Connect with Your Ancestors: Transforming the Transgenerational Trauma of Your Family Tree


Book Description

Connect With Your Ancestors provides hope for anyone frustrated with a lack of answers for their symptoms, conditions and repetitive life challenges. Do you experience unexplainable fears; ungrounded feelings of grief, anger or shame; addictions; relationship challenges; anxiety or depression; burnout or chronic health conditions? These are some of the ways that descendants carry transgenerational trauma for their parents, grandparents and ancestors. If you repeatedly explore different medical treatments, therapies or alternative healing techniques, yet remain stuck in life in some way; there is a strong likelihood that you are entangled with someone or something in your family system that is emotionally unresolved. My family system had plenty of transgenerational trauma to address and yours might too. War, immigration, displacement, family tragedy, birth trauma, adoption, exclusion or religious persecution are some transgenerational trauma experiences that transmit from generation to generation. If you know little about your ancestors, then the transgenerational trauma has likely been silenced. Silence is a profound carrier of transgenerational trauma, with family secrets or traumatizing experiences taking on lives of their own. This trauma lives on in the unconscious body of family members waiting to be addressed, becoming more powerful with each generation of silence. This book is a compilation of blog entries (aka small essays) on topics of transgenerational trauma and systemic healing. It engages with the insight that is found through systemic and family constellations, emphasizing the need for energetic body focused systemic healing approaches. It is the first in a series of books that will be made available shortly on numerous systemic healing topics. Connect With Your Ancestors reflects on ways to recognize transgenerational trauma and body focused ways to address it, so that it doesn't have to pass down to your children and grandchildren.




Break the Cycle


Book Description

***The Instant National Bestseller*** A Next Big Idea Club must-read title for January 2024 The definitive, paradigm-shifting guide to healing intergenerational trauma—weaving together scientific research with practical exercises and stories from the therapy room—from Dr. Mariel Buqué, PhD, a Columbia University–trained trauma-informed psychologist and practitioner of holistic healing From Dr. Mariel Buqué, a leading trauma psychologist, comes this groundbreaking guide to transforming intergenerational pain into intergenerational abundance. With Break the Cycle, she delivers the definitive guide to healing inherited trauma. Weaving together scientific research with practical exercises and stories from the therapy room, Dr. Buqué teaches readers how trauma is transmitted from one generation to the next and how they can break the cycle through tangible therapeutic practices, learning to pass down strength instead of pain to future generations. When a physical wound is left unhealed, it continues to cause pain and can infect the whole body. When emotions are left unhealed, they similarly cause harm that spreads to other parts of our lives, hurting our family, friends, community members, and others. Eventually, this hurt can injure an entire lineage, metastasizing across years and generations. This is intergenerational trauma. This trauma is why some of us become estranged from our families, why some of us are people pleasers, why some of us find ourselves in codependent relationships. This trauma can be rooted in the experiences of ancestors, who may have suffered due to unhealthy family dynamics, and it can be collective, the result of a shared experience like systemic oppression, or harmful ingrained behaviors in a culture like the acceptance of physical discipline of children, or even a natural disaster like a pandemic. These wounds are complex, impacting our minds, bodies, and spirits. Healing requires a holistic approach that has so far been absent from the field of psychology. Until now.




Connecting to Our Ancestral Past


Book Description

Connecting to Our Ancestral Past is a pragmatic, spiritual journey that introduces a variety of specific rituals and conversations in connection with Constellations work, an experiential process that explores one's history and powerful events of the past in order to understand and resolve problems of the present. Constellations facilitator and author Francesca Mason Boring presents this therapeutic method in the context of cultures like the Shoshone, of which she is a member, that have seen the world through a prism of interrelationships for millennia. In Constellations work there is an organic quality that requires a discipline of non-judgment, one that is embraced in traditional native circles, where the whole truth of a person's life, roots, and trans-generational trauma or challenge is understood and included. Mason Boring provides a transformational walk through the universal indigenous field— that place of healing and knowledge used by Native healers and teachers for centuries—by describing stories and rituals designed to help people with their particular struggles. These rituals, such as "Facing the Good Men"—designed to help women who have suffered abuse in relationships with men—reject Western notions of over-the-counter medication. Instead, they stress a comfortable environment whereby the "client," with the help of a facilitator, interacts with people chosen to represent concepts, things, and other people. In Western culture the word "medicine" is thought of as a concrete object, but Mason Boring explains that indigenous cultures favor a process of healing as opposed to an itemized substance. She re-opens doors that have been closed due to the exclusion of indigenous technology in the development of many Western healing traditions and introduces new concepts to the lexicon of Western psychology. A range of voices from around the world—leaders in the fields of systems constellations, theoretical physics, and tribal traditions—contribute to this exploration of aboriginal perspectives that will benefit facilitators of Constellations work, therapists, and human beings who are trying to walk with open eyes and hearts.




