Evidence that Traumas Get Passed Down

Some people look at the world as it is and say 'why'? and some people look at the world and say 'why not?' for the way they imagine life could be.

Imagine a world where there is no war between nations and between families, no PTSD, no cause for violence in any form, where people from all walks of life and from all cultures and traditions can be clear, truthful, transparent, authentic, real, honest, and loving towards each other and themselves.  John Lennon imagined this in his song, 'Imagine':

Imagine there's no heaven

It's easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us only sky

Imagine all the people living for today

Imagine there's no countries

It isn't hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

Imagine all the people living life in peace

You, you may say

I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one

I hope some day you'll join us

And the world will be as one

Science and research are catching up and validating something we've known for centuries:  the Sins of the Father are visited upon the generations below.  Now, some people look at the world we're living in and really question why all this is happening and other people are looking at the world and what they want to create and say, 'why can't we make that happen?'  The way I see it happening is when you heal yourself, every generation moving forward heals.

"We are affected by the seven generations that come before us and affect the seven generations that will follow," prescient words of wisdom and warning from a great Shoshone Elder, Francesca M. Boring.  Think about that for a moment.  Everything our ancestors did, on both sides, seven generations back, affects us today.  And what we do today, how we live our lives, what we do with the events that happen during our lifetimes, will affect the seven generations after us.  A powerful message bearing a call to take responsibility for all of our lives, to heal the wounds inside so that we don't pass this down to others to heal for us; all the unconscious, undigested emotions, pains, sufferings, horrors, and secrets that we unknowingly, unintentionally pass down when we don't take the time to heal ourselves from our own pain, which includes individual, familial, and the collective pain of humanity.  I've got the evidence below to show you that traumas from your parents, and their parents, get passed down.  So, as you read this remember: what you're doing affects everyone on the planet, especially the generations below.

Epigentic Transmission of the Impact of Early Stress Across Generations

A 2010 study conducted by Dr. Isabel Mansuy, a neurobiologist from the University of Zurich, published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, discovered that some impacts of traumas cross generations and cause genes to change which are then passed down to the offspring.  They raised male mice, and frequently separated them from their mothers inducing stress.  This was done for about 14 days, at which time, the mice  were cared for normally.  As the males became adults, they began to exhibit PTSD like symptoms -jumpiness, isolation, hyper-alertness.  They also noticed their genes functioned differently than other mice, most notably, the gene that helps regulate the stress hormone CRF and the gene that regulates the release of seratonin, and what they discovered was that these genes were either overreactive or underreactive.  These mice are equivalent to those who experience combat, or the Holocaust, or some intensely traumatic event.  Then, they bred these male mice with females to see what, if anything, occurred in their offspring.  Once they fathered pups, the males were removed, and the offspring were raised by their mothers with no trauma separation.  What they discovered was that as these males grew into adults, they exhibited the same anxious and jumpy behavior of their fathers and had the same gene changes! [2,1]

Here's what John H. Krystal, M.D., Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, and the editor of Biological Psychiatry had to say about these results:

"The idea that traumatic stress responses may alter the regulation of genes in the germline cells in males means that these stress effects may be passed across generations.  It is distressing to think that the negative consequences of exposure to horrible life events could cross generations," says Krystal. 

"However, one could imagine that these types of responses might prepare the offspring to cope with hostile environments.  Further, if environmental events can produce negative effects, one wonders whether the opposite pattern of DNA methylation emerges when offspring are reared in supportive environments." [1]

Lost in Transmission: Studies of Trauma Across Generations.

The subject of this book by M. Gerard Fromm, published by Karnac Books (2012), is that all the traumas that are so overwhelming and too unbearable to even discuss are passed down to those who are closest and dearest to us.  Our loved ones end up carrying what we are unable to carry, and we do the same.  For time, I will print the synopsis of the book as it is written.

