Healing Ancestral Trauma
‘Where attention goes, energy flows’, or so the saying goes. The last few years have been very challenging for me. I’m currently coming out of what some would describe as a ‘dark night of the soul’. I have certainly done a lot of soul searching since around the beginning of 2020 when things started to take a turn for me shortly before the pandemic then also hit. I was hoping that after several years of hardship for a variety of reasons, 2024 would be a quiet year. That is honestly what I had hoped for. A quiet, uneventful year…. yeah! It hasn’t turned out that way. Don’t get me wrong, it hasn’t all been bad. There are some bright, sunny times ahead on the horizon. I can see them and almost touch them. But the reality is that the last few months have seemed like a whirlwind. As I’ve been coming out of the other side of the tunnel, my life has been changing beyond recognition. My core values and beliefs have remained the same and have helped to get me through. However, my thoughts on my whole purpose, the ‘why’ I have been put here in this specific moment in time have been called into question and have been changed slightly. I also think that my approach and outlook on life itself has also shifted. A lot of this has been down to a recognition and understanding of past family trauma which has been left to fester through the generations. The more I started to become aware of this, the more interesting research on healing past family trauma I have started to come across on social media and elsewhere on the internet. It is one of those things that I have come across before in books, but until it is the right time and you feel it is relevant to you, your mind ignores it so that you can deal with the current situation and circumstances in front of you. Well, this is my time to address it. Maybe it will resonate with some of you?
As an only child, and (so it seemed at least on one side of the family) an only grandchild, I was very much spoilt and doted on growing up. I loved the attention but with that came a lot of expectations and pressure. I was always told lots of (what were meant to be) encouraging phrases like ‘You’ll be the top of your class’, ‘You’ll pass your driving test first time’, and ‘You’ll grow up to get a great office job’ etc. As a child, I just took it that my family were really proud of me, and I wanted nothing more than to reciprocate this by making them even more proud. The problem was, I wasn’t top of the class. I struggled with maths and spelling. I didn’t pass my driving test first time and ended up giving up on the idea of driving for a year. I knew that I didn’t want to be stuck in an office job forever. I was creative and didn’t like the idea of sitting still for too long. Thankfully, I did get into the local university and have ended up (at least until this point) making a pretty decent living for myself.
Let’s address the other elephant in the room. The continuation of the family. Which, well, pretty much all fell on me. When I was little, I was encouraged to play with dolls from an early age and even into later childhood when a lot of other girls had long moved on from them. I was, right up to until my teens, a very ‘girly’ girl. Whilst nothing was ever specifically said to me, I grew up with the idea that it was a woman’s job to get married and have kids. I was almost made to believe that that (and that alone) was the whole meaning of life (particularly for me as there was no one else to continue the family!). During my teen years I had a whole string of boyfriends. The fact that my parents had split up and I hated the idea of being lonely and single also had a lot to do with this. I always knew that I wanted a big wedding and that I didn’t want to look too old in the wedding photos (I’ve always been keen on photography). Thankfully, a year before my dad passed away, I found my perfect partner (now husband) whom I have now been happily with for over sixteen years.
So, have we ended up having children? Yes. But it has not been easy. I’ll save the details for another time, but I’m currently in my fourth pregnancy. We have a six-year-old daughter called Phoebe, lost our second daughter Imogen halfway through the pregnancy, and had a very early loss last year. We are expecting the latest addition in the next couple of months.
Some of you may have realised that if we’ve been together for over sixteen years, why did it take us so long to start creating our family? Especially when we both always knew that, if possible, we wanted to have two children. I’ll add at this point, that there are a couple of main reasons for wanting at least two. One being that they will hopefully always have someone to lean on in times of trouble (Life is never straightforward). The second reason is that whilst I do not plan on putting any pressure on my children to continue the family line, if they do feel any natural pressure to do so, it will be a burden that is shared between them, not just one that falls on an individual as it did with me. Going back to why we waited to try and conceive, we arguably got married rather young in our early twenties and we were almost the first to get married amongst our friends. Today’s modern society (at least in Britain) seems to deem it better to wait until your later twenties/early thirties to have children despite modern scientific studies showing that women’s fertility drops significantly around the age of thirty-five. Secondly, I was very nervous about what certain family members would think as I’d always had it drummed into me the importance of waiting until I had a big enough house and enough money behind me to support my own family. Thankfully the whole family (including the member that had drummed into me all the talk about money) were over the moon to find out that I was pregnant. One of them even came straight out and said, “It’s about time!”