Healing Collective Trauma


Book Description

A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding and Healing Shared Trauma What can you do when you carry scars not on your body, but within your soul? And what happens when those spiritual wounds exist not just in you, but in everyone in your family, community, and even beyond? Spiritual teacher Thomas Hübl has spent years investigating why it is that old and seemingly disconnected traumas can seed their way through communities and across generations. His work culminates in Healing Collective Trauma, a new perspective on trauma that addresses both its visible effects and its most hidden roots. Thomas combines deep knowledge of mystical traditions with the latest scientific research. “In this way,” writes Thomas, “we are weaving a double helix between ancient wisdom and contemporary understanding.” Thomas details the Collective Trauma Integration Process, a group-based modality for evoking and eventually dissolving stuck traumatic energies. Providing structured practices for both students and group facilitators, Healing Collective Trauma is intended to build a practical tool kit for integration. Here, you will learn: • The innumerable ways trauma shapes our world—from identity and health to economy, geopolitics, and the state of the environment • The concept of “trauma loyalty”—unconscious group bonds based in a pain narrative • How the climate crisis is both a manifestation of humanity’s collective trauma and an opportunity to heal • “Retrocausality”—how the power of presence can reshape the past and make new futures possible Including essays contributed by experts such as Dr. Gabor Maté, Dr. Otto Scharmer, Dr. Christina Bethell, and Ken Wilber, Healing Collective Trauma offers not just an advanced look at community trauma but also a hopeful glimpse of the future. As Thomas declares, “Together, I believe we can and must heal the ‘soul wound’ that marks us all. In so doing, we will awaken to the luminous possibility and profound potential of our true, mutual nature as humankind.”




My Grandmother's Hands


Book Description

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER "My Grandmother's Hands will change the direction of the movement for racial justice."— Robin DiAngelo, New York Times bestselling author of White Fragility In this groundbreaking book, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology. The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze, and it endures the trauma inflicted by the ills that plague society. Menakem argues this destruction will continue until Americans learn to heal the generational anguish of white supremacy, which is deeply embedded in all our bodies. Our collective agony doesn't just affect African Americans. White Americans suffer their own secondary trauma as well. So do blue Americans—our police. My Grandmother's Hands is a call to action for all of us to recognize that racism is not only about the head, but about the body, and introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide. Paves the way for a new, body-centered understanding of white supremacy—how it is literally in our blood and our nervous system. Offers a step-by-step healing process based on the latest neuroscience and somatic healing methods, in addition to incisive social commentary. Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW, is a therapist with decades of experience currently in private practice in Minneapolis, MN, specializing in trauma, body-centered psychotherapy, and violence prevention. He has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and Dr. Phil as an expert on conflict and violence. Menakem has studied with bestselling authors Dr. David Schnarch (Passionate Marriage) and Dr. Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score). He also trained at Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute.




