How to Know if You Have Inherited Trauma

 Join me as we journey into the heart of inherited trauma, bridging the gap between science and spirituality by bringing clarity to a nebulous but very important topic. 

This episode I talk about the types on inherited trauma:

inter-generational trauma
inherited trauma 
collective trauma
cultural trauma

Together we explore the way that trauma and its echos are passed from one generation to another.  We explore methylation, a primary process in creating genetic changes. Holocaust survivors and their children show more methylation on their epigenome compared to a control. 

This episode tells you what Inherited trauma is, conceptually, spiritually and biochemically, teaches you ways to figure out if you may have inherited trauma and even ways to heal it. 

Join me!

Chapters

• 0:04 Understanding Inherited Trauma
• 10:42 Epigenetics and Inherited Trauma
• 23:01 Root Chakra and Ancestral Trauma
• 29:12 Inherited Trauma and Cultural Resilience
• 38:59 Inherited Trauma
• 43:13 Healing Ancestral Trauma in Groups
• 49:22 Ancestral Trauma and Support Podcast

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

I am your host, owl Medicine, and in today's podcast, we're going to be talking about inherited trauma. We're going to be talking about intergenerational trauma, cultural trauma, collective trauma and how it moves from one generation to another. Trauma is something that I love to study and understand because I think it's inescapable, and in today's podcast, we're going to be talking about the traumas that our ancestors faced all of us, certain groups more than others, but we're going to be talking about how their experiences were so profound that they became embedded in their genetic code for their children to inherit. In this episode, I'm going to be blending a lot of different stuff. I'm going to be blending spirituality, I'm going to use the chakra system, which is something I normally don't, but it's a easier way to understand this stuff, and I wanted to talk about generational trauma and how it moves from one place to the next, but also not just to press you by talking about trauma, but give you ways to be able to identify these things in yourself and be able to cope with them, and I think the chakra system does a decent job. Like you don't need to know much about it at all for it to be a functional way for you to think about these processes. So if you don't know anything about biology, that's fine, we're going to keep it real simple. If you don't know anything about the chakra system, that's also fine, we're going to keep it real simple. I really want to just kind of explain this in as many ways as possible so I can get people to understand what I believe is the heart of it. Because when I hear about ancestral trauma, when I hear about generational trauma or intergenerational trauma or collective trauma, I'm either getting a very cold and clinical view or I'm getting a very spiritual view, and I like both of those. I love the cold, clinical and I love the spiritual. But for me, where the rubber meets the road is the in-between. For me, what really matters is where those two meet, and so in this episode, I'm gonna attempt to lay things out in a way that allows us all to be able to understand what is meant by generational trauma, both in a kind of hippie-woo-woo general way and in a biological, biochemical way, and also in a historical way, and we'll even do it in a narrative way, because this is a podcast All we have is narrative, but we're gonna be talking about individual narratives as well, so stick with me to the end and you might learn something.

Speaker 1: 4:03

So what is inherited trauma? And inherited trauma is simply trauma that you didn't experience, that causes you to behave in ways that are pathological for you. When we talk about trauma which I talk about all the time on here trauma is a wound. So I guess let's start there. Before we even define inherited trauma, we need to define trauma. What is trauma? Trauma is a wound. Trauma is a wounding that we live with and that wound leaves us triggerable and we never know what's going to trigger us not always, but a lot of times we can guess and what happens when that piece of us is triggered. When we're triggered, we automatically launch into a preordained response to a specific stimuli, and that preordained response, that pre-programmed response, is not a beneficial response. That's what trauma is. It is an inflexibility in our inability to respond to stressful stimuli. Inherited trauma is when we launch these responses and we don't actually have any memory in our life, in our own personal lifetimes, of experiencing trauma. Yet we are acting out in ways that are fairly obviously trauma responses.

