LensqTrauma happens when you face a situation which you are not yet ready for. In childhood, you are completely dependent on your caregivers. If they are not able to meet your overwhelming needs, it results in a trauma. As an adult, you attract more of such situations so that you get a chance to overcome the same and feel secure finally. But when you don’t recognise this pattern, you might start to feel a sense of defeat which can result in emotions like shame and depression.
Some of the trauma you carry in your life is not necessarily unique to you. It is the same trauma as your parents and their ancestors also faced. For example, not being emotionally available or not expressing your emotions. Over generations, this is no longer considered as trauma by your family because it is normal for them now. But when you face life challenges surrounding that and are tired of the same drama repeating over and again due to faulty coping skills, you realise that it is a trauma and not normal. You also realise that you never received the healthy patterns because your parents never had it to begin with.
Now, you have a choice to be a victim with a sense of entitlement that “My parents should have given it to me”. While it is true that you deserved a better childhood and better care, you also need to know that you can’t do much about the past and choosing to be a victim is only going to make your life difficult.
But, when you decide that you want to change this, you notice that you are going against your odds. You have unhealthy coping skills but choosing the healthy way is a challenge as you go into changing the rewiring of the brain. As you start working on it, you notice that breaking a pattern is as good as breaking a bad habit. Both of them have a highly ingrained neural network pattern.You need to be highly aware to catch yourself whenever the old pattern gets repeated and strengthened. One way to break the pattern is to stop strengthening it.
In order to achieve this, you need a lot of mental bandwidth. There will be days when you relapse and you question why do I have to even work on breaking this when my ancestors could survive with the faulty coping style. You will also notice that you won’t necessarily have the support of your family while you make these changes because they survived with the old faulty coping style and you do something different that is threatening to them.
But when you go ahead and prepare the alchemy you are out there creating a butterfly effect. You are not only helping yourself but your next generation and also your previous generation by setting an example. Your next generation doesn’t have to suffer because of the changes you made in your nature and nurture.People around you are also going to take inspiration and change their own lives.
Do you want to break generational trauma?
Start with noticing your parents as they are and not the way you want to see them. Look at them as if you are seeing a stranger for the first time.
- What beliefs do they carry?
- How did they form those beliefs?
- How many of them are similar to yours? (If it is not serving both of you, this is what you need to change)
- How many of them are different? (These are the ones you have already worked on and changed)
If you are looking to work on breaking generational trauma at depth, check out this workshop.
Happy becoming the link breaker!