Last post I discussed the need for awareness about the emotional baggage carried transgenerationally through ancestral immigration or current immigration. I said it is held in the cells of the body until it is acknowledged, accepted, and healed. If you are stuck in life in some way or struggling with chronic illness or relationship issues, healing may involve releasing unconscious energetic entanglements or identifications you have with ancestral family members who experienced immigration.
Imprinting the Cells
The external environment that surrounded the cells of the body of each ancestor, including emotional responses, became locked into the body, or imprinted onto the cells through epigenetic gene expression. Whatever they experienced in live and through immigration created an emotional response, and these responses created patterns of emotional behaviour. When the same emotional behaviour was used over and over again, it created reactive neuronal pathways to and from the brain through the nervous system. Emotional responses were often suppressed rather than openly expressed. Many cultures were stoic and stifled emotional outbursts. You will know if your ancestors suppressed their emotional responses by whether you or your other family members do it too. Do you keep the family secrets buried? Is there a lack of knowledge about past generations? Do you hate confronting conflict? These emotional response patterns are passed from generation to generation. It’s time to unlearn these emotional response patterns that are no longer working for your highest good.
Your Emotional Soup
The cells of the body respond to the environment in which they dwell. Have you created a healthy emotional soup around the cells of your body or a malignant soup? Remember that your ancestors may have epigenetically tossed in some pretty heavy rotten ingredients to the soup. What are you carrying for the ancestral family system? You may have unconsciously sacrificed yourself for the wellbeing of the greater family system. Unless you become attentive and wake up, you will not understand what you are carrying for the family system. The family system is seeking healing and balance, and it is up to the living family members to attend to this healing work so it doesn’t have to pass down to your children and grandchildren.
Immigration Woes
The old fears stored in your cells, the fears you feel today, may be the result of settlers having to travel to new lands, leaving behind their homelands. Who are the immigrants in your family? They may have landed in a new space but they brought with them their old emotional trauma and wounds from war, persecution, oppression, or economic failure. It doesn’t matter whether the immigration occurred yesterday or five hundred years ago. Take a good look at the patterns that are occurring in your life.
Do you go around feeling like a martyr, feel hard done by, feel oppressed, feel like a victim, feel terror or trauma for no explainable reason, feel like life is all about hardship, feel pushed to do things that you can’t explain, feel stoic emotionally, feel shut down emotionally, feel drawn to the dead, feel like everyone is out to get you, feel unexplainable sadness or grief, feel helpless, feel torn in different directions all the time, feel like you need to hide from the world, feel like a failure in some way, hate authority, feel tortured, feel like you’re at the mercy and whims of others, or feel unexplained shame or guilt?
I don’t think you would consciously choose to feel these feelings. All of these feelings involve the unconscious mind, which is imprinted on the cells of your body. These feelings are reactive emotional patterns that came from somewhere or someone in your past. They may even have come from a past human incarnation. It’s time to look back at what went on in the lives of your ancestors because even past life energetic residue will show up over and over in the current family system.
Victim or Perpetrator
Were your ancestors the victims or the perpetrators? What was your first reactive response to that question? Pay attention to it and take note of it.
Many ancestors shifted between being the victim and the perpetrator in different generations or within the same lifetime. We carry inside of us both victim and perpetrator energy – sometimes more of one than the other. Were they forced to do nasty things to put food on the table for the family or for survival? Did they carry feelings of societal or religious righteousness that they were doing the right thing? Did they have to feign support of regimes that they didn’t agree with in their hearts and souls? Did they have to do cruel things in the line of duty? Did their actions create guilt or shame? Were they tortured or persecuted by others? Did they carry survivor guilt? Did they carry unexpressed rage or sorrow? Do you have family members who fought on different sides of wars? Does your family carry old religious fears or oppression? Dig out that genosociogram of your family system (your emotional family tree) and put everything that comes to mind beside the name of each family member that has an infamous family story. Pay attention to the little details that may be currently ignored. Who lived an unusual life? Check out this web page for a list of those included in your family system.
https://www.peacefulpossibilities.ca/family-constellations-calgary-radical-inclusion-4/
Everything you remember about your family system is unconsciously carried for a reason. Have you been told you are emotionally like an ancestral family member in some way? This might provide a clue to help you know which side of the family to explore. Use that as a starting point for where the healing is desired. You are meant to heal the wounds and unresolved emotional trauma of the family system.
The energy of victims and perpetrators longs to be healed. It doesn’t matter if you feel attuned more strongly with the victim or perpetrator energy, all of these ancestral voices call out to be acknowledged, accepted, and healed. Many of the ancestral voices are imprinted on the cells of your body and in your psyche. To silence these voices of the past is to bring on unwellness, struggles, or relationship difficulty in life until the unresolved emotional issue is addressed.
I participated in a family constellation a couple years ago where the voices of all the victims and perpetrators in the ancestral family system were underlying the symptoms of schizophrenia in a young woman. All of these voices wanted to be heard and accepted as they were. To hide or bury the family past is to create unwellness in the current generations. It means you are rejecting a part of who you are at the deep DNA level. Epigenetically, the emotional response of your ancestors to what they lived and experienced through life and immigration passes down through the family system creating suffering today for someone, or it could be a group, or it may impact someone’s immune system function – manifesting as an inner rejection of a part of self.