Speaker 1: 5:52

Now there's inherited trauma, which we kind of speak of as the individual. It's an individual person's inheritance. Then there is intergenerational trauma, which is both familial and adopted, because you can get intergenerational trauma from your parents to you or from your adopted parents to you, and you will do that by mirroring and we know this from studies on alcoholics and alcoholic parents and people being raised by alcoholic parents who weren't their parents and being raised by alcoholic parents who were. Then there is cultural trauma, and this is trauma that an entire culture of people have gone through and an entire culture is affected. Then there is collective trauma, which is very similar to cultural trauma, but it's just a collective, a collective being a group. It doesn't necessarily need to be a specific culture. Maybe it's multiple cultures. A collective trauma might be boarding schools, where two different cultures have experienced boarding school, like forced boarding schools. In the United States you had the Japanese internment camps doing the exact same thing, or pretty darn close to the exact same thing as what we had just done to indigenous peoples a couple hundred years before, not even a couple hundred, like one to two. God, how fast America went. Disgusting is really impressive. But that's cultural trauma versus collective trauma. It is a group of people who experienced a similar trauma that may not be a, that are not part of a part of the same culture. So I've got basically four different types of collective trauma that I'm talking about, but four different types of trauma that I'm talking about.

Speaker 1: 8:10

And you know what trauma is. It is that deep wounding that leaves us triggerable, and when we are triggered, we launch a pre-programmed response too, a specific stimuli. Next we need to talk about Alright, so now you understand what trauma is and you understand what inherited trauma is, and you understand that there are multiple types of inherited trauma. But how do we know if we're experiencing inherited trauma? Well, there's lots of ways that you can know, but first you have to figure out is this your trauma or is this inherited trauma? And the way that we figure that out is usually the same at first, because what we're looking at is we're looking at behavioral patterns. Do you have patterns in your behavior that are not beneficial to you, that don't really make much sense in the situations that you use them? And if the answer is yes, then you have some kind of trauma. But it might be yours, from your own past, your own life, your own childhood. It might be your parents and you might be acting out things that you saw your parents acting out Like.

Speaker 1: 9:28

I have trauma around being weak, and I have that from not only being raised as a white male in the Midwest, from a very conservative, religious and historically military family. I could not be weak, but that got compounded by the fact that I saw my mother. This is the mirroring aspect. I saw my mother never have a chance to be weak. She never had a chance. She was always working, always busting her ass, and so I saw that and I have mirrored that in my life and that's what we call intergenerational trauma and that's familial. And even if I were adopted I would still have some pre-programming that way that could be traumatic to where I saw my mother never, ever taking a break, never sitting down, never laying down, never stopping working, and so I just assume that's what you're supposed to do. And so now I continue to do that. Whether I am blood to my mother or whether I'm not, that's intergenerational trauma.

Speaker 1: 10:42

But then let's talk for a second about cultural trauma, because there's lots of cultures that have a long history of trauma. The most salient in the conversation right now is obviously Palestine and Israel. There's also obviously the indigenous population here in the United States, while North America and kind of all over the world and all of the African Americans with a shared cultural history of slavery in the United States and with these groups of people. I don't want to talk about this in just the woo woo way of like there was stuff that happened to your ancestors, that made them that was traumatic, and now you have that trauma in you and you have to deal with it Like yes, that's true, but there's no there. Those those explanations are not satisfactory to me because okay, but what, where, how and why? Like you can't just say shit like that and it actually mean anything. I want to know what's actually happening and one of the ways that we've figured this out.

Speaker 1: 12:02

Fairly recently I believe it was 2015, there was a study done on Holocaust survivors and the children of Holocaust survivors, and so what they did was they took Holocaust survivors and people who were Jewish, who were not in the area of the war and therefore were not exposed to it, and they took blood draws from Holocaust survivors, from people not in the Holocaust and that were also Jewish and descendants of those people. So we've got Holocaust survivors, their children, non Holocaust survivors and their children, and they took blood draws from these people and they wanted to look at the epigenetics to see what's going on is. Is maybe their epigenome different because of what they experienced? And the first step on any study is observational. And when they observed, through looking and asking more and more questions to these people, they found that 30% of the Holocaust survivors children report PTSD and zero of the control group did zero of the controlled group reported symptoms of PTSD, the control group being children of Jewish people who were not exposed to the Holocaust or did not suffer through the Holocaust.

Speaker 1: 13:35

And that's very interesting to me for a couple of reasons. One is that moves things from a cultural trauma in some way to a collective trauma. This is where the two are bridged in some way, because the culture, the European Jewish populations were the culture that was abused and obliterated nearly through a genocide attempted by Hitler. That was a specific culture, but there were people within that culture who were not exposed directly to that and their lineage down the line reported 30% less PTSD. By 30% less I mean zero PTSD, and that I think is very interesting because I want to talk about the internet and our collectivity and how I think that's impacting trauma and our perceptions of trauma and how trauma-informed people are becoming.

