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Our Parents Past Lives

How do the past lives of our parents affect us? We do not only pass on our history, our traditional food recipes, and stories from our grandpas and grandmas but even our traumas. Additionally, some of our ways to survive and our way of life.

Our trauma and our methods of protecting ourselves are threads. I had a client whose father was schizophrenic. He believed the Mexican mafia was after him. His son, who was 8 years old at the time, was living with him.

Dad would come to school, take him out of school, and they would drive for hours, trying to get away or move away, leaving everything behind. This was the way of my client’s life experience with his dad.

My client, as he grew up, had a problem with the Mexican race. Those problems were buried within him.  While going to college he had fallen in love with a Mexican girl who didn’t look, Mexican. Soon after he received this information from her, he started getting sick.

He started feeling weird, his stomach would hurt, he would get headaches, almost feeling frightened. Why?  He wanted to stay away from this girl. He confided in her one day when she asked if she did anything wrong?  He said he blurted out the following words. He wanted to know “if she had anything to do with the Mexican Mafia?” My client told her about his dad and his illness.

He said he felt relieved, and at the same time scared that she would judge him and think “this guy’s crazy.” His Girlfriend, (she must have really liked him) suggested he should get help. (Smart lady.)

This trauma was placed within him by his father, who was not medicated for his mental illness, affected his son for the rest of his life, and could have ruined a good relationship. Today, he is married to this lady, has children, a good job, and doing well.

How parent’s trauma, can affect their children’s lives is very real.

Our parent’s past lives and lives within each of us, are molded into our biology. We are all sculpted by experiences of threat and safety. They are like threads, both literally and metaphorically.

Long and thin, those threads stretch, not only through the spaces of our bodies, but back through time, even to the generations before we were conceived.

Scientific studies of trauma and adverse childhood experiences have revealed that children’s distress casts a much longer shadow of thread through our culture, more than we know or care to admit.

We now know that childhood traumas hover over us as adults, creating health conditions like heart disease, liver cirrhosis, obesity, drug use, alcoholism, diabetes, dementia, and many other diseases and illnesses.

If we don’t start raising our children gently and lovingly, we now know that we can start not only threading through the spaces of our children’s bodies, because of our unresolved traumas but pass it on to our grandchildren as well.

If we don’t increase our knowledge of how we can stop damaging our children, the children of our future, we are risking casting those threads to our children’s futures and the effect that could have on their children and their future, it could go on and on.

Let’s get the needed help, for the sake of our children and their future.

Many blessings to you all.

 

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Is Trauma Hereditary?

Trauma is defined as a physical and psychological threat or assault to a child’s bodily integrity, sense of self, safety, survival, or to the physical safety of another person significant to the child. Have you ever thought that trauma is hereditary? Do we have to go through a traumatic episode also, as did our father, mother, or family? It does feel that way, when you hear the history of your family.

Early childhood trauma (i.e., those bad things that happen before the age of six) lie at the root of most depression, anxiety, and many other emotional and psychological illnesses. Could this finding be heredities?

Why do some of us in the family continue to suffer with trauma? Are we making these choices for our loved ones? Must it carry on to every generation?

Due to traumatic experiences, children are susceptible to psychological disorders and severe emotional turmoil, often needing trauma therapy assistance.

Heredity trauma is also known as intergenerational trauma.

What causes intergenerational trauma?

Intergenerational trauma can negatively impact families as a result of unresolved emotions and thoughts about just living life. Negative repeated patterns of behavior, including beliefs about parenting and passing on some of the traditional parts of life in a way that families live.

Untreated or poorly-treated substance abuse or severe mental illnesses can or may effect us all in someway or another.

Can you inherit your parent’s trauma?

Many types of research suggest that trauma may be inherited in many aspects. Studies have shown that experiencing trauma may abandon a chemical mark on a person’s genes, which is then passed down to future generations. Can you believe that? It scary to think that we cannot escape this.

Does inherited trauma exist?

Intergenerational trauma is usually seen within one of the parents or grandparents of one family who was traumatized enough, and each period of that family continues to experience trauma in some form or another. In these cases, the origin can usually be traced back to a devastating event, and the trauma is unique to that family. Its almost like a curse. If you believe in curses.

Symptoms of intergenerational trauma:

• Lack of trust of others
• Anger
• Irritability
• Nightmares
• Fearfulness
• Inability to connect to others
• Not getting treatment for the intergenerational trauma

Healing hereditary trauma includes the following therapies, which can break the cycle of trauma:

• Parent-child interaction therapy
• Family therapy
• Family system improvement therapy
• Working through a genogram
• Child parent relationship therapy

Other hereditary intergenerational traditions could include in times of war. Sometimes we follow our forefathers’ tradition of going to war. Parental disorder trauma constitutes an essential health care need of veterans, especially those who recently separated from service. By reviewing studies regarding the strength of several types of trauma found that many of the studies were invalid in composition and performance and that relatively few of these studies have been carried out in veterans’ populations, despite suggestions that civilian and veteran people respond indifferently about many kinds of treatment.

The board also notes that the data is insufficient for potency or generalization of ethnic minority treatment modalities.

Despite challenges in the consistency, quality, and depth of research, the board found the evidence adequate to conclude exposure therapies’ efficacy in treating trauma.

The committee found the evidence inadequate to determine the effectiveness of different pharmacotherapies, three other psychotherapy modalities, and psychotherapy delivered in group formats.

In other words, there was no pure evidence that trauma is or is not really hereditary. Or is it? What do you think?