Generational Trauma : It Doesn't End With You

Because accountability is where we actually start to build new systems, do things differently and we've got more forward thinking.

“The motivation phase is where we realize that the trauma bonding thing is not working and we want to get out of it,”

but we don't maybe know how to do that. The accountability phase is where we're actively designing the what. And we are collaboratively coming up with new systems to stop the bleeding, feel the wound, so that the next generation doesn't have to grow up knowing any of this. Your brain is wired for deception, but here's the truth. Patterns can be broken.

The code can be rewritten.

Once you hear the truth, you can't go back.

So the only question is, are you ready to listen? Generational trauma gets described in many different ways. Some people talk about it as if it's something that's carried through bloodlines and some point to genetics or epigenetics. While others recognize the spiritual environments that can influence your behavior, your thought patterns and your emotions.

“Human beings are actually complex and extremely multidimensional, so I think multiple layers play a role all at once.”

Genetics can influence your stress responses, spiritual environments can influence your thinking, your behavior, or how you're relating to one another. When you study how these patterns actually move through families and cultures, one mechanism becomes extremely clear. Generational trauma spreads primarily through behavioral patterns and emotional environments. In other words, your nurture. Children grow up inside emotional climates and their nervous systems organize themselves around the climate that they're in, beliefs form, behavior adapts, and behaviors, and patterns become automatic.

Children do not inherit them in the form of a memory. They inherit patterns as perception, reaction, and belief. Those patterns shape their adult relationships, their responses to conflict, how they respond to stress, and eventually, the environment that they set up for their own children.

“Generational trauma really is generational patterning.”

Every child grows up wanting three things about their world. They learn what emotions feel normal, what behaviors create safety, and what beliefs explain the environment around them. These three elements form the foundation of someone's brain pattern system, which we talk about very often on the show. When a child grows up an environment where anger is common, anger becomes familiar, and monomotional withdrawal is the dominant response to dealing with conflict with draw becomes very familiar. And when love appears conditional and inconsistent, anxiety begins organizing your behavior around trying to receive love.

Children adapt extremely quickly because their brain learns survival patterns early. One child may become hyper-responsible, that's just like me. Another child may become extremely avoiding. Another child might become controlling. Another might become the caretaker for everyone around them, also guilty. Each of these responses begins as an adaptation to the emotional environments surrounding the child. As adults, many people continue recreating these same emotional conditions as they adapt to during childhood, because, of course, safety equals familiarity.

For familiar environments, tend to pull people back in. The nervous system organizes itself around what it learned early as in life. Beliefs form early in life as explanations for the emotional environment that a child is experiencing. These beliefs in turn shape perception and become filters through which your entire reality is interpreted. Once a belief forms, the brain begins collecting evidence that reinforces it.

This is what makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy or a loop. A child who forms the belief that people can't be trusted, begins scanning the world for proof that people can't be trusted. A child who forms the belief that love must be earned, begins organizing their behavior around performance and approval and validation seeking. The belief becomes the lens through which they interpret their reality. The lens then shapes their behavior and the behavior produces outcomes that sometimes you can't run away from.

Those outcomes in turn reinforce the behavior. Over time, emotional cycles develop around these belief systems and these cycles repeat again and again. The brain is constantly scanning for cues in your environment. And these cues are going to in turn shape your expectations before your conscious thinking even kicks in. Psychology refers to this mechanism as priming.

Priming activates certain associations in the brain before you even made a decision.

Small signals influence behavior in very powerful ways.

Research has shown that subtle reminders of your identity can influence your overall performance.

One group checked their gender on the test before beginning the test and another checked their gender afterward.

“The group reminded of their gender before the exam performed worse overall.”

A single reminder activated a belief and that system influenced their overall performance. And when you expand this influence across your entire childhood, the impact becomes incredibly significant. Children group hearing messages about what people like them can expect from the world. Messages about relationships, messages about success, messages about safety and belonging. But the messages repeated inside families, communities and cultures become neurological instructions.