Speaker 1: 14:46

But here we have a group of people who lived through an obvious trauma, and their children are reporting symptoms that have nothing to do with what they went through, because they didn't have a Holocaust that they lived through. Now they all the children, whether they were parents of Holocaust survivors or just parents of Jewish, or whether they were children of Holocaust survivors or whether they were children of Jewish parents they all reported some amount of trauma in their life and that's why it's very interesting that, even though they've reported some trauma, the children of Jewish families who didn't experience the Holocaust have a zero and the children of the Holocaust survivors have a 30% rate in PTSD. But why? What is the actual analog? So we've been talking a little bit about the spiritual definitions, which is really just talking about the phenomenon, in a way without much specificity, and now we're moving into the specificity, and here what they found in this study was that there actually were genetic markers that were different. There actually were genetic markers that were different in the Holocaust survivors' children, and in the Holocaust survivors they had a ton of methylation on their genome, and that methylation is the primary way that we study epigenetics. When we study epigenetics, what epigenetics means is changes in our DNA that don't actually affect the structural letters, the ACT and G right. There are a ton of stuff that we used to call junk DNA that we know now are actually if-then clauses that basically say if, in this situation, respond this way. What does that sound like? It sounds like pre-programming, to stress that way, when we're exposed to a certain type of stress, we respond in a specific way.

Speaker 1: 16:54

Now, the children of Holocaust survivors. What did the Holocaust survivors do to survive? Did they fight? No. Did they run away? No. Did they unify and form a union and say hey, we're going to take you to court if you don't stop burning us alive and throwing us in gas chambers? No, they didn't. What did they do? They shut down. They conserved resources, they kept their head down and their mouth shut. They accepted the fact that they were helpless in their given situation and the best they could do is conserve resources and survive.

Speaker 1: 17:30

Now, that sounds really close to depression. That sounds really close to PTSD, which are also like-depression was also something that was noted a lot high and a lot higher prevalence in Holocaust survivors and their children. And why? Because now, through such a profound experience where the only way that their parents were able to survive was by shutting down everything, by not launching a fight-or-flight response, but by absolutely minimizing everything about who they are. They were able to survive by shutting down and accepting their helplessness and for a long time depression was described as learned helplessness, and that's still not that far off. We know it's way more complicated than that and all that sort of thing, but it definitely comes from a sense of learned helplessness and I genuinely believe that most trauma has a flavor of helplessness to it, that the overwhelming majority of trauma has some peace of helplessness in it. There was something that we weren't able to do for one reason or another to get us out of it and that locks us in man. That locks us into depression and to this triggerability that we get with PTSD. So the children of these Holocaust survivors had all of the symptoms that we normally associate with inherited trauma, in cultural trauma even. But what they didn't have? But these children with the classic symptoms of inherited trauma, which makes sense just observing it like, okay, yeah, it makes sense that children of Holocaust survivors would experience more depression and more PTSD. If you're an empathetic person anyway, it kind of makes sense.

Speaker 1: 19:35

But to see the actual analog being the methylation, because what methylation does is it's these little methyl compounds that attach themselves to the epigenome and they turn on and off things like switches. I'm sure you've heard about turning genes on and off. The way that that happens is through methylation, and there was far, far, far more methylation in the Holocaust survivors' blood and the children of the Holocaust survivors' blood. This is really cool to me because now, scientifically, we're beginning to put together just the very, very beginnings of what the biological analog for ancestral or inherited trauma is. There is an actual analog and it's in the epigenome and it's methylation. So that's really cool.

Speaker 1: 20:33

Now I'm not saying that all of this is purely inherited, because if you're raised by Holocaust survivors, not only did you inherit their DNA, but you're going to inherit much of the way that they are in the world just through observation and through mirroring. The way that they respond to stress is going to be the way that you respond to stress, because your nervous system doesn't really have much information. In that way we are born very much a clean slate, so we can adapt to whatever environment that we are in, because we as humans have taken over all the environments, so you never know which one you're going to be born into this go-round and it's useful to be able to adapt appropriately to that environment. And so we have grown through evolution to have some stuff preprogrammed and have some stuff that we learn afterward. And we learn a lot of stuff afterwards from our parents, not the least of which is how we handle stress.