"A central thesis of this volume is that what human beings cannot contain of their experience - what has been traumatically overwhelming, unbearable, unthinkable - falls out of social discourse, but very often onto and into the next generation, as an affective sensitivity or a chaotic urgency.  What appears to be a person's symptom may turn out to be a symbol - in the context of this book, a symbol of an unconscious mission - to repair a parent or avenge a humiliation - assigned by the preceding generation.  These tasks may be more or less idiosyncratic to a given family, suffering its own personal trauma, or collective in response to societal trauma.
This book attempts to address the heritage of trauma - the way that the truly traumatic, that which cannot be contained by one generation, necessarily and largely unconsciously plays itself out through the next generation..." [3]

Here's what some leading psychologists and scholars are saying about this book:

"...The more "unmentalized" the trauma of parents, the greater the likelihood of its suppressed whispers finding their echoes in children's lives.  To render the unthinkable aspects of a trauma into a cogent, if fumbling, narrative, therefore, goes a long way to minimizing its long-term adverse effects..."
     -Salman Akhtar, MD, Professor of Psychiatry, Jefferson Medical College; Training and Supervising Analyst, Psychoanalytic of Philadelphia [3]

"'Lost in Transmission is not simply about how traumatic psychological injury is passed down to the children and grandchildren of those who originally experienced it.  Even more, the insightful and personal essays in this collection are about finding the shared humanity in families, in psychotherapy, in society, and in memories of the past that repairs the damage people do to one another.  A moving and inspiring book."
    -Thomas A. Kohut, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Professor of History, Williams College, USA [3]

"...Lost in Transmission teaches us how the unacknowledged terrors of one generation can lead to the neglect of the next...; how historical traumas can be used to mobilize hate and violence; how the shame of previous generations can be stealthily imprinted on children's psyches - leading them to avenge historical humiliations or assuage historical pain they may not even know of.  These wise healers unlock the code.  A critically important contribution to healing history's lasting wounds."
    -Jessica Stern, Former Erik Erikson Scholar; Advanced Academic Candidate, Mass. Inst. of Psychoanalysis;  author of Denial: A Memoir of Terror and Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill [3]

As Molly Castelloe, Ph.D. writes in her article in Psychology Today about Lost in Transmission:

"Transmission is the giving of a task.  The next generation must grapple with the trauma, find ways of representing it and spare transmitting the experience of hell back to one's parents.  A main task of transmission is to resist disassociating from the family heritage and "bring its full, tragic story into social discourse." (Fromm, xxi) 

She goes on to write: "How does one discharge this mission?  It is a precarious terrain of finding one's way through a web of family loyalties to which one has been intensely faithful.  The working through of transmission entails a painful, seemingly unbearable, process of separation.  It can become an identity crisis, the breaking of an emotional chain.  As Fromm puts it, "something life defining and deeply intimate is over."  The child speaks what their parent could not.  He or she recognizes how their own experience has been authored, how one has been authorized, if unconsciously, to carry their parents' injury into the future.  In rising above the remnants of one's ancestors' trauma, one helps to heal future generations." [4]

That's just some of the supporting evidence of how traumas get passed down that I've compiled.  I haven't even mentioned all the studies they've done on the survivors of the Holocaust and the effects of the trauma experienced and passed down to the second and third generations.  This information is all very recent, too.  Now, before you start accusing and blaming others, specifically your parents for what happened to you or someone else in your family (I want to remind you it's important to take responsibility for all of your life - all your choices, decisions, and errors -being the author of the totality of your whole life), remember, they were doing the best they could under the conditions and circumstances of their lives.  And they were traumatized too.  These things, as I've pointed out above, get passed down.  We know it now, we have scientific evidence to support it, and for men, we need that, (I know I do), we need to see the evidence, the logic and science, before we take action to do something.  We are not as intuitive as women, at least not yet, we have to develop that ability.  Nonetheless, what I'm saying is there is no one to blame.  It doesn't serve you to be upset with someone when they didn't even know themselves the value of cleaning up their inner life.  It doesn't serve you to accuse, blame, or shame someone for what may have happened to you.  It also doesn't serve you to live in guilt, shame, or self-loathing.  That just keeps you stuck in the past, shackled to the events that traumatized you.  It keeps you there, and not in the present moment where life is happening.  To open up your present, you've got to clean up your past, even if it includes the past of your parents and ancestors.  What you don't clean up, you give to your future generations to clean up for you.  I really want the men out there who are reading this to get this.  We will pass it in our genes if we don't heal this within ourselves first.  Now that you know this, the next step is what do you do with this new information in your life.  Are you going to stop it from being passed down?  It's is your choice, and what you choose, has consequences.