The brain organizes expectations around those messages and behavior begins aligning with them. I once worked with a client who grew up hearing a sentence repeated over and over again in their family.

And that sentence was, people always leave.

It was spoken casually and it was often said without much thought behind it. Over time, it became part of how their world was understood. Relationships were approached cautiously. Emotional distance felt safer than closeness. Vulnerability carried inherent risk.

“The person believed that they were protecting themselves by staying guarded.”

Years later, they began noticing a pattern. They pulled away first to take care of people at an arms length. Emotional closeness of any kind felt uncomfortable and actually dangerous. Eventually, relationships ended in every ending reinforced the same belief. People always leave.

The belief quietly created the outcome that it was actually just predicting. Once the pattern became visible, their behavior started to change. New responses replaced the old ones. Relationships began unfolding quite differently. The belief that once felt like a permanent truth lost its power entirely. Patterns that once felt inevitable began opening up into new possibilities.

Patterns gained strength when emotional responses reinforced them. The brain does not simply repeat behaviors. It begins seeking emotional states that fill familiar.

“Emotional addiction patterns start to form around those.”

And the brain becomes accustomed to a certain type of emotional chemistry. And it starts to recreate conditions that trigger those same biochemical responses. Some people become familiar with chaos. Other become familiar with rejection. Maybe others control or even rescuing others.

Each emotional pattern produces a very specific and predictable chemical response in the brain. And over time, behavior begins organizing your life circumstances around your emotional expectations. Relationship choices are purely just a reflection of that pattern. Your conflict styles start to repeat. Life begins mirroring the emotional environment that your brain recognizes.

From the inside the nervous system is returning to what it learned early in life. In many families, there comes a moment when someone begins to notice the cycle. A parent hears themselves speaking to their child in the same tone that they may have experienced as they were growing up.

A father may recognize anger patterns that he wants promised himself he would never repeat.

A mother may notice emotional withdrawals are in conflict that feels strangely familiar. That moment can feel uncomfortable. In break method, we often refer to this moment as reality for to go. Where you're becoming the very thing that you tried so hard to fight against. And there's something you can do except face it head on.

This moment requires honesty and responsibility. It also is what marks the beginning of change. Once the pattern becomes visible, it no longer is able to operate quietly in the background. You start to recognize that you have a choice. Maybe your response is start to shift.

Children raised in that new emotional environment experience something brand new. And when that shift occurs, the trajectory of your next generation starts to change. Patterns that once felt stretched across decades can dissolve in one single lifetime. And to be honest with you, I've seen them change with one person taking break method. Healing wounds often follows a progression.

In one of my break lectures many years ago, I was teaching about how generationally we seem to get caught in these sort of specific traps. Specifically regarding processing our own trauma and behavior.

The first stage that we were stuck in culturally and societally was a hiding phase.

And if you look back at the cues to this, this would be things like mental hospitals and things that kept you separated away from society. Where if you had any sort of issue, you were basically deemed subhuman and they just locked you away. It wasn't something to process, it wasn't something to work through. It was something to separate. And I'm glad that we got out of that stage, absolutely.

But then I think we transitioned into the stage where instead of hiding and keeping everything separate.

I believe for the majority of my lifetime.

I'm turning 41 in less than a couple of weeks, which is crazy. And for the better part of my life over the years, it's become more accessible to both acknowledge mental health issues, seek help for mental health issues. And then certainly in the last 20 years of my life, use those mental health issues as a way to either garner attention to be a part of a community,

or as a way to build your lifestyle around healing.

And for those of you that are listening and putting healing and air quotes here,

because I think trauma bonding is very antagonistic to healing. And I think that we have been stuck in this sort of support group retreats, sharing circles, Instagram, driven trauma bonding for a really long time. And I think there are many people out there trying to sound the alarm and do something about this. But I think we've been stuck here for the better part of 20 years.

There are plenty of people that I know are questioning this and doing what they can on their social media channels, or in their programs to try to shift the narrative or turn the tide.

“And I think I've evaluated that that third transition point is motivation, right?”