Speaker 1: 21:38

So what does this have to do with the chakra system? Well, this is the way I explain it to people, because I think it's easy to understand. The root chakra is the chakra that's all about my place on this earth. It is your genetic inheritance, it is where you come from, it is your root to the earth and it is the first chakra that's formed. Most people know there are lots of chakras, but most people just talk about the seven main ones in the center of the body, and the first one to form is formed in vitro and it is the root chakra, and that is the place that ancestral trauma sits. That is the place inherited and cultural trauma and collective trauma sits. It sits deep down inside there and shit, even the Chinese say this. Actually, I was just reading a book I bought years ago and I finally got well, I guess a year ago, and I finally got to it on psycho-emotional conditions and the extraordinary vessels in Chinese medicine and one of the extraordinary vessels is called the daimai and it's like the belt vessel and it goes around the waist and there are two branches and one of the branches that goes around the small of the waist and then dips down really like scoops down toward the pubic bone and creates like a basin down there.

Speaker 1: 23:01

And they say in Chinese medicine, which has nothing to do with the chakra system, that's Indian. They say in Chinese medicine that that is where trauma is stored childhood trauma and ancestral trauma. It is stored deep in the daimai. So I find that interesting that two different systems, one in India, one in China, who have completely different perspectives on like life and healing and whatnot, like Chinese have five elements. The Indian Indians have, like your pitavata kafa, they have Ayurveda versus classical Chinese medicine or now TCM Two very different worldviews and ways of looking at things and understandings of the world. And they all agree that trauma is stored deep down in the area that the Indians would call root chakra and the Chinese would call the daimai.

Speaker 1: 24:03

And this is important because it is the very first thing to form about who you are and it forms the structure of how you survive on the planet, which is why it's about surviving. It's about food, and then the next step after getting ourselves to survive is getting ourselves to survive through our babies. That is number two Chakra. Number two is the sacral chakra. And the sacral chakra if the first one's all about me and my place on this earth and I get you, and that's programmed largely by our parents, the second one is also programmed largely by our parents, but it's about bonding and we bond first with our parents and then somewhere around puberty, we start bonding with other people because we're moving away from our primary unit being our family and getting old enough to where now we're getting close to hitting puberty and our biologically capable of having children of our own. So we're working on developing our own unit. So it makes sense that then we move out and we bond.

Speaker 1: 25:16

But the thing about chakras is each one is built on the last and so if the first one you inherited some trauma stuff, which is again just saying that you inherited automatic responses to certain types of stimuli then your bonding is going to be deeply affected by that. So when you reach out to bond to a friend or a neighbor but especially romantic relationships because they're the closest bonds that we have. Often people with inherited trauma really struggle to have intimate relationships. We struggle to bond in those intimate relationships and there's lots of ways that that manifests, but a lot of it boils down to the way that we deal with things, and the way that we cope with things either doesn't jive with other people, with like specific other people, or doesn't jive with other people at all.

Speaker 1: 26:10

If we are, if our trauma or our parents or grandparents trauma or great great grandparents trauma was, was based around every single person that I came in contact with that I trusted was untrustworthy and it hurt me and my family, then there's a really good chance that you're going to just be fundamentally untrusting of everyone and you're not really going to know why. And that's what's so complicated and annoying about generational and inherited trauma is, at least with childhood trauma, you can look at the patterns and the dynamics of your childhood and your relationship with your mother or your father or caregiver or your mother and father's relationship or siblings, and you can understand pieces about it and go okay, well, I guess that that makes sense because you've seen it. But with inherited trauma, most often we haven't seen it because we weren't there, which is why it becomes beneficial to ask, which is where people who are raised by their blood parents they have a big step up on people who were not, people who were adopted say they don't have any ties to, or maybe they have very, very little information about, their birth families and so they'll still get inherited trauma. You can get intergenerational trauma from being raised by a traumatized person, but they're inherited trauma that is deep ingrained in the methylation of their epigenome, that comes from a person that they'll never be able to answer questions about and that sucks. But it's still doable, as in, you're still able to heal yourself. But before we get there, let's go to the third chakra that is affected by ancestral trauma. By ancestral trauma. The first one is all about my ability to be alive and maintain my aliveness on this planet. That requires my parents and when two parents love each other very much and all of that, and that gives birth to me. And then, once those basic survival needs your food and your water and your shelter are taken care of immediately, what you need to keep alive is the bonding, because we are a social species. It is through our bonds that we have survived, through collective hunting and collective gathering and as family units, we have needed other people to survive forever. And the next one, up after the sacral chakra, is the solar plexus, and the solar plexus is all about me.

