Are You Wrapped Up In Generational Trauma?

Dr. Anita examines how "Generational Trauma" may be playing an active role in your life, and how can shadow work make a difference in your current life situation.

Transcript

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So what if we are creating our own reality? What if it's really true that the responses that we are getting from people are due to our own reactions to any particular situation? That it's a a circular event, what you put out comes back, what you put out comes back, what you put out comes back. So how in the world am I traveling across the country stuck at a border? And how did I do this to myself? Hi, this is Dr. Anita with another diamond moment. The diamonds of our lives, and I've said this repeatedly: the diamonds of our lives are produced through time, through heat, and through pressure. I want to dig down a little bit more in this as I go further into my story of how I got to where I am today. Any experience that causes us high levels of emotion, whether that be laughter, sorrow, fear, trepidation, anxiety, all of those different levels and nuances of fear have the ability to lay patterns in our lives that unknowingly we walk through and work out for years after any initial trauma has taken place. When you combine that with the traumatic lives of those who raised you, and it's so important always to go back and look at the contributing factors. When you look at who raised you, what they went through, whether they lived in a time of prosperity or scarcity, whether they were focusing their lives on moving forward or just trying to live without any plan for upward mobility or growth out of that situation, whether they felt helpless and hopeless and were just holding on to try to make it, where do you come from? When we're talking about the subject that we're going into today, generational trauma, I want us to be really aware that not only are we looking at others, because I've said this a thousand times, when you point a finger at someone else, you have three fingers pointing back at you. How did their behavior affect you? How when you're so prepared to say you did this or they did this, we need to look back at ourselves and many, many, many times. It requires us to get still, to get quiet, and to take just a beat in order to figure this out for yourself. You can't go to the person who was the root or the cause of the trauma and get them many times to explain why did you do this to me? Why were you that person that affected my life in this way? We have to look at our lives and determine or evaluate where this traumatic experience is popping up and what we have been trained to believe when we're going through that particular set of circumstances. So you're in the kitchen, you see a spider, you you just freak out. Why are you acting that way? You're thousands of times larger than the largest spider. And I'm gonna say that with a caveat. I haven't seen the largest spider, but I'm this just for uh an example. And because I was afraid of spiders at one point in my growing up years. It was the legs, it was the way the legs moved, it was the little furry body, the little look of it, it was knowing that it had its eyes, could see a thousand of me, and that just for whatever reason was not my favorite thing to think about. As a result of that, I knew that spiders had baby spiders, and I felt that if there was a spider, his family was close by, and if not, if something, if I did something to the spider, then his family's gonna come looking for him. So this is basically as a small child why I was afraid of spiders. But as I grew older, I had to realize you have a shoe, the spider doesn't. If you really want to get rid of the spider, it's pretty easy. You can out move the spider because they're small, they can't get away necessarily, and not all spiders are venomous, so it's not something the spider could just bite you and then you're dead. So I had all of these preconceived notions about the life of a spider, the community of spiders, and while some of it, and I don't know, could be true, a lot of it was a fear that came from me, and it had a beginning, and I simply on a daily basis was continuing to live out the life of a situation that may never come up. When I was little, and my brother does uh deny this, or did deny this rather, um, he put a toy spider in my bed. So I'm very small. This I would have been four or five years old, and um he put a plastic spider in my bed. I threw the covers back to get in the bed, and there's this spider. Initially, it it was startling, it shocked me. I didn't take the time to see whether it was real or not. I just got out of there and screaming and crying, and my dad came, showed me that it was okay, it was nothing there, and surely by that time my brother had run in and moved the said plastic spider. So I was really left looking uh very frightened for no reason, but it triggered something that stayed with me, and from that point forward, I felt fear and anxiety when I saw spiders. Now, that's a small example, but what if you were raised by parents, very intelligent, very accomplished in their own uh lives, very able to care for you and make everything flow smoothly in your life, except in areas that they had no control. And that was what I encountered when I lost my child. No one had the ability to circumvent this traumatic event in my life, and because my parents had also been through trauma, they weren't even able really to speak to my trauma. They walked with me, but they did not give me the words that I needed to hear to float me above this traumatic experience of my life. The most traumatic experience to this point of my life. Later, as I look back, I really did have to give my parents a lot of grace because I'm sure they were literally dealing with the worst experience of their lives now reoccurring in the life of their daughter. And while they didn't have the tools to handle it in their own lives, you can't just develop the tools overnight to help someone through their own issue of trauma. When we move back to even a broader perspective, we have to look at what's taking place in their lives at the time that they experienced their losses. At that time, we were coming out of a world war, we were uh settling the atmosphere of the world from a huge traumatic event that had taken place all over the world. Many of their friends had been lost in this war. And so they were dealing with grief, uh a collective grief for the world, a grief in their own lives, and really, especially knowing my mom, who was the kind of person that just didn't want to think about it anymore. I I would ask her, even in times, the historic times that she and my dad lived through, what it was like. And she said, I don't want to talk about it, I don't want to think about it, and she didn't. So I'm dealing with a mother who did not deal with trauma, period. I'm dealing with a dad who's trying to keep it together for himself, for his wife, for his family, living in at one point the Jim Crow South, only to leave there, coming to hope and ending up in a spiritual center where you weren't the right color. So if you really understand where they were coming from, you have a better