Where people realize I can't just talk about my trauma forever and use it as a way to build community around myself, or to maybe excuse or justify my poor behavior, or not going to cook it in my systems. I want to actually do something about it.

And you know, great first started in 2014, but it was only the 2017 that we launched our first online program.

And it's the role we need to balance every year. So I thought it's crazy that it's been almost 10 years of healing and great work at online safety. And if I look at those years, our growth and the amount of people that are ready to show up and say, "I don't want to keep looping in this forever. I want to get out of it," has increased tenfold. So I know this motivation phase is right there and people are leaning toward it.

“But I think part of what we're experiencing socially politically is this trauma-bonding social justice wound.”

It's got its tentacles throughout our society right now. And I want to just pause here and say, "I'm not saying this to diminish any bad thing that has happened to anyone." Any specific cultural group, because there are horrendous things that have happened to many cultural groups. But we can accidentally bring our problems with us and pass it on to the next generations. If we don't do the work to heal from it and separate from it, and I think there's been this major shift in the last 10 years in particular,

where we're really bent on trying to bring all of our issues from the past and bring them very much into this moment today. And in fact, if you look at a lot of what's happening in kind of the liberal political side of this spectrum, there's very much this introducing yourself with all of your disabilities or injustices before you even say your name. And I'm not saying this to poke fun at it. I'm purely saying we're talking about the psychological aspects of this and we're talking about priming.

“If you quite literally start off with, you know, all of the, and maybe maybe I'm not speaking to the regular, but I think I am.”

You've probably seen some social media clips where people will introduce themselves with all of their disabilities and their racial injustices and then give their name. But I'm not going to go out of my way to, you know, push into this too much further, but you can kind of film the blanks there. Before you even have a chance to pull someone's energy in or think about their name or I wonder who this person is, you've already primed them to think of yourself in all of these very specific trauma-laced ways.

That has an impact long term and people like that are now raising children and I'm very fearful that what is happening with this current generation will set us back even further than we already are. Because now mental health issues, social justice issues of the past are they're not coming through maybe story or more implicit ways of just observing behavior anymore. Now they're very much put on a pedestal and they are intentionally led into in both parenting and social interactions etc. So the idea that it was already hard for us to move beyond and break the generational chains of trauma and traumatic stories and things have happened in the past that was already hard.

The way that many people on the left side liberal spectrum are doing it now makes it impossible like actually impossible if you look at behavior and psychology like a math problem.

You train through group think people to put this sort of trauma story on a pedestal and you train them to think this is always true without question so then they're going to go out in the world and they're going to see the entire world around them from that lens. I'm going to tell a story that I've told on one of their podcasts before and actually got their podcast episode pulled so I don't know why when I tell this story you're going to be like huh but the sponsor of my episode happened to be a very liberal tampon company.

So I think it was actually the sponsor that asked from episode to get pulled this was many years ago and I digress. So I was in Atlanta once for a training and I was standing in a line where you're going up to the counter to order your food you put in order and then they give you like a little number and then you go back and sit down.

“I was standing behind in line someone from the training that was honestly still is I love her dearly a wonderful beautiful bubbly black woman from the south.”

She was standing in front of me and we're kind of like chit chatting in the line we're getting closer closer closer and she gets up to the person at the front and I'm an observant person so I've kind of been.

You know taking in the say it's watching this person how they've interacted with many people before them and this person was having a really bad day.

Were they having a bad life possibly were they nice absolutely not they were rude they were short they clearly hated their job they worked in a burger joint I may not like my job either at a burger joint. But I watched many people tons of diversity before this person come through to this particular person at the cashier counter and they all in my opinion had equally crappy experiences because this person was not a nice person. This person goes up they order their food when we go to sit down the entire conversation was about how racist that person was.

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“And it was, did you see what they said to me? Did you see what they did to me? And I took a beat and I thought, do I say something? Do I say something? Do I say something? And I was like, you know what?”