Speaker 1: 29:12

I've talked a lot, especially about the book and in the book, about how our opinion of ourselves is first determined by our interpretations of how we are treated Full stop, the interpretations that we have of how we are treated, whether we are liked or likable, loved or lovable, or in the way or a joy to have around. All of these kinds of self-sufficiency, of identifiers. Later they start from how we are treated when we're little. They start, and the people that treat us are people that we have bonds with. Whether they treat us well or poorly, they're people that we have bonds with. So it makes sense to me that once I have the most basic thing of like okay, I have a physical body, and now it's like very basic survival things, violence if I'm being threatened and food and water then you move into bonding, which is about sex and pushing more of you out into future generations.

Speaker 1: 30:18

Then you have this third one, and this is all about me. It's about who I think I am. The sacral chakra is about who you think you are and pushing yourself. Not the sacral. The solar plexus chakra is all about who you are and manifesting yourself in the external world. Who are you? That's what's determined by the third chakra, the solar plexus. Who are you and how are you in the world? And the way that this is affected is again because each of the chakras are built upon themselves, because they are an energetic system that is all integrated.

Speaker 1: 31:01

So if the root chakra has some stuff in there that's a little messed up, that doesn't deal with stress well, or doesn't deal with rejection well, or doesn't deal with small spaces well, or doesn't deal with open spaces well, or whatever it is, because trauma can be literally anything, because all kinds of crazy shit happens that hurts us and that hurt can linger and that's trauma. So when we get to this third and we're talking about me, who I am is made up of what I inherited from my parents and the bonds that I have made, the relationships that sustain me. All of these things are what form my identity and over time I eventually, once this third chakra is settled in and then the other ones all form as well, we can become in control of to some degree of our own interpretation of ourself or our own thoughts of ourself, but it always, always, always first begins with what we can get from our parents and then, especially, the way that we are treated by those around us, that second chakra, bond level stuff. And so if the people around you are traumatized, or if the people that gave birth to you and raised you were traumatized, or they have unhealthy stress coping responses, then you were going to have many of those same things, and this is how it moves from one generation to the next, to the next, to the next. If people are wondering and I hear that they do, when people wonder like, why are Native Americans alcoholics and have this crazy high suicide rate, well, look at their collective trauma, look at it. The only way that they were able to survive was to keep signing treaties and keep trusting the white people, because they had bigger guns and were absolutely abysmal and amoral and would do anything to win. How do you beat that? You survive. You just barely, barely get by, you minimize, and everybody does it differently.

Speaker 1: 33:20

I'm not saying every single person, every indigenous person or every indigenous culture or individual within that culture. All responded this way. What I'm saying is, as a whole. They had to be willing to go to worse and worse and worse and worse places, by having free Rome of the entirety of North America to being relegated to tiny, tiny little plots of land in the absolute worst places in the country, in the continent. They had to be willing to go from bad to worse in order to survive and that breeds a level of helplessness that, without cultural teachings to embolden the children who are the children of these survivors, they don't have the stories of the resilience and you know what? That's because we took it from them, because we did put them in boarding schools and we took away their language.

Speaker 1: 34:30

We absolutely obliterated these people and obliterated their culture, because their culture, what I believe a culture is, is the information needed to survive in a given environment. That's what I think is culture. I think that, like and that that's everything from expression, like art, to the ways that you understand the ecology around you and leveraging the, the animal life and the plant life, for homeostasis and balance and healing and longevity. All of those things are cultural because they all add to the way that you survive in a given environment and expression is important. So, yes, art and music and dance and all of these things are inherently culture, because they need them to survive, because these dances and these stories and these practices, these ceremonies, which are some of the most important things and probably the best ways to deal with ancestral trauma, these ceremonies had the stories that that were needed, of the resiliency to survive, and we killed them.

Speaker 1: 35:40

Now there are. There are obviously natives and African Americans and groups of all types that are the odd man out or that do things differently and say they and and maybe aren't as as afflicted. But there, I don't think there is any escaping this. I think that we all got demons. That's why it's the opening line of my book we all got demons.

