Pain travels through families until somebody is ready to feel it. Pain is not just an abstract concept- it is physiological. It is material. It is a weight that lives in our nerves, in our bones. It is a deep knowledge our organism carries that we have been wronged. And if we do not allow ourselves to release this pain- or we are not given a viable opportunity to- it will not just go away when we die. It will simply get passed down. From nervous system to nervous system. The imprint of pain is mirrored in the cells of each subsequent generation. Our bodies are so intelligent: the mix of stress hormones our baby bodies are bathed in while we grow can tell us what to expect outside the womb. They may tell us: Beware! something is wrong out here. There is some reason your lineage is in pain. And so we grow up, primed to feel it too. Our anxiety is not just our anxiety: it is an accumulation of our family’s history. It is a legacy of so many bodies for generations knowing that something is wrong and needs to be changed- or that we need to be prepared to survive it too if we can’t. And so in this way the unresolved trauma of every generation before us is passed down until it can be addressed. Until someone is ready to acknowledge it. Until someone is ready to be feel it. Until someone finds a way to have a new experience of the world. #familytrauma #familylegacy #neurobiology #neurobiologyoftrauma #neuroscience #neuroscienceoftrauma #trauma #attachmenttheory #ptsd #intergenerationaltrauma #traumarecovery #mentalhealththerapist #mentalhealththerapy