This is one of those great learning opportunities where I'm just going to say something because I know would but any amount of money on an in Vegas. That person was not rude to her because of the color of her skin. That person was rude to her because that person was rude. That person was rude to a white person to an Asian person. It doesn't matter what their skin color was. That person was just rude. But if you've been trained to think of somebody based on what their skin color is going to do to me, you're going to filter their rudeness through a lens of racism. And that doesn't make it objectively true.

Because that person was just as rude to me as they were to her and my skin color was the same skin color as the person that was the cashier. So I say this as an example because if you are trained through your generational trauma and now just the entire social justice movement as a whole to see the world that way.

So I encourage each of you to be thoughtful about what you are allowing yourself to believe because what we believe we will start to see pop up in our world.

Another example of this would be and this happens all the time when you get a new car maybe you thought that you were like the only one that had your car you never see them all sudden you get your new car and you're like oh my god everyone has my car now.

“It's just because it became part of your awareness so you were primed to now start to see it in more places.”

That is how priming works another great easy example of priming would be if I show you in my hand that I'm holding up the color yellow right now and I ask you to think of a fruit most of you are going to say a banana. Like it just how it goes some of you might have thought lemon but most of you if I was holding up the color yellow and I asked you to think of a fruit and the yellow or even just hearing the word yellow was either in your ear or you can see it with your eyes. You are very likely to pick a yellow fruit because that is how priming works.

So if you teach a child either explicitly or implicitly that men are all dogs and men always leave and men can't be trusted or white people are inherently racist or black people are inherently racist.

You will all but ensure that is what they see in their world and it will not mean that it is objectively true. So when we think about where we're stuck in these phases, where we see this intersection of kind of social justice and then us already being stuck in the trauma bonding phase in our healing trajectory as a human collective.

“The blend of these two is extremely toxic because they feed each other, right?”

I would love to see us get to a place where we can have some real and nuanced conversations about injustices that were done to people in the past and trauma and poverty and other sorts of systemic injustices.

And have a conversation about truly how to solve them because my belief is that the way it is being done today does not only not solve them, it actually augment them and makes them worse.

I've talked in previous episodes and obviously all my other podcast content from my old podcast the modern good about some ideas on how to solve some of these problems, but I think at very least we need to be able to have nuanced conversations.

“But I think this is where we, I hope, are going to shift out of this sort of motivation phase because I do think there are some people who are going to get to solve them.”

They do think there are some people that are trying to motivate their way out of the trauma bonding. I think there are some people, especially in some of these communities that have been wildly mistreated historically have been disenfranchised. There are many people inside of these groups. They're just, they're not as loud as the organized group think groups on the left, but there are absolutely some people who have been trying to sound the alarm on this. For those of you, I commend you because we shouldn't have to choose between one or the other. We can't just pretend those things didn't happen, but we also shouldn't only think about the things that have happened and not do anything to help those groups heal.

Because I do believe that healing, of course, is a choice, but there is an actual destination, where you will have effectively been able to release your past trauma, separate yourself from it, and not see any user value and holding on to that trauma story anymore. And I don't think that we have ever seen that happen on mass with the groups that need to have that happen. We've never gotten any of these groups that have experienced really significant pain and trauma to be cared for in a way that allows them as a collective to see value in releasing that identity and starting fresh.

So I would like to see us get there. I know that I've worked with many people that are where once operating inside of these groups, and in going through my work with break methods and some of my other lecturing that I've done in kind of more of the sociopolitical sphere. There have been a lot of people that have woken up and realized, oh my god, you're right. This is exactly what I'm doing and I don't want to participate in that anymore. But I think there needs to be a bigger conversation about what we build in parallel, because you can't just deny it and be like, oh, just get over it, and then you also can't do what I think has been happening on kind of more that sort of left leaning social justice side, which is surely going to make it worse.

help solve this problem. So we'll certainly after this episode, we'll keep pulling this thread. But I think big picture, we have to get to a place where we move out of even the motivation phase and get into the accountability phase, because accountability is where we actually start to build new systems, do things differently, and we've got more forward thinking. The motivation phase is where we realize that the trauma bonding thing is not working, and we want to get out of it, but we don't maybe know how to do that. We just have that motivation piece. We know something has to change, but we don't know the what.

