Family Patterns in Generational Healing

September 14, 2018

Michael Harris, PhD

Family Patterns in Generational Healing

Family patterns in generational healing are going to be your next step in this investigative process. Where did you get those patterns? You guessed it, from the fam, the mothership or whatever words you use. My personal investigation has been an interesting trip through the way-back machine. I have been trying to sift through the stories and get to the actual information.

Example: I had been told my whole life that my uncle was murdered by his ex-prostitute wife and another, for his social security check. Fact check: he died of cirrhosis of the liver. Not as exciting as the first story but very telling in how my family handles death, illness, and trauma/drama.

Go through the Generations

If you have a family member who does genealogy this could be helpful. Luckily for me, my sister and brother-in-law have made a full-time hobby of this. The stories we were told as kids, mostly are factual and I’ve discovered I had some really wild relatives. I also have discovered that my family history is filled with pain, abandonment, illness, disease, murder, and sorrow.

What you do with this information you discover is going to be the gateway to your healing process. Don’t get too caught up in the stories. You just need to know what happened. I frequently tell people, “just look at the pictures, don’t stand in them”. Translation: keep objective or neutral about your history, it was in the past. The purpose of this is clearing you and ultimately, clearing your family from all of this “stuff”, so you can get to the part where your life is awesome.

7 Generations

In Native American culture, thoughts and actions affect 7 generations, both up and down the scale. If this were a common thought in American culture would be more careful about what we thought and how we acted? I think so. For simplicity, I recommend that you stick to 2-3 generations in both directions. I only know about my grandparents, almost nothing about great-grandparents and I’m old enough to have accumulated 7 grandkids.

Start with what you know. Your life and immediate family, then start working outward. My family isn’t close (no wonder) so I had to ask other family members about history, the stories, what they remember. My focus was on the repetitiveness of specific patterns of illness, disease, and how they died.

I discovered that there have been lots of men abandoning women. Lots of women who hated men (no wonder). Children who were forced to become adults too early. Sound like a bad LifeTime movie. One grandmother of mine had at least 7 kids. 5 survived. One, I don’t know what happened to and another that was starved to death because she was a girl. it’s tough to imagine. On the flip side, My other grandmother’s father abandoned them and they almost starved as well. Downstream, I have two adult children who gave up their kids to other family members. So the generation pattern continues.

What’s the Point Here?

My goal here isn’t to tell you that I have a bad family, I don’t and nor do you. They are just like everyone else’s family, there are secrets, made bad choices and sorrow. It’s to illustrate that we all have patterns that need attending, but frequently are too painful or embarrassing to own. Stay with me it’s going to be worth it.

If you can stand in the vortex long enough, you can notice what these patterns have created. And you can decide if you just want to go along with the norm, you can run and hide (because that has worked so well) or you can decide that the buck stop here and make a change.

String Theory

String theory is a set of attempts to model the four known fundamental interactions—gravitation, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force—together in one theory. This tries to resolve the alleged conflict between classical physics and quantum physics by elementary units—the one classical force: gravity, and a new quantum field theory of the other three fundamental forces. (source: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory)

To me, string theory is a perfect explanation for how things work, particularly in families and generations of families. The short version. If one particle (family member) is moving in one direction and another particle (other family members) is moving in the opposite direction; whatever happens to one particle affects the other. Families work the same way. So in a perfect universe (mine), if this theory is true for trauma, it is also true for healing.

Task

I have a task for you if you’re interested? I want you to take some time and really think about what you know about your family. What the stories are. Who did what to whom and for how long? And think about what these things mean to you, your family and the repetitive patterns that have shown up as problems, mistakes, coincidences and “bad luck” Maybe by bringing light to these issues they can be healed.

Set some time aside, like 30-45 minutes, and drill deep. Remember to stay, objective and just watch. If you need a break take one, but do the work. Tomorrow I’m going to offer a process that may help break this generational cascade.

Want More?

I know this article is kind of short but it’s intentional. I want you to take the time to evaluate what’s been going on in your family generationally. Tomorrow I’m going to give you an example of a near-death (hypnosis) experience, similar to a tribal transformation from child to manhood/womanhood like they do in primitive tribal ceremonies. It’s worth the wait.