understanding of where I was coming from when this unthinkable tragedy happened in my own life. If you think about it, and this is bringing it to another dimension, when you train uh or when you breed animals, when you breed dogs, you breed them for a specific purpose that um some are bred for hunting, some are bred as uh companion dogs, some bark a lot because their role would be to alert or to protect, and then others don't bark at all. How do they train that into an animal? And it comes from generations past and mating the animals with a specific uh genetic heritage because they knew that they would respond in a particular way. That happens in trauma in our lives, it makes a I'm gonna call it a scar, a tear in your soul that you work from unless you take the time to heal that tear. Every time you go through this stretch of road, it's gonna be bumpy because you've never taken the time to clear the road and to even it out and to make it smooth. So every time you get to that place, it's gonna be bumpy. And either you learn to just strap yourself in and roll with the bumps, or you say, This is no longer working for me, and I want to do it a different way. In every situation in your life, you have the ability to make a choice. Every single situation gives you the ability to make a choice, but it is your choice how you use the information that you've gathered up to that point, whether the road is going to continue to be bumpy or whether you're going to take the time, even and level the road, so that the next time you pass this way, you'll have a smooth ride. That is where I was on the border. My past experiences had been traumatic enough that when I got to that place, instead of understanding that I have grown beyond this, that when I encountered this type of issue in my life, this is what I do, this is how I react, this is the inner peace and calm that I need to project in this situation so that I get out of it what I want and not what I don't want. It took waiting on that border day after day, one day at a time, for me to slowly begin to say, what is wrong with this picture? What are you doing? What are you thinking? And why are you continuing to experience the same thing? It took weeks for me to work through it, unfortunately, because the ticket, the price tag for where I was was growing every day, which also brought with it its own level of stress. All of the things that I that I expressed to you, my son, thinking we would only be gone a few days, and now it's over a month, and looking at my own life, looking at my account be drained over a situation that I can't do anything about, I can't go back, I can't go forward, I can't move from where I am. And then I begin to realize let me look at this again, and to look at it from a more positive perspective. If I'm still sitting here, maybe this is where I need to be. Maybe there's something that I need to see before I cross the border so that I can move forward, anticipating good and not evil. I know the plans that I have for you, plans of good and not evil to give you an expected end. Okay, so all of these things are going through my head along with where I was spiritually, what I continue to believe in those things that I had challenged that were no longer working for me. How do you fit all of this together to get out of the situation that you're in right now? And then it came back to me. What have I been learning? I've been learning to take one day at a time. Within that day to take one moment at a time, there wasn't a spider in every moment of every second of that day, just in that one place. And once I removed that, now I'm working again from a clean slate. When I began to look at things differently, when I began to adjust my perspective, when I modified the way that I thought, when I stopped looking at it in awful terms and began to look at it and how can this benefit me, I began to learn what I needed to learn to move through that particular challenge and to get beyond that point so that I could achieve the goal that I was looking for. And it took me looking back at myself, me doing what we and what is called shadow work. Where did this come from? In the shadow. What is it covering that I need to see so that I can grow and continue to achieve my goal in this trip that I'm on, moving from one place to another? You have to use what you've learned. The diamonds in our lives are produced through time, gaining wisdom in that time, growing up in that time, being able to better rationalize, to visualize, to understand what's taking place, and then at that juncture of the road, being able to decide for myself what road I'm going to take. Because once again, at every decision, you have choices. They may not be great and wonderful things that you were looking forward to, but there will be choices. And once you make that choice, allow the choice to reconstruct the path that you're on so that if you ever have to walk this way again, you got a smooth road instead of a bumpy road to ride on. I took the time to breathe, to get out of the loop of what if, the awful what ifs. I took the time to get still and quiet. I took the time to begin to do things that I liked that caused me joy so that I could raise my vibration, so that I could come out of the blues and raise it to something joyful so that I would be on that vibe, that level in that dimension before I moved forward. Once I came out of that awful phase, the awfulizing phase of, oh my God, what else would go wrong? And that we've all done it. When you come out of that, and you're able to look and say, How in the world did I get here? What was I expecting? What was it that caused this delay in my moving forward? What was I expecting that my life is now showing me? And it took some time, which probably added to the number of days that I was in that hotel. It took some time, but I did finally get to the place that I could raise myself up, overcome all of the challenges and the disappointments, get to that border again. At that time, I got the exact people that I needed to get to help me to move forward. There was even a person there at the border when I was asked where I was going, and I told them they were from that place, and they were more than happy to help me move forward, to help me get to where I wanted to go, because they were proud of where they lived. It took an entirely different turn, but it took three weeks to get there because I wasn't only dealing with my own fears and uh doubt or unbelief, but I was also carrying that of my parents and of their parents and of their parents. I'll explain more of that later. If you haven't done so, please join me at my website www.d-r-an-i-t-a-mc.com. That's dranita mc.com. Join me on NoonVibe and on Fanbase. If you haven't done so, get your Diamond Journey Journal. Becoming is a Process. A process has stages by me, Dr. Anita McLaughlin. And keep coming back because we're working through some things here. This is a space where we we normalize. Live spiritual experiences without dogma, without fear or control. We honor your experiences, understanding that where you come from may have had similar experiences for others, but sometimes it's the first time that you've had to walk in this place. Keep coming back.