To me, the accountability phase is where we're actively designing the what. We know how we're going to do it. We're pouring into those systems. We're having these really nuanced, hard conversations with people who have been mistreated and disenfranchised, and we are collaboratively coming up with new systems to stop the bleeding, heal the wound, so that the next generation doesn't have to grow up knowing any of this.

“Because I think that's the biggest deficit that we give to our children is to prime them to see the world in a certain fear-based or shame-based way.”

I've said this before that I really think fear is as contagious as a virus. If you think about little kids, little kids are so fearless that you basically have to spend your entire parenting life for the first two years trying to help them not die. Because they just, they don't understand fear yet. They don't have it. But what ends up happening from a parental perspective is you accidentally influence your fears into your children with how you are parenting them. Don't do this. You're always taking the deep breath. You're likely to put your kids on edge, and then they're going to grow up wanting to keep everything safe and being very hypervigilant because you pass that on to them. You augment that out to deeper, sociopolitical, historical wounds, and you've caused a massive problem.

Because that child can't outgrow that you've actually put that fear into your child and they're going to have to come to me as a 40 year old to try to get out of it or some other program. And it's not easy work you guys. So if we can, which I believe we can, we can take the responsibility right now and say, "Hey, on behalf of my people, whoever your people are, I do not want to participate anymore in perpetuating this generational wound that has to stop with me.

I don't own my future generations to think like this, to see the world this way, and I want them to be unrestricted to imagine what could be."

“Because I think big picture that is what gets handicapped the most is you handicap your child from being able to see all the possibilities in the world.”

And how can we get the people that are in these sort of disenfranchised, impoverished, horrible condition groups to envision new solutions to save their own people or to change the trajectory of their people?

If we're already handicapping what they think their opportunities are in the world, how they can do those things, we are blocking innovation and problem solving with how we're raising children.

And I am so passionate about finding a way to help people in these groups, not just deny their pain and hurt. That's not productive, right? We're not trying to gaslight people in the thinking that didn't happen to you. Of course that happened to you.

“But we have to move beyond the sort of dichotomy where we're either gaslighting a mean like, just get over it, or that's the only thing that we focus on.”

We have to help people in these groups acknowledge the pain in the hurt, work through that pain in the hurt, in a way that is systematized so that we can help their next generations and the people that are running in more of the lateral generation. So like sisters, brothers, cousins, so instead of the youngers, we have to kind of broad sweeping go lateral so that those groups can let go of these stories of pain and hurt and actually start fresh. And obviously this conversation is about generational trauma and to me, that is the accountability phase where we're saying this happened to my people, but it can stop with me.

I do not want to participate in passing this on to my children anymore. And that interrupting of the generational pattern, it does require an intentional action and does require you to stand in place and say no more ends with me.

But that means that the first step has to be learning to observe your own behavior and take drastic ownership for it, right?

Because you have probably been taught to put all that pain and suffering and all these fear, shame, messages up on a pedestal and you pass them on to your kids, either through them observing your own behavior, your own pain, your own suffering,

We have to be aware of how we are both explicitly, right? So verbally directly and implicitly, so under the radar through observation, teaching our next generations, what the world means, what people are going to think about them and how this unfortunately reinforces all these patterns of generational trauma.

“We also have to be able to identify the behaviors that we're using that reinforce these cycles and very much keep them alive. And then of course, we have to disrupt those patterns.”

We have to be able to do things differently, just like in the human body, fire together, wire together, fire apart, wire apart.

We have to figure out in these communities in which generational trauma has been perpetuated, what behaviors or cultural ways of living life are continuing to fire these things together and augmenting the pattern, and where do we have to start to create some pattern opposition and change? Let me ask you a question. Have you ever noticed how you can know something as unhealthy and still do it anyways? You know you shouldn't react that way in an argument. You know that habit isn't good for you. You know that that thought pattern is irrational, and yet somehow your brain runs the same loop again. This is where a lot of personal development goes wrong. Awareness alone doesn't change the brain.

