#INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA AND PARENTING HOW TO#
#INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA AND PARENTING PROFESSIONAL#

Our children will benefit greatly from every little bit we can possibly move in this direction. It is about reclaiming our personal will and sovereignty, starting to live our lives with dignity and self-love and behaving like the holy beings we are. This healing work involves shaking ourselves awake right in the midst of the nightmare of disconnection that the Power Over Paradigm perpetuates, and trying our best to see clearly. It is lineage work and legacy work that extends well beyond our own lifetimes. It’s about awareness and the willingness to do our best to take responsibility for our own healing work and give our children as much support and resourcing as possible to tend to theirs. This healing work is not about perfection or purity. No matter how “perfectly” we parent there will be some passing down of trauma. We have all inherited trauma and experienced personal wounding and we are all passing it down to our kids.

#INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA AND PARENTING HOW TO#

Notice and accept and do the work of learning how to respond in the most loving and healing way that you can. If you are truly committed to healing trauma within your lineage, try to see what they show you. If you’re paying attention, raising kids will bring everything into the light for you. Their behavior or attitudes will reflect things to you that you may have long since relegated to the shadows and blind spots of your psyche. Your children will be a mirror for you as they grow. In each of these moments you are given the opportunity to relive your own experience and tend to the unmet needs of your inner child, both by doing your own personal healing work and also by taking care of your children in the ways that you weren’t cared for.

#INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA AND PARENTING PROFESSIONAL#

Depending on the severity of the trauma you may want to seek out professional support to guide you through deep healing work as you traverse these thresholds. If you can steady yourself in the awareness that each of these moments is an opportunity for healing, you can transcend the fear and panic of the trigger and respond instead of react. Each stage or threshold they pass through will bring you right back to the parallel moment in your own life. If we seek to minimize the trauma our children take on through their childhoods, our first step is to recognize that we are the link between generations and substantial healing of these deep wounds can happen in our own lives if we bring our attention to it.Īs you raise your children, your personal and intergenerational traumas will be triggered again and again. Whether we are carrying high intensity personal trauma or the more general trauma of being raised in our wounded society, we can actively work to interrupt the passage of trauma along our lineage through the way we raise our kids. As they say, “hurt people hurt people.” Likewise, hurt parents hurt kids.Īs they say, “hurt people hurt people.” Likewise, hurt parents hurt kids. This trauma cycle is the root cause of many (if not all) of the harmful and abusive behaviors that traumatize children. That trauma is then passed down from generation to generation and exacerbated as wounded people raise children whose needs are, in turn, neglected or violated. The violence of the Power Over Paradigm is so acutely at odds with our natural human needs that both those who perpetrate the violence and those who are the victims of it suffer deep wounding and internalize trauma. The brutal history of conquest and colonization that has created the conditions we find ourselves in today has affected all of our families and ancestors in various different ways. There’s a wide variety of types and degrees of intensity of the trauma we carry and the effects it has on us and our parenting. Whenever our basic human needs of safety, belonging and meaning are interrupted, either through violence or negligence, we are wounded and carry that wound into our lives as trauma. Being born into a society that is based on power, domination and disconnection has embedded trauma deeply into each of us. Trauma is a psychic wound that hardens you psychologically that then interferes with your ability to grow and develop. Trauma is when there is a loss of feeling and there is a reduced flexibility in responding to the world. If the wound was great enough, you’d get a big scar, and it would be without nerve endings so you wouldn’t feel, and it would be much less flexible than your normal tissue. How I think about it is that if I wounded you, if I cut your flesh, the healing would involve scar tissue forming.

Intergenerational trauma and parenting