Sometimes it’s hard not to think that life is “doing it to us,” and that some people are lucky and others are not. As a generational cycle breaker, understanding the effects of generational trauma is the first place to start. When family members continually struggle with certain issues like lack of education, dysfunctional ways of relating, addiction, failure in careers, or an inability to create financial success, they’re often caught in vicious cycles that seem impossible to break.

 

What’s actually going on is more complex than a simple curse – it’s intergenerational trauma manifesting through family patterns that affect the nervous system in profound ways. These negative cycles often stem from childhood trauma that wasn’t properly addressed in previous generations, creating a lasting impact that reverberates through time.

 

Sometimes the repeating pattern in your family of origin is based upon an initial traumatic experiences that occurred in the family. It is then passed down to the rest of the family, complete with the accompanying emotional disturbances. Working with a trauma-informed therapist or attending support groups can be part of the process of understanding these generational patterns.

 

For example, I had a gentleman client come to me who fearfully reported he was sure he was going to lose a leg before he was 55 and become an amputee. This would seem to be a wildly unlikely possibility—a case of an irrational phobia showing up out of nowhere. But diving into his family history through family therapy, I learned that every oldest male in his family system for seven generations had lost their right leg one way or another.

 

It had started with a great-great-something-grandfather losing his leg while on a whaling ship in the Pacific Ocean. His son lost a leg in a logging accident somewhere up in the Pacific Northwest. Then his son lost his right leg after getting shot in a hunting accident and the wound turned gangrenous. Yet another ancestor lost a leg in World War I. The stories went on and on. Cursed, right? 

 

No! Truth is, once my client understood that he was dealing with an inheritance of Emotional DNA—in this case a hardened belief in the family “curse”—once he was able to obtain a broader view of his family’s system dynamics which led to insights and shifts that enabled him to change his thinking that losing a leg was inevitable, he shifted what had seemed like a curse. Once he grasped that the pattern showing up was not fated and didn’t belong to him unless he held onto it and made it so, he was able to change his thinking and rewire his brain and body. And he is still walking around on two legs to this day.