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“And when we're talking about generational trauma outside of just your family line, which certainly matters, and I don't mean to minimize it.”

But we're now thinking about generational trauma as it pertains to more of a cultural or racial identity that perceives themselves to have been either other or harmed in some way. The intensity of the generational trauma certainly ratchets up, and again, like I said, I don't mean to minimize what's happened to anybody, because everyone's trauma is traumatic to them. And I think the pathway is clear, when an individual who is clearly participating in and passing on all of their previous bloodlines, traumas and behaviors, be it addiction or anger or emotionality or mental health issues, you can be the chain breaker, right?

If you've seen that time and time again in break method, somebody comes in, they wake up, they have that reality, vertical moment, they realize, oh my god, I'm doing all the things that I was fighting so hard to not do. And now I can see this showing up in my kids, I have to be the one to stop this cycle right here. And you can be one person with one choice to do the work can protect the rest of that bloodline forever and more, because the reality is as much as we, I think have been tricked into genetics being this all powerful and to T especially over the last five years.

Genetics are not actually that powerful, genetics can be overwritten by your environment every time, the balance there is it's not equal if you were to put them on a scale, the nurture nature conversation, it's not a balance scale, nurture absolutely outweighs your nature every time. I've heard other doctors describe genetics as a loaded gun, but something has to pull the trigger of the loaded gun otherwise it won't shoot, it won't fire the bullet could see there forever completely dormant nothing would happen.

So when we think about it in this context, I think a lot of the last few years we've really been kind of programmed subconsciously to be like, oh it's just genetic it's just an act there's something we can do about it.

One choice to do break method will prevent that from being spilled over into your children and if your children aren't raised in that they won't raise their children in that, et cetera, et cetera.

So that is true and we're just thinking about us being able to break our own generational trauma. So let's split back into generational trauma that is tied into some sort of cultural identity or racial identity in which you perceive as a group you have been harmed over at the course of time, which in one of my lectures long time ago. And maybe I'll find the visual and I'll link it to the show notes. There's this really cool it's like a long scrolling map that just shows the change of power and slavery over like thousands and thousands of years and it's all color coded it's a pretty cool thing and I think often.

“Groups that are the loudest and most recent can kind of manipulate the mass psyche into forgetting that actually it's much more complex than it might sound based on today's sociopolitical climate, right?”

So in today's sociopolitical climate and again, there's not to minimize it at all, but a lot of what we hear about is kind of the the bypoc people of color, you know, slavery being kind of the most recent in our history.

Our history line things that gets brought up a lot and then also of course first nations need of American traumas that have happened and again I'm very well versed in all these things.

I am not here trying to say that these things weren't horrific and traumatic because they were they were systematized they were awful. I know way too much even firsthand from clients about what happened with first nations and Native American groups and boarding schools etc. So I am telling you right now these things really happened there horrific and of course there is trauma in the generations from these things occurring. But what I am saying is that some of the ways we take on this story and take on this identity and we don't actually take the position I can be the what this can stop with me this can stop with my family this can maybe stop with my tribe right we as a people need to heal from this so that we do not perpetuate these things I don't think that has happened.

An interesting piece and I will try to do some digging and find the name of the book I read this book back in 2018.

Looking at the African American community in the United States for example actually as a group the African American community in the United States very much did this in the early 1900s. Leading up into kind of the 40s 50s this is not something by the way that you get taught in school and when I first started digging into this history it was like I'm sorry what this would have been great to know. Actually African American communities were largely very conservative very religious compared to the general average and they had actually amassed a lot of wealth for themselves.

They had built all these parallel economies and yes of course there was segregation all those things which are of course absolutely wrong and disgusting but as a group. They had built all these parallel economies hospitals entrepreneurship right they had basically were they were like we can't participate in your system we're going to build our own systems and they'd actually amassed wealth and we're living it like in the large average they were living well.

“And this is where of course the conversation takes a turn because I think big picture I think everyone knows listening to this podcast that kind of naturally always have been conspiracy oriented and I think many of the conspiracies that.”