Step Into the Light: Transforming the Transgenerational Trauma of Your Fami


Book Description

Step Into The Light is the third in a series of books called Transforming the Transgenerational Trauma of Your Family Tree. Step Into The Light reflects on ways to recognize transgenerational trauma and body focused systemic ways to transform and heal it, so that it doesn't have to pass down to your children and grandchildren. This book provides hope for anyone frustrated with a lack of answers for their symptoms, conditions and repetitive life challenges. Do you experience unexplainable fears; ungrounded feelings of grief, anger or shame; addictions; relationship challenges; anxiety or depression; burnout or chronic health conditions? These are some of the ways that descendants carry transgenerational trauma for their parents, grandparents and ancestors. If you repeatedly explore different medical treatments, therapies or alternative healing techniques, yet remain stuck in life in some way; there is a strong likelihood that you are entangled with someone or something in your family system that is emotionally unresolved. My family system had plenty of transgenerational trauma to address and yours might too. War, immigration, displacement, family tragedy, birth trauma, adoption, exclusion or religious persecution are transgenerational trauma experiences that may transmit from generation to generation. If you know little about your ancestors, then the transgenerational trauma has been silenced. Silence is a profound carrier of transgenerational trauma, with family secrets or traumatizing experiences taking on lives of their own. This trauma lives on in the unconscious body of family members waiting to be addressed, becoming more powerful with each generation of silence. This book covers an array of transgenerational trauma topics, including many that are often rendered taboo by families and societies. It engages with the insight that is found through systemic and family constellations, emphasizing the need for energetic body focused systemic healing approaches.




Wounds into Wisdom


Book Description

“Wounds into Wisdom is for anyone who has suffered trauma, either directly or in a family whose generational trauma is buried. It helps readers uncover suffering and use it to help others―the final stage of healing. We may not be able to control what happens to us, but we can control what happens next.” ―Gloria Steinem 2020 Nautilus Book Award―GOLD/Psychology 2020 Book Award from the Jewish Women’s Caucus of the Association for Women in Psychology 2019 Book of the Year Award Finalist in Religion and Self-Help categories Our past does not simply disappear. The painful history of our ancestors and their rich cultural wisdom intertwine within us to create the patterns of our future. Even when past trauma remains unspoken or has long been forgotten, it becomes part of us and our children―a legacy of both strength and woundedness that shapes our lives. In this book, Tirzah Firestone brings to life the profound impact of protracted historical trauma through the compelling narratives of Israeli terror victims, Holocaust survivors, and those whose lives were marred by racial persecution and displacement. The tragic story of Firestone’s own family lays the groundwork for these revealing testimonies of recovery, forgiveness, and moral leadership. Throughout, Firestone interweaves their voices with neuroscientific and psychological findings, as well as relevant and inspiring Jewish teachings. Seven principles emerge from these wise narratives―powerful prescriptive tools that speak to anyone dealing with the effects of past injury. At the broadest level, these principles are directives for staying morally awake in a world rife with terror.




When Ancestors Weep


Book Description

We are all beautiful souls made in the image of God, full of inherent value, dignity, and worth. Yet we may struggle to accept this truth because our attention is often diverted to focus solely on outward appearances and behaviors. In other words, we all live with some degree of ignorance of our soul consciousness. We may get glimpses of it, but we never attain the full extent because physical, emotional, and psychological issues cloud our vision of who we truly are. For example, diseases and illnesses do afflict us in the body. We do feel physical and emotional pain with so much intensity at times that we believe it is going to break us in two. At times, our lungs may struggle to take a breath, or hunger and diseases cause our stomach, intestines, bones, muscles, and blood to scream in agony. These experiences might make us question whether or not we are the soul whom God has created. However, this illusion lies not in the suffering, pain, and agony we experience, but rather, it is in the perception that there is nothing more to us than an emotional, intellectual, and physical body. Indeed, physical and emotional pain and suffering can temporarily drown out the cry of our soul, but our soul is never silenced. Furthermore, the truth is that the greatest strength of who we are as souls lies in our ability to transform and transcend physical, emotional, and psychological limitations. The greatest effect hearing the cries of our ancestors has on us not only comes from getting in touch with our own soul’s voice but also awakens us to hear the cries of those who have no voice today. There has always existed in society a pattern of disenfranchising the weak and wounded—people who have been labeled as unlovable, untouchable, and therefore, unreachable. For some, disenfranchisement was due to their disease or illness. For others, it was due to their poverty. Still for others, it was due to their gender, race, religion, politics, or social class. Many in society preferred such people not to be seen, let alone heard from. However, just as the cries of our ancestors and those who have been the victims of crimes against humanity can never be silenced, and so, too, are the cries of the disenfranchised heard above the din of everyday life. Their cries are not only heard deep within the soul but their pain is also given a voice through those who speak for them.




