we show up and hold space for those we love.
It doesn't mean we won't face the same situations as those that came before us, but it does mean we will make different choices and behave differently when we do face them, which leads to different results.
This is why I do the work I do. Yes, I talk about sunsets and pleasure but my work is way deeper than that, I work with the body and the nervous system cos trauma lives in the body.
Either we do the work or those that come after us do it or stay in a loop.
I do this work so we may all change our family dynamics and heal so things are easier for the next generation.