I have believed in and followed at this point kind of the joke is like I'm not a conspiracy they're sending works I'm kind of like bat 100% here. A lot of the things that I have suspected over the course of my adult life have of course come to pass. This one makes sense to me, I didn't know it at the time but it does make sense. And maybe this is something that we'll dig into in a future episode too because there's a lot here and I also need to get the name of that book for you so you guys can look into it as well.

“But it does seem that around this time and I think I'm correct about dates but again, let's we'll get the name of this book and I will verify because I don't it's been probably six years since I read this book.”

So I think what was happening is like going into kind of late 50s early 60s. It became very clear that actually a lot of the sort of political figures that were being established in black America at this time were actually more conservative leaning and.

I'll attack on black America with drugs right there was an intentional I think very well constructed.

“Play to disrupt and dismantle all of the progress that have been made in that community and disseminate drugs and completely collapse all the progress that have been made.”

And I encourage you to look into this a little bit more and again I feel like these days I shouldn't have to give this reminder but. Because of the way tech works you can't just go on Google and expect they're going to type in something and you're not going to get a very curated very. Like politically already skewed perspective so you're going to have to go deep dive here and I I will get you the name of this book because it was amazing and had so many citations so you can really dig in and kind of look for.

Look for real information sources well instead of just try to rely on Google right which is very biased.

So as you start to dig into this you realize that there was very much this sort of like subversive political movement that was aimed at actually dismantling all of the progress that black America had made.

“And I bring this up as this example because I think a lot of what you hear today.”

And this conversation around black Americans systemic racism which again I'm not saying doesn't exist to some extent it does but I think that what has happened especially in the last let's say 20 years has made it worse not better. Taking to consideration that once before a long time ago even though slavery preceded this other kind of I think positive uprising culturally of black America. It doesn't take into consideration that once before black America did mobilize and pull themselves out of it. And I think that needs to be more part of the conversation because right now the conversation very much is well because that happened to us then.

This is where we are now and if you were to look at it plotted on a chart this wouldn't actually be true it would be like yes trauma happened we raised up it took a long time to rise out of it but we were here. Then something took us out and we went back to a certain again and then now we're trying to build ourselves up again but a lot of the conversation narrative doesn't take into consideration that they've as a group. They have very much pulled out of it before and risen into success a massing wealth and largely being more per capita religious in the Christian orientation than the average of America at that time.

This is important to think about because if you're perpetuated this narrative we can't do this because of this you're not considering the data that shows you actually can and I'll give this example and I know this is obviously a extremely heated topic right now just because of everything that's happening in the world and maybe we'll go into this more but a good example of this would be.

I was raised Jewish and I had grandparents that fled Europe during the Holocaust so my dad's first generation.

So when you think about something like that and again I say this because I know that there's a big wave of anti-Semitism right now and people are blaming everything on the Jews and if you have watched. Any of my wokes like stuff during COVID times you know how I feel about that and I think it's a much more nuanced conversation than that but we're not going to touch that one at this current juncture but I will say if you look at. What happened to Jews in Europe during Hitler times. That was horrific right very very horrific and now a day is interestingly enough you're hearing a lot of people I think they're more Holocaust deniers lately than I've ever seen in my.

“Generations so again that's why I say I know this is a somewhat contested topic but if you think about something like that having happened.”

And this goes back to the influence of belief in the stories we tell ourselves is going to determine our trajectory so this is kind of that whole victim victim or sort of dichotomy. Having been raised Jewish and very culturally Jewish Jewish people they see themselves as victors even when they're like and and you know I think to some extent. Maybe make them come off as ego-tistical or boastful or whatever.

I agree in things like that. Being focused academically and you know always doing better protecting your family by making good decisions right out these sorts of things.

But I think more than that there's never this belief in Judaism because we're talking about right now generational trauma and cultural stories. So if you think about Jews even going back to the time of the Bible there's very much this. Survive or narrative right like you can try to keep us down but we're going to keep coming back up right so.

