It’s the day before Halloween, two days before Dia De Los Muetos and the Gaelic, Pagan holiday of Samhain if you’re really witchy!
All of these holidays can kind of give us the creeps. They share the idea that on these days, the “veil” between our world and the spirit world is thin. It’s theoretically more possible to connect with your ancestors and the people who have passed on before us. Ghosts, goblins, witches, and things that go bump in the night are all front and center, along with skeletons and reminders that all of them, at some point, will be returned to the ethers.
But that’s not the scariest thing…
The scary thing that I want to tell you about is not a ghost story or another Halloween movie (what are they on number 11 now??)
No, the scary thing that I want you to know this Halloween season is that some of your issues in life could be the result of…..
Wait for it…
Ancestral Trauma
OK, that’s not that scary, but it is a weird thought, isn’t it?
That the issues that you face in your life, fears, phobias, anxieties, depression, even mysterious, unexplained chronic illnesses or pain can actually be the result of not what YOU have gone through in YOUR lifetime but could have actually been passed on to you by your ancestors.
Your parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents can hold the key to the struggles you are facing right now in your life.
Sounds too bizarre to be true??
Research out of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York has proven in numerous studies that the neurobiology and cortisol levels of the offspring of Holocaust and other survivors closely matched the profiles of the actual survivors even when the horrors were never discussed.
They found similar profiles in the babies born to women who were pregnant and developed PTSD after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.
Further research proves that you or I am three times more likely to develop PTSD if one of our parents had PTSD. We are also that much more likely to struggle with anxiety and depression.
It even gets weirder.
In the book “It Didn’t Start With You” by Mark Wolynn, he describes the story of one of his patients who was in his early 20s and came to him with terrible insomnia that had not responded to any treatment in years. He asked him to describe the insomnia experience, in which he shared that he woke every morning at 3:30 am, freezing, shivering, and unable to get warm no matter what he did. He would have the bizarre thought that “If I go to sleep, I’ll never wake up again.”
Upon further explanation, it turned out that he had recently learned (after the symptoms of freezing insomnia had developed) that his Father’s brother (an uncle he had never known) had died of hypothermia while checking power lines in a storm. It was such a devastating and sudden loss to that family that they had never spoken his name again.
Now three decades later, his nephew was experiencing these bizarrely parallel symptoms.
Queue Twilight Zone music, right? Do do do do, do do do do
Could it be that the issues you are experiencing in your own life that you’ve never been able to understand are the result of your ancestors’ unspoken and unspeakable trauma?
Is it possible that your weird symptoms make perfect sense once you discover the underlying causes??
Do you often wonder how you can have the symptoms and sensitivities of someone with PTSD without ever having gone through anything particularly difficult?
If you suspect this could be a possibility, feel free to reach out!
The trauma treatment for ancestral trauma is basically the same, although we must be a bit more creative when working with inter-generational trauma.
If you’d like more information, you can check out the book I cited above, “It Didn’t Start With You” by Mark Wolynn, or just give me a call for a free consultation.
I’d love to do a deep dive to find out the mysterious answers you’ve been seeking!
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