My mum passed away at the beginning of this year. I now do not have any grandparents or parents left alive and of course, no siblings. It has left me contemplating a lot of things. I no longer believe (and haven’t done for a number of years now), that a woman’s only job is to reproduce. I do believe that we are put here to help with the continuation of the species and ultimately to look after and help nurture the planet that we call our home, but there are a myriad of different ways that people can do this. In fact, I really don’t believe that everyone should have children or at least not too many. The planet is getting rather full of humans. We have almost become too successful as a species which may well end up being our downfall if we exhaust the planet’s natural resources. My biggest quandary lately has been around the outdated ideas surrounding money, wealth, status and the need for ‘more’.
There is no denying that having a bigger house with more space and an excess of money does help when raising children. However, as almost everyone who has had children will tell you, the main ‘things’ that a baby needs are love, food, and shelter. Babies and children do not care if they have the latest trendy clothes or toys. They do not care if their house is bigger than someone else’s. The main thing that they need is love. My advice to anyone out there who is in a stable relationship, wants children, but is unsure whether now is the best time to have them or if they are too young or have enough money behind them, is to just start trying. Money will come and go, but our health is fleeting. Considering that I am now (as far as I’m aware) the third generation of women in my family to have suffered miscarriages, why on earth was I advised to wait? We also never know how much time we have. Life is fleeting.
On the subject of money, I have also seen how damaging and controlling it can be. Siblings have fallen out over money and possessions in my family and not spoken for years, even continuing with the negative chatter after the other has died. Family members have used threats about money to control and manipulate each other and have even promised large sums of money will be passed on, only for the will to be changed and the person mysteriously written out. I have learnt never to trust what anybody says or promises about money. It really can be the route of all evil.
Our lives should not revolve around money or monetary possessions. Yet, a lot of people in my family (and others that I know), particularly those who grew up in the ‘Boomer’ generation (1946-1964), seem to have this mentality and habit of hoarding possessions in their homes and wealth in their bank accounts. We all know that hoarding can have many different causes and can have many negative long-lasting effects. I’ve seen first hand how hoarding money can have just as negative an impact on a person as hoarding possessions. The individual feels that they have an enormous responsibility to ‘save and protect’ the family finances and absolutely fears spending/losing it and being judged (by whom I don’t know). We all know that money and possessions are useless to us when we die. Whatever you believe happens next, we are unable to take it with us. So, all of the money, the possessions, the responsibility, the heirlooms, the mindsets, and the rubbish gets passed on to the next generation.
My parents both passed away quite young having both worked really hard (one in a corporate job) for other people. My dad was nowhere near retirement and had very little in terms of possessions to his name. He had only travelled to a few places around the UK but never really had any desire to and seemed to be quite content with the simple things in life (food and a roof over his head). My mum made it to retirement, but it was largely spent fighting cancer and having hospital treatment. What was the point in them working hard and saving up for retirement? Another family member hasn’t worked for several years and has enough money to live very comfortably, travel or seek private medical care should they wish. But they don’t. Is life not for living??
Of course, there is no way of knowing if our lives will be long or short. I am certainly not suggesting that we should be frivolous and throw our money and possessions away. I know that I couldn’t live a completely minimalist lifestyle myself and it’s important to have an emergency fund and be able to support yourself. But this constant need to own bigger homes, replace things with the latest most up to date model, put pressure on women to have children to continue the family line whilst also being high flying and earning lots of money, it needs to stop. We need to learn to value community and multi-generational living again. No wonder there is a social care crisis in this country with an ageing population whose children are too busy working to pay for houses that they are struggling to afford. Or when people are living for longer and sitting on pots of money, hoarding it like dragons instead of enjoying it themselves or helping the younger generations and seeing them make use of it and enjoy it whilst they are able to. The older generations should not have to die in order for the younger generations to succeed and prosper in the world. We should value the knowledge and wisdom that older generations possess, not see them as a nuisance. Also, no wonder there are so many miscarriages and young couples struggling to conceive if they are leaving it until later in life for fear of not being able to support themselves or not having the support of their families who are piling the pressure on them to not just conceive but also be ‘successful’. When will society understand that it is family, community and ultimately ‘experiences’ that are the most important things in life?
I’ve come to realise that it’s not just my life’s purpose to ‘raise the next generation’, it is also my mission to heal my ancestor’s damaging ideas around money and what success looks like. It is my job to teach the next generation that it is not your job title or monetary value that are your signs of success. In my view, success can come in many different guises but, the most important marker for success is your ability to support both yourself and others. We all have unique gifts to share with the world and to help add value to it, not just keep taking from it and depleting it. At the end of the day, we are only human. We are members of the animal kingdom and therefore a part of nature (not apart from it as some would have us believe). Ultimately, we just need food, shelter, warmth and companionship. It doesn’t matter whether you leave this world owning a lot or little. The greatest gifts are the ones that cannot be bought.