I also want to point out that there's no "fixing" anything.  You're not broken and need to be fixed.  The idea is when you are already perfect and whole, you just have to remember your wholeness.  Transparency and truth equals healed.  Being able to share whatever has occurred, heals it.  It's different from fixing it.

Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people sharing all the world

You, you may say

I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one

I hope some day you'll join us

And the world will live as one

What a beautiful and inspiring vision of what this life could be and will be, based on all of us doing our part.  

Do honor to your ancestors, do honor to your parents, do honor to your future generations and get this healed within yourself.  Be the one who stops the pain and heals it.  Be the one who finds the courage to speak the truth of your experience, without blame, guilt, anger or shame, and find the miraculous release that comes with transparency.  You're a beautiful child of God.  Every single one of you.  No exceptions.

References:
1.  www.ts-si.org/healthcare/26795-do-psychological-trauma-impacts-cross-generations
2.  www.helphealingtrauma.com/2011/04/15/genetic-trauma/
3.  www.karnacbooks.com/Product.asp?PID=30112
4.  www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-me-in-we/201205/how-trauma-is-carried-across-generations



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Your PTSD can be healed!

Thank you for following me on this blog.  I wanted to share with all of you a free gift: Reclaiming the Life you were meant to LIVE! Teleconference. Please enjoy the recording.  I want to share with you my story so that you know you are not alone, and that you can be healed from this.  I love you all. Thank you for all your feedback. Click or press on the link below to receive the mp3 or on the phone, call the free conference play back number: (605) 475-4099 Access code: 520966#. 

The next teleconference is scheduled for June 13th, at 6PM PST. 

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Shadow Work - A Tribute to Debbie Ford

What we create in this life will help the world move forward.  Just look at what Debbie Ford did with her work on the Shadow.  After dealing with years of addiction, Debbie turned those dark years into something great, brought about a total shift in awareness and understanding of the dark, repressed emotions and unconscious behavioral patterns that intrude on people's lives.  She taught people how to overcome them, find the gold within the dark, and recover the lost side of them hidden beneath the coverings of the shadow.  Her work has helped inspire millions to look at themselves and their shadows with compassion, unravel the origins of these disruptive and unconscious behaviors and belief systems, and helped them to replace their self-loathing with self-love and forgiveness.  Once you are able to face your own truth, face everything you are hiding from the world to see, you will discover it was these fears that kept you from being the person you are capable of being.  As the I Ching states:

It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without self-deception or illusion, that a light will develop out of the events by which the path to success may be recognized.

Her work continues to inspire and is still moving forward, and this blog post is a tribute to the work she brought to the world.

What is the shadow?  The shadow is everything we try to hide from the world, it's everything we don't want other people to see or know about us.  The shadow is secretive, dark, and sometimes, very dangerous.  The term, "The Shadow", I believe, was originally labeled as such by the great psychologist Carl Jung, who defined it in these terms: "On the civilized level, it is regarded as "a personal "gaffe," "slip," "faux pas," etc., which are then chalked up as defects of the conscious personality." [1]  These defects of the conscious personality are then suppressed into the unconscious because it is so disagreeable to our ego-consciousness and represents all that we dislike and/or fear about ourselves, and then, we build up facades around us to keep these defects from appearing.  When they do appear, they show up as projections in the outside world, and what we hate in someone else, is truly what we hate about ourselves.  The shadow side must be integrated within our consciousness in order for us to move towards full individuation of the individual.  We can not disown any part of ourselves.  When we do, troubles arise, the shadow hides until it finds the right situation and circumstances to rear its head and demand to be seen and heard.  But if we don't heed its warnings and accept its truth, we will continue to endure the various effects it produces in our lives.