Speaker 1: 36:09

Each and every person who has ever walked this earth has at least one true story that will break your heart, every single one. Whether they are African American, indigenous, spanish, white, american and anavian, ethiopian, it does not matter. Every single person has a story that will break your heart. Some of these people belong to cultures and that culture has stories that will break your heart, and the way that these people responded to the stories gets imprinted in their DNA through the epigenome, through a process that we now know called methylation, that turns on and off switches that say if in this environment respond this way. That's what genetic inherited trauma is. That's how it's passed from generation to generation and from family to family. Some of it's through modeling, because I don't, I handle my stress in a certain way because of certain experiences that I had. Some of it is through the actual genome, through epigenetic changes. They're inherited that way.

Speaker 1: 37:17

But for you, listening, if you want to know, if you have inherited trauma one I feel like most of us do but the way that you can look for yourself is do you have patterns of behavior that are undelt with and unhelpful? Do you know where they came from? Does it make sense, given what you know about your childhood or your family? If not, ask about your grandma, ask about your grandpa, ask about the lineage there. And for me, I put together a lot reading American Nations by Collard Woodward, colin Woodward, such an incredible book. I've brought it up multiple times, but it taught me about what cultures established what regions in the United States and suddenly all of the things that I knew about my family that were so incredibly toxic made perfect sense, because my family is all Appalachian.

Speaker 1: 38:11

They came from the borderlands of England. England was the group that was going around conquering the world and these were England's closest neighbors. You want to know why I'm so fucking hyphy? You want to know why I'm always ready for a fight, why I don't have fight, flight and freeze, I just have fight, fight and fuck you. The reason why is because I was a borderlander. My family, my great grandparents, they were borderlanders, borderlanders being. They were the people living on the borderlands of Scotland, on the south border of Scotland right up against England, or on the eastern and southern border of Wales right up against England. The Irish. These people were fighting to keep and maintain what little shit that they had.

Speaker 1: 38:59

Wales is so rainy it's basically just a cold, wet, rainy forest and Scotland is pretty barren in a lot of places. It's stunning, it is beautiful. I've never been to Wales, unfortunately. I have been to the west of England, but I've never actually made it into Wales and I really want to go because that was the one place that my grandmother talked about, because she said she was Welsh and when I did my 23 and me, sure enough, all of that information was there. But I inherited so much from the culture that my parents come from, and even Robert Sapolsky in his book Behave talks about this because he talks about priming and these things, like putting a flag in a room with people who were taking a little survey and seeing how it affects the survey, or putting stinky trash in a room and seeing how that affects people's answers on a survey and tracing back all the way to like.

Speaker 1: 39:59

Here's one for you. Did you know that the genome or the gene mutation that allowed people to survive the bubonic plague in the 1600s, 1400s or 1600s, whatever in England is now the exact same one that causes Crohn's disease? Because it's like it's two copies of the same gene and that gene is all about being sensitive to inflammation and because they were really really sensitive to getting ill early with other things and not getting a deep infection from the bubonic plague, and now they're so sensitive to inflammation, especially in their gut lining, that they get Crohn's disease Like that same. It's crazy. That level of wisdom is imprinted in our bodies, in our biology, in our DNA and as far as the chakra system, that root chakra, that daimai, these most deep places, that's where all this information gets stored, that's where everything gets pre-programmed, and then how we bond is affected, and then how we bond obviously affects our own sense of self and once our sense of self is affected, obviously every single other thing after that it's a ripple effect. Everything else after that is affected.

Speaker 1: 41:26

So I wanted to spend today talking to you about inherited trauma, generational trauma, whatever you want to call it. There is inherited, intergenerational, cultural and collective, and they're all slightly different, but they're all trauma and there's no right or wrong way to deal with it. But one of the things I do think is important before we go is take a look at your patterns, take a look at those automatic behaviors of yours and see if they make any sense and if they can't make any sense given your environment, if throughout your entire lives, see if it makes sense through watching your parents and their patterns and if that doesn't make sense, then it was definitely most likely inherited. And I say definitely, slash ha ha. Most likely because nothing comes out of nowhere and I really believe that if we are silly enough to think that somebody will just be an alcoholic or be really strongly a certain way for no reason whatsoever, you're an idiot. Everything works that way in reality. It may seem completely unconnected to us, but I think that's just because the world is much more intertwined and complicated than we believe, maybe even more so than we can believe, more so than we're even capable of believing, but I don't believe that any trait comes from nowhere. So if you have these echoes living in you that make your life a little bit harder, you probably have some generational or inherited trauma that you need to deal with. And before we go, I wanna give you ways to deal with your inherited trauma.

