Breaking the Chain of Ancestral Trauma

I flew home to Australia recently to be with my family for my mother memorial. It was a gathering to say goodbye and to be with family, but something else had been brewing in me, the hope of healing across generations.

Standing before my children, my niece and nephew, and a room full of elderly citizens, I shared that becoming a trauma healer had not been a comfortable path for me. It had required me to face the pain my mother’s own limitations had left in me. And in doing so, I had come to see her with more compassion.

My mother grew up in a time when children were not allowed to feel. Her own mother, had survived hardships she never spoke of; a woman who aspired to be an intellectual in an era that actively discouraged women from having minds of their own. My grandmother kept her inner world hidden, expressed through paranoid and fear, never even wanting her photograph taken, as if being seen itself was dangerous.

My mother lived caught between Victorian repression and the idealised freedom of the 1970s. Her childhood traumas of neglect, austerity, and emotional silence never released their grip. She came across as eccentric, someone who lived life on her own terms. But beneath that mystique, her relationships were fraught and she never quite felt safe with other people, or able to express love in the ways we need.

Exploring my mother’s history, I could see the tools she was never given. Seeing this trauma pattern play out in my own childhood has been both painful and cathartic. It opened my path as a trauma healer. I know that we don’t have to continue to carry what hurt us, and that understanding where someone comes from begins to help us heal intergenerational trauma.

We are living in a time that is powerfully calling us to do this. The patterns of pain and disconnection that have moved through families, over generations are asking to be witnessed and released; through compassionate seeing comes healing.

What I shared with my family at my mum’s memorial was an offering of her story. She hurt members of my family, and she was shaped by our ancestry that conditioned people to disconnect from their heart and soul. When we see that, we can begin to heal the ancestral pain that has repeated over and over and finally break this chain.

I told them at the memorial, that although I see the resilience it took for my mother and the women before her just to survive, I am also free to break the patterns that no longer serve me. We must find a way to be willing to see what's hidden, to bring it to the surface, to clear it, to heal it, so that we can be in the energies of our higher consciousness. Healing our ancestral trauma means connecting to and releasing what's been out of balance from the past, physically, emotionally, and energetically, as we as a species, are being called to purge the trauma patterns, of this last 5000 years. I do this in my self and in my clinical practice healing the traumatic burdens of our inner world though parts work.

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Clare is a registered art therapist with 25 years of experience working with trauma, creativity, and the healing of the inner world.