When all the shame and blame have passed. As we retrace our child withins history, we inevitably reach an ancestral place of connection. That of the Child Withins connection to the ancestral genetic chain....Ghosts, so claim the distinguished Hungarian psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török, are psychological unfinished business. Whereas for Freud it is individual repressed traumas that return to haunt us, for Abraham and Török, repressed traumas can be transmitted down the generations. And this repression often comes in the form of family secrets.
"What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others," they wrote. Ghosts, like dreams, constitute a return of the repressed. They are traumas that have not received a proper burial. Too painful to mourn, they are avoided and passed down the family tree. And the point about ghosts is that they have a way of coming back to haunt you when you least expect them. Assimilation only ever runs so deep.
One of the threads that runs through so many of our child withins lives is shame. Not for what we had done, but for what our parents, grandparents, and other ancestors had done. It is as though what our forebears did had somehow become our story, and we feel implicated—as we though they had done it, or inherited it, or would pass it on.
Another theme is lack of maternal love: mothers who were unwilling or unable to provide physical and emotional security, affection, solace, and caring because of their own limitations, blind spots, mental illness, or emotional genealogy. In some cases, the cruel hand of fate removed a mother through death.
A third thread is absence: adults who were physically there, but emotionally remote or not present. Or who sent their children away to orphanages, boarding school, foster families, or to live with other family members.
There are shared stories of violence, emotional and physical trauma, drug or alcohol abuse, lying, secrets, scathing words, denial.
The goal is not to dwell on problems, but to look at what each of us has inherited emotionally, and how we can transform that inheritance, release it, or release our fear of it in order to live fuller, more satisfying lives. We had to separate our own child withins story from the story of those who came before us. Their mistakes were not ours. We had to swing open the closet door and look fearlessly at the skeletons that were rattling around in there. And then we had to close the door. There was forgiveness, self-forgiveness, commitment to make better, freer choices for our unique child within finally shedding our ancestral bonds.
Our behaviour patterns can actually pass down in our genes. As our lives progress, something turns those genes on….and, presumably, something can turn them off.The Ten Stage course of recovery assimilates that change process.
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