In a way you know maybe like a sort of cockroach sort of thing like you can try to do what you can but like you're never going to get rid of us.

“So I think that story and that belief culturally that's what gets passed down their Judaism even stories for example like Hanukkah right there are very specific things that get passed down culturally and Judaism one of them is the story of Hanukkah.”

Where basically there's this battle that breaks out with the macabees and it's winter and it's cold and there's really only enough oil for one night but through prayer last for eight nights and they you know they're fine. So there's Jews have this cultural belief that they are survivors and when you believe that you act accordingly.

When you are passing on a different story.

It will affect the people that are raised with that different story so I hope that you're picking up what I'm putting down here. We have to start healing and we have to start telling our next generations a different story about who they are and I think that is where we are fundamentally stuck right now.

“Because I understand people not wanting to let go and release their old trauma stories because it feels like no, no, no, but you have to understand it. This happened to my people. I hear you. I see you. I agree.”

But at what point in our lifetime are we going to draw line in the sand and say these things happen to me, but I am not these things. I have the ability to be different. I have the ability to be renewed and I have the ability to make a choice right now. To prevent my children from having to carry that burden for the rest of their lives. So I would like us get to a place where we're more intentional about what stories we tell ourselves what we believe and we make sure that we are only passing on to our kids that which will serve them in their lifetime and the lifetime's after them.

Because our stories and our belief systems will influence future generations, right? I know with Native American cultures there's this idea of always being thoughtful about the seven generations after you.

“I think that's a really beautiful concept. I think largely that is embodied in specific ways, for example, in the Native American or First Nations cultures, right, with how they're stewarding the land and caretaking nature.”

I would love to see groups that have been harmed in some way over the last, let's say, 200 years. Not just take that position or concept and apply it to things like the land, but to your own mind, your own emotional state, your own trauma because we can change the trajectory of future generations by changing ourselves. And there has to be a moment where we're willing to shed our trauma story. And it's a scary place to be. And I think much of what happens with group think causes you to be afraid to ask questions or say, hey, why do we do this? Is this really serving us anymore?

Because then you risk getting ostracized from the group. And when you have trauma that's tied to identity or race or religion, etc., you are primed to believe that you need your group to survive without us, it's even worse. When the reality is, I think people are going to have to be bold and ask some really hard questions and maybe take a couple steps outside of the comfort of their group think or group identity right now in order to create the space for others to eventually do the same. And I would love to be more a part of that conversation. I love to continue having conversations about this because I think we're in a time and place politically, where we have to start doing this.

Because if we keep bringing our trauma with us forever, a history will repeat itself and it won't repeat itself because it was our destiny will repeat itself because we have been primed to do so. And instead of remembering that we can rewire and have agency and change the future, we'll just keep recreating the past and I don't want to do that with my kids. Do you want to do that with your kids? That sounds awful.

So, is that going to be you? Are you willing to do the work to release yourself from the trauma story and the narrative and start fresh with your kids?

“Are you willing to do what it takes to not accidentally vomit all of your worst dysregulian behaviors and coping mechanisms onto your children?”

Because if you can stop now and say I need help, I need to do this work, I don't want to do this to my kids. You will change the future because history doesn't just repeat itself passively. We are doing it to ourselves and I hope that this episode helped wake some people up and remind you that you have the ability to take responsibility. And I think that's something that sociopolitically we've lost touch with right now. Many people are operating in this victim mindset of like this happened to me and I have no power and the only way to get my power back is kind of a radical self advocacy where you're kind of now yelling about your trauma.

Both sides are missing the solution and I'm always naturally oriented toward being a solutions based thinker. I have a lot of ideas here, but I hope that if you listen to this podcast and you are in one of those groups, it caused you to stop and think for a second.

Do I want to participate in perpetuating this or do I want to renew my mind change myself so that I can literally change the future?

“Because that's the choice that you have in front of you and if you want to be the person that breaks the generational chains of trauma in your family line, you know where to find me.”

Share this episode with somebody that needs it and I'll see you guys next week.

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