Speaker 1: 43:13

The way that we deal with trauma in general in the West is individualized. We tell people to go to therapy and deal with it on your own, on your own time, by paying a couple hundred bucks an hour to somebody who sits and listens to you and asks you how does that make you feel? And that's wonderful. I love therapy. I'm sure you all know that by now. But that is not enough, especially when it comes to the types of trauma that we're dealing with in the modern day. We're looking at how we got here and here being this very tech driven, incredible world with all these opportunities, and the way that we got here was through slavery, through genocide, through obliterating entire populations of people, through deeply, deeply harming other human beings, which means cultural and collective trauma, and you've heard me talk before about how relational trauma most of our trauma is relational and relational trauma has to be dealt with and healed in relationship. I believe that cultural trauma and collective trauma is the same way.

Speaker 1: 44:24

I believe it is best healed in groups. I think ceremony for group healing is probably the best way to deal with your cultural and collective traumas. Find people who are whatever you are, whatever group that you feel that you belong to. Find other people who are similar and who are having similar struggles to you. And I want you to build ceremony, because what ceremony does is it builds space. It creates a space for healing. So the more purposeful that you are with this, the better. It doesn't need to be elaborate, it could be as simple as you want, but it does need to be purposeful, and the more people that come together, the better.

Speaker 1: 45:14

I believe, and set your space, set up your space, set it up for healing. And because you are healing ancestral trauma, I want you to call your ancestors in, start it with a prayer, start it with an incantation, start with just a poem or a saying or spoken word, whatever you want to call it, but start with words. But start with words and start with words that invite your ancestors to you. Not all your ancestors, because I'm sure you got some shady ones, like some real shady ones. So when you call in your ancestors, ask for your ancestors in the light, ask for your ancestors who are working in the light, ask for the evolved ancestors and the ancestors who are actively trying to do good in your life now, because as much as you have ancestral trauma, if you have ancestral trauma, that means, by definition, you have ancestral resilience. So call those people in, call in your ancestors, call in their resiliency, bring them into this space with you and ask them to help heal you. And then I want you in this space to be present of mind, with where your mind wanders, and I want you to think about the weight of the things that you carry.

Speaker 1: 46:42

Everybody in the meditation, everybody in the ceremony Think about the weight of the specific things that you carry, which means, before you come to do this healing, you need to know what you're healing to some degree, and maybe you don't know exactly what it is, but when you come and you start this process, it will unveil itself to you. But for many of us we know at least one thing, otherwise we wouldn't be tipped off that we have any problems, but we know at least one thing that seems to pop up some pattern of ours that doesn't seem to fit with us, with our lives, even with our parents. And when you're in this ceremony, think about that, think about that space, think about that pattern, think about a situation in which that pattern was beneficial, think that ancestor for the pattern, because in another situation it might be beneficial. You're just not in that situation right now. Think that ancestor for the resiliency, think that ancestor for their strength and for giving birth to you, no matter how many generations away it was. So now you have an idea, hopefully, what is inherited trauma, what the different types are, how you can find it within yourself, how it affects us, what the actual biological mechanism is that whole methylation thing and something that you can do about it.

Speaker 1: 48:14

Going to therapy is great, but I think we all need to start doing more to be our own therapists, especially now with how much information is out in the world. Good information is out there. We all should ought to have our own therapists as well, but what I mean by becoming your own is be the person in your community who puts together a workshop. Be the person in your community who puts together a webinar on ancestral trauma and on healing, and you don't need anything besides a willingness and some kind of clue as to what you're doing, and with this podcast I hope now you have some kind of clue. I hope that you will reach out to the people who have been injured in similar ways to you and you will come together and you will heal as a group. That's what this world needs. We all need more healing from our own individual stuff, from our ancestral stuff. We all need more healing.

Speaker 1: 49:22

So thank you for joining me today. I hope that you got something out of this podcast. This was a meaningful one for me, and it actually took a friend suggesting it because I couldn't believe I hadn't actually done one on specifically ancestral trauma. But here it is. I really hope that you got something out of this. Thank you for spending your time with me. Consider clicking the link in the description and go buy me a coffee, become a member and support the show so you don't have to listen to ads telling you to buy crap that you don't need. I really appreciate you. Thank you. I hope you have a marvelous weekend and remember stay curious and stay uncomfortable. Kitён sighing you.