How To Look Upon Our Parents With Compassion
Did you know your body holds memories that aren’t yours? That some of your patterns maybe don’t actually belong to you? That trauma can be inherited from relatives we’ve never met? Crazy. Right? When I first learned of these facts I felt this immense release in my body that radiated a sense of peace that far passes my limited ability to understand.
Many of us walk around with wounds we can’t explain; whether these symptoms are seen in anxieties, depression or obsessive thoughts that range from occasional struggles to chronic crosses we may still be looking for the roots of these manifestations. I know that connecting my current struggles with my ancestors and what happened to them never crossed my mind. But science is showing how traumas experienced by previous generations can be biologically inherited! Shocking right!? But it also makes so much sense! When trauma is ignored and never resolved, never spoken about is when it appears in later generations asking to be seen, heard, and healed. Once we make these links we can break those cycles.
Wise people understand that where we come from affects where we go, and what sits unresolved in our past influences our present. They understand how our parents regardless if they were good or bad parents, present or not are important and there is no way around it. Our family’s story is our story. Our parents are in us and rejecting them only further distances us from ourselves and increases suffering. This blog begins with the recognition of reality, it is not to blame or shame our parents or ancestors for our pain, but to take agency of the tools we do have.
Recently I have realized I have judged my parents harshly unconsciously. I told myself that I will not end up like them, that when I grow up I wouldn’t be like my mother. I unconsciously blamed them for all the things wrong in my life. I’ve come to see that it didn’t matter how they could or couldn’t love me, but what matters is how I could receive what they had to give me.
My early separation from my mother along with inherited trauma from my lineage (my great-grandma, grandma and mother all separated from their own mothers) foraged a language of fear. The words alone, hopeless, and damaged have left clues to how my current battles were linked to a greater picture.
So you may be asking how does this actually work? It works through the biological modifications where genes switch on and off expressions depending on our interactions with our environments as well as our genetic inheritance. New research shows us that we can inherit gene changes from traumas that our parents and grandparents experienced. When traumas occur our bodies make physiological changes to better manage the stress. This makes sense because we are made to fight to survive and make sure or offspring do as well!
The adaptive change in lets say our grandmother is passed down to her child, your mother and then to you, preparing you and your mother to deal with similar trauma. This obviously can be a good thing, but it can easily become the stressor itself when that threat is no longer present. For example, if our grandmother or grandfather grew up in a period of history torn by war they could pass along skills for survival to us, meaning maybe a hyper-alert body, quick reflexes to loud sound — protective responses. It would be ideal to have these innate skills if we were born at the same time, but more often than not our environments are safe making these inherited traits not useful but maybe now dustructive.
So, yes it’s true that our grandparents’ and parents’ experiences can unintentionally become our own a legacy we may never have wished to perpetuate in our own families, but we can now in this moment can make the links between our patterns — our fears, anxieties and begin to see how it may link to what happened to one of our family members.
We now with this information can take actions to break the cycles of generational wounds and unresolved traumas!
Here are some things I have begun to do!
- Asking my parents more questions about their childhoods, about things I don’t have memories from my own childhood. Asking them if there are things in our family that no one talks about. Any deaths or accidents, abuse or neglect. Are there any hidden family secrets? What stories haven’t been told?
- I’ve honestly begun to open up myself to reconcile parts of my relationship with my dad and mom.
- Take it to prayer and spiritual direction.
In the words of Mark Wolynn, author of It Didn’t Start with You, “I’ve found that if we ignore the past, it can come back to haunt us. Yet when we explore it, we don’t always have to repeat it. We can break the cycle of suffering, so that our children can be free from having to live our pain in their lives”.