How does the shadow show up in our lives?  Debbie Ford made a movie about this called "The Shadow Effect."  I highly encourage all of you to watch it, and much of what I'm writing about in this blog post comes from that movie.  In the movie, Debbie explains how it shows up: it shows up as writing bad checks; a man cheating on his wife or girlfriend; drinking too much; doing drugs to escape the pain in one's life; cheating on your tax returns; screaming at your kids; emotionally abusing your partner after you've been the nice person all day long to your friends; surfing the internet and visiting porn sites while your wife is cooking dinner for you in the next room; eating disorders; narcissistic personality disorders; eating chocolate cake in the middle of the night after 3 days of dieting; cheating on our boyfriends or husbands while they are working hard to provide a place to live; taking other people's ideas and making them are own.  These are just some examples of how the shadow shows up.  Where the shadow becomes dangerous is when these repressed thoughts, emotions, and impulses become violent, and this manifests itself as rape, domestic abuse, terrorism, war, evil, and radical injustices both economically and socially.  In the film, Deepak Chopra stated some shocking statistics about the economic injustices in the world.  Did you know that 50% of the world is living on less than 2 dollars a day, and 20% are living on less than 1 dollar a day!  In a world with so much abundance, how can this be accepted and tolerated?  But we do, because we don't want our lives to be affected by the change this might impose on us to change the way we live, or to be more responsible in how we utilize the resources available to us that benefits all rather than just the few.  How lucky are we to be on the other end of the spectrum.  A flip of a coin, and we might have been one of the 50%.

The birth of the shadow begins when we are very young.  Debbie explained that what happens is "we were shamed for certain behaviors and these messages got ingrained in our subconscious like a compute virus altering our sense of self and wounding our healthy egos."  Our minds at that very delicate age are not equipped to filter out things that would be able to protect us from these unhealthy belief systems.  The rational, logical part of our minds had not developed yet, and thus, these viruses entered without even our knowing, and as we get older, they begin to shape how we see ourselves in the world.  The parts we don't like about ourselves, (I'm not handsome; I'm the problem; no one will like me if they really knew me; I'm not lovable; I'm stupid; I'm never going to amount to anything: it's my fault; I'm worthless; I'm bad, etc.,) gets repressed, and then we try to prove not only to ourselves, but the rest of the world that we are not that which we hate about ourselves.  So, we build masks, to protect our wounded egos and "to prove to others we are not as defective, inferior, worthless, and bad as we might fear we are."  The masks we construct hide our flaws and insecurities and create a persona which we believe will get us what we truly want: love, acceptance, attention, and a sense of belonging.

The problem is the masks become our prisons.  Many of us have a public life and a private life.  I certainly did at one time.  I was trying to fit in in certain groups because I wanted to belong, to feel loved, admired, and desired, and yet, inside, I felt guilty for abandoning the man who I really was to impress all these others around me.  And what did that lead me to do?  Self-destructive behaviors because I hated who I'd become. All that stuff I felt was wrong about me, that had been influenced or deemed wrong by others, was now the guard standing outside the prison of my own making.  These parts of ourselves that we have deemed wrong are screaming to come out, they want to be set free, accepted, loved, and integrated into who you are.  Look at life.  It exists in contradiction: light and shadow; up and down; hard and soft; and if life is these things, and we are part of life, then every quality we see in another individual, exists in us as well.  We are the totality of it all, whether it is active or dormant, conscious or unconscious, if the good qualities exists in us, so do the "bad" qualities.

Instead of confronting our own shadows, we disown it, and project out all these unwanted qualities on to others.  What does that look like?  It sounds like this: "He is such a jerk; she is so self-absorbed; He is such an arrogant asshole; these people are all losers; you're such an idiot; she's a bitch."  We are so afraid of our own unworthiness, and as Debbie points out, simultaneously afraid of our own greatness, we unconsciously project these unwanted qualities onto others.  But, she says, "Those we project on own the qualities of our unclaimed darkness as well as pieces of our unclaimed light.  Until we claim back all that we have projected away, what we can't be with, won't let us be."