Honoring Your Ancestors


Book Description

Discover the Spiritual Nourishment and Magical Power of Ancestor Veneration Learn how to connect to your ancestors and receive the benefits that come from veneration—deeper spirituality, more love in your life, better outcomes in creative pursuits, powerful magic and spellwork, and an improved sense of wellness. Filled with hands-on techniques and tips, Honoring Your Ancestors shows you how to create an ancestor altar so you can work with ancestors of all kinds. Author Mallorie Vaudoise also shares fascinating ideas for incorporating rituals, spells, family recipes, and even practices like music and dancing to help you open this wonderful new dimension of your spiritual journey. Ancestor veneration is one of the most widespread spiritual practices in the world. This book shares the important distinctions between working with blood ancestors, lineage ancestors, and affinity ancestors while helping you recognize the signs that your ancestors are responding to your petitions and offerings. You will also explore important topics like mediumship and ancestral trauma so you can be sure to develop a veneration practice that's uplifting and affirming for you.




Let Your Tears Flow: Transforming the Transgenerational Trauma of Your Family Tree


Book Description

Let Your Tears Flow provides hope for anyone frustrated with a lack of answers for their symptoms, conditions and repetitive life challenges. Do you experience unexplainable fears; feelings of grief, anger or shame; addictions; relationship challenges; anxiety or depression; burnout or chronic health conditions? These are some of the ways that descendants carry transgenerational trauma for their ancestors. This book reflects upon how to recognize the transgenerational trauma you might be carrying for your parents, grandparents and ancestors, and provides body focused ways to address it. If you repeatedly explore different medical treatments, therapies or alternative healing techniques, yet remain stuck in life in some way; there is a strong likelihood that you are entangled with someone or something in your family system that is emotionally unresolved. My family system had plenty of transgenerational trauma to address and yours might too. War, immigration, displacement, family tragedy, birth trauma, adoption, exclusion or religious persecution are some of the transgenerational trauma experiences that transmit from generation to generation. Silence is a profound carrier of transgenerational trauma in many family systems. If you know very little about your ancestors, then the transgenerational trauma has likely been silenced. Family secrets or traumatizing experiences that are silenced take on a life of their own. They live on in the unconscious body of family members waiting to be addressed. The impact on living generations becomes more powerful with each generation of silence. This book is a compilation of blog entries (aka small essays) on topics of transgenerational trauma and systemic healing. It engages with the insight that is found through systemic and family constellations, emphasizing the need for energetic body focused systemic healing approaches. It is the second in a series of books that will be made available shortly on numerous systemic healing topics. Our ancestors didn't have access to the knowledge about systemic healing that we are developing today. What the ancestors suppressed emotionally, going on stoically as if everything was fine, may be a template for your life. Any transgenerational trauma or inherited trauma that you don't address may be passed down to your children and grandchildren through their pre- and perinatal experiences, epigenetically, through collective memory or culturally in the cells of their body. Most of you carry either subtle or blatant unresolved family emotional wounds or trauma as energetic entanglements and it may be holding you back in life. You may be surprised to learn that you unconsciously sacrificed yourself out of love and loyalty for your greater family system to carry a wound, trauma or imbalance that needed to be acknowledged, addressed and healed. This book covers topics such as what it means to be drawn to the dead, energetic separation from the dead, when a child is born to a woman in mourning, former intimate partners, energetic impact of parent separation on children, adopted children, the death of a twin, immigration, living life fully, Eastern European family and community dynamics and epigenetics. We desire healthy emotional response patterns and ways to quickly work through our emotional issues and the issues we carry for our ancestors. This book provides examples of transgenerational trauma and systemic healing for the walking wounded, all the healers and helpers of the world, the victims and perpetrators, the colonized and colonizers, the genealogists who continue to search and the many clients and patients who go from practitioner to practitioner searching for answers. Let Your Tears Flow was written for you and I, and for our children and grandchildren.