Understanding and moving through ancestral and avoidant attachment traumas

My blog must not be resonating with readers lately judging from the number of likes on posts.. I should not care about it and in a way I dont because I must write what I feel or become drawn to but it does make me wonder. Lately I am truly questioning everything about my life as on many days I find it hard to inhabit it fully. Things may change when the Sun moves out of the 12th house of my chart, but I had a dream the other night after therapy that I was being sucked down into a quagmire and I do have to fight to get up most days its hard to describe the impact of energies and living alone it may become more intense.. The insights from Mark Wolynn’s multigenerational trauma work have also been flying thick and fast.. At times when its hard to breathe I think of my sister who I have had so little contact with now and of the breathing difficulties that began to affect her.. I realised that when she and her husband moved away from our home town she was the same age as our great great grandfather when he emigrated and she also put herself under so much pressure she ended up having a break down.

Kat gave me a lecture last week by a Jungian woman who has written a book on ancestral time bombs, what she seems to deal with in that book is the thing that Mark talks about in a lot of his work, often when we hit a certain age we may face a huge depression or crisis of some kind, and we may actually be reliving something that happened for a parent, grand parent, uncle, aunt or great uncle and aunt. I think of how my brother developed cancer around a similar age to my father and the my sister and I were also beset with cancer.

Last night I thought a great deal about our grandfather being gassed in the war, and of what he endured in the trenches and on the soggy fields of France which is where his unit were sent to fight after doing time in Lone Pine, when I met my ex husband he was doing gardening work at a small town on the south coast here and living in a caravan at The Lone Pine caravan park, I have a box of letters he wrote during our courtship in the few months before he came to live with me in Sydney in August 1993.

Those men came back from war and had no one to talk to about all the intense death and suffering they eitnessed but it is my experience that their experiences affected them and all of those around them and do reverberate cellular within descendants.

Mark goes into a lot of detail about the work of a scientist Rachael Yehuda at Mount Sinai Medical Clinic on carried trauma and genetic changes, most of their research is done on mice, but Rachel has a particular interest in the trauma of the Holocaust that went into silence and then can awaken in later generations.. It seems so important that we speak to our parents about their lives. In my mother’s case later in life she really regretted not being able ask her own mother about her father who died of those war injuries in around 1931 when my Mum was only seven.. Possibly my dream of being taken down into mud could be a remnant of my grandfather’s trauma and it did come when the Moon was moving towards a conjunction with Neptune in Scorpio in the 3rd house.. 12th house transits trine this in my chart and at the moment in the skies we have a soft sextile aspect between Neptune in Pisces and Pluto in Capricorn, so its a good time to be delving deeper into our hidden histories (Pluto) and their affects and birthing compassion and empathy (Neptune/Pisces).

I am using the soothing techniques lately that Mark recommends for talking to our bodies when we feel anxiety or tension in certain parts of our anatomy, past traumas of this kind exist as fragments or sensations that may be hard to put a finger on.. I hear a lot of talk on the Ascension Symptoms Facebook page about people experiencing certain pains or tingling or strange sensations in their bodies and it is clear from some recentvposts from astrologers like Daniel Sowelu that this kind of ancestral clearing work is happening for so many of us right now, but sadly we may not always be able to make sense of the symptoms we suffer from.

Here are some of the soothing things Mark Wolynn recommends to make our bodies feel less anxious and fragmented by inherited traumas.

Laying hands on our body in tense places and saying

“I am here for you”

“I will hold you close as you try to breathe”

“I will comfort you”

“I will stay with you” (as opposed to running away and using distractions)

“I will breathe with you until you are calm”

In addition because often when we carry the fear of traumatic symptoms as core feelings of unsafety often we run or try to seek distance from others or from the offending parents who may have hurt us with their unconciousness. But in time this running away may bleed into other relationships for some of us.

It is my experience that those I have known with the planet Uranus aspecting either their Sun Mercury or Venus they may often run away or go through many broken relationships due to the fact something severing happened with or to a parent or ancestor that then impacted them.. I saw this in one of my brother in laws as well as in the last parter I dated from 2007 to 2011.

According to Mark when we block the vital force of love flowing from and to a parent or when our parent had to block that due to their own parent being unavailable connection becomes compromised. When we have rejected, judged, blamed or distanced ourselves from the parent due to anger and blame, the reverberations are passed on. We may not be fully aware of what we are doing, but when we push away a parent we also push away a big part of ourselves. Then those qualities may being to express in us unconsciously.

To heal this issue of separation we need to find a way to bring our parents into our hearts. I have done this work with my father after he died and I have a good friend who also had suffered a lot of abuse from her own father who could only fully confront him about it after death, but sadly what we often forget is how our own parent was traumatized and they may not even remember themselves. In the end it is more healing to make a relationship with the pain that may remain or be left than to run or act it out on others.

An example Mark uses in his book on trauma It Didnt Start With You is of a man called Randy who remained angry at his distant father, undergoing the healing work with Mark, Randy learned that his father had lost his very best friend when they fought in the war, this was the reason that his father kept up such a distance,) then Randy could forgive and feel compassion for his father rather than continue to feel hardly done by.

In addition the healing power of words to heal wounds that hurt deep inside of us should also not be forgotten. Mark cites the research of Dr Andrew Newberg in his book, a neuroscientist who have found

“a single word has the power to influence the expression of genes that regulate physical and emotional stress.”

I have most certainly experienced this in my own life so many times when I have been upset and someone responds kindly. Having cruel words used on us can make our stress levels rise and it appears possibly even change aspects of gene expression.

If a parent has passed on and we now struggle to get close to others there are also some healing words we can learn to say.. We can ask help from that parent as follows :

“Please teach me how to trust and let love in.”

“Please teach me how to receive.”

“Please help me to feel more peaceful in my body.”

What I am also learning in my life is that we do not get wounded in isolation. As a child WE ACTUALLY DO NEED WHAT THERAPIST DAVID RICHO HAS CALLED THE FIVE “A’S”

AFFECTION

ATTENTION

APPRECIATION

ALLOWING

APPROVAL

Later in life we may run ourselves ragged trying to find these things from outside of ourselves due to the traumas done or passed down to our inner child.. This is where the inner child meditation healing work of Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh can really help us.. being able to visualize ourselves as a five year old child we can also ask that child what they felt they needed and missed out on.. We can then learn both how to give it to ourselves as well as how to be vulnerable and ask it of others when we need it. I

f instead, we are trapped in avoidant or anxious resistance we may have come to believe it was weak to need others or if we were often overpowered by a parent’s needs or feelings we may have felt it was not possible to be seen as separate, then we also have much healing work to do according to Mark Wolynn in order both to individuate and feel safer and less overwhelmedin relationships..

For it is true we are unique individuals who are entitled to our own needs and do not always have to serve others, but we also are largely interdependent beings who really do need others at times. Until we find that self love and compassion for others in all their complexity, living peaceful lives that are also spiritually fulfilling becomes difficult.