This is why we want to deal with the shadow.  What happens if you ignore it?  You self-destruct.  You implode rather than explode.  Your life collapses in on itself.  And this is what often happens to people who have experienced some kind of trauma in their lives that has not been processed and is instead, buried deep within the unconscious.  Trauma changes how our brains function, which in turn, changes the chemicals and hormones released in the body.  If you've experienced prolonged periods of trauma in your life, whether through combat or emotionally abusive relationships or intense family dramas or rape or being bullied for years and years, whatever it may have been, the way your brain functions has dramatically changed, and this is not a good thing.  As the movie points out to the viewers, "It's important to express any kind of pain.  Without that, it stays with us, it gets lodged in the body, it causes us to react and live unconsciously."  All the things which have not been processed, the undigested emotions and feelings and our thoughts about it, are toxins to our bodies, and without proper treatment, "lead to all the physical, emotional, and psychological impairments that show up later in life."

When we repress our shadows, it can lead to destructive behavior, towards oneself and/or towards others.  Examples of how this shows up:  alcohol and drug abuse; domestic violence (every day 3 women die in the U.S. as a result of domestic violence and more than half of them knew their attackers); rape; violent assaults by co-workers; murder; mass murder; genocide.  As Debbie Ford so eloquently points out, "We have to resolve the undigested emotions that are in our bodies and dislodge the stress in our minds.  We have to unearth, own, and embrace the very parts of ourselves that have caused us the most pain.  And the moment we do, the light of our awareness will begin the process of transforming them."  All of us have gone through some kind of trauma in our lives.  It's what we do with it that counts.  If we ignore it and bury it away into our unconscious, though we may think it no longer exists, the moment the right situation or circumstances show themselves, the shadow will come out, and we become caught in the maelstrom of its destructive forces.  However, if we stop, take the time to look at it, own it as part of us, there is gold to be found.

All the bad experiences we've ever had can be experiences which bring about the greatest of gifts because they help us to be who we are.  Those experiences transformed, can help us to be more loving, compassionate, and forgiving.  When we embrace all that we are -the light and the dark- we experience freedom.  We are no longer chained to the memories or traumas of the past that kept us from being all that we were capable of being.  And, as Debbie Ford states, "As we move through our shadows, we can reclaim our light."

As I stated in a previous blog post, shame destroys.  But shame cannot survive empathy.  We can use the pain of our past to become the greatest expression of ourselves, if we are willing to do the work.  You don't have to carry this shame alone.  You have to climb your way out of the darkness.  There are people out there who are willing to hold a light for you, to see you as you truly are, through your shadow, so that you can reclaim your light.  I honor people in my work and in my program in that way, where you can be your most vulnerable without ever having to feel ashamed about it.  All that pain and trauma is just covering up the gold that is underneath, and when you chip away at all the dirt covering it up, it shines as bright as ever.

Debbie Ford recently passed away, but her legacy endures.  Her pioneering work with the shadow has brought forth new and innovative ways to overcoming the pain and traumas of our past, helped to heal millions from the effects of their own shadows, and helped them to reclaim the light that was always theirs to begin with.  She was truly a blessing for all of humanity.  Why would one want to do shadow work?  It sets you free to be who you were always meant to be.  It gets you to the point where you forgive, yourself and others, and when you forgive, your heart is set free again to truly enjoy all that life has to offer.  You get to be who you always were, and become all that you are capable of becoming.  It allows you to live life with freedom, joy, and love in your heart for all of life.

When we are no longer under the influence of the shadow, we get to stand in our own light, and that, my friends, is the redemption we seek.


References:
1.  Jung, Carl.  The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, 'On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure'.  Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press.  Tenth Printing, 1990.
2.  www.theshadoweffect.com
3.  www.debbieford.com


 

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• Do you have difficulty letting go of the past?

Can you say yes to one of these:

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