Understanding Ancestral or Generational Trauma

Content warning: This episode references suicide, depression, bereavement, pregnancy loss, the holocaust, and 911.

In episode 5 of the Intuitive Health Podcast, Dr Anthony talks about ancestral trauma and how the experiences of our lineage imprint on the genes of generations to come. This is due to epigenetics - an emerging area of scientific research that looks at how behaviours and environment can affect the way our genes work.

As well as explaining the science behind generational trauma, Dr Anthony goes into how you can identify what you might hold in the body that doesn't belong to you, and how you can bring healing to it. 

Dr Anthony Rafferty is a doctor, reiki healer, shaman and intuitive healer based in Dublin, Ireland. Throughout this podcast series, Dr Anthony bridges the gap between science and holistic healing by combining evidence-based Western medicine with nutrition advice, lifestyle guidance and traditional energy practices.  

If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and share it on Apple or Spotify. Visit the Intuitive Health website to book a healing session.

Transcript

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00 Welcome to the intuitive health podcast. I'm your host Dr. Anthony Rafferty, medical doctor, PhD, Reiki and shaman intuitive healer. I'm here to bring you on a journey of holistic healing that explores the science of the physical body combined with mental and emotional well being energetic and spiritual health. I am so excited to be talking to you today about a topic that I actually am very, very passionate about. And it's one that I see on a day to day basis in my clinical practice here. And it's all to do with trauma that we inherit from the familiar line. And I don't just refer to the familiar line, during this episode a lot to be kind of going a bit deeper into kind of what intergenerational trauma looks like, what ancestral trauma is, what spiritual trauma is, because, you know, we have our genetic family that we came from. So that's obviously our parents and their parents of the parents that came before them. And this lineage of genetic inheritance, this continues to run back through many, many, many generations. And in fact, when you actually think about it, we go beyond that, all life forms on Earth can be traced back to the first life form. So essentially, we have multiple generations of, of basically people that we can inherit the heavy trauma from, what's really interesting when we go deeper into this is that we also can inherit trauma from our society. So being a gay man being born into kind of the collective trauma of what the gay community has experienced, I hold that trauma in my body too. And, you know, it's been fascinating going on a journey, reading more about that collective trauma that we hold within the the LGBTQ plus community and some of the amazing work that's been done. And to kind of process that, and it's very, very powerful, we actually go back to our roots to the to where a lot of this trauma actually stemmed from and even I was a part of a beautiful Gay Men's Buddhist community. We used to meet every Saturday during COVID. And it was fascinating because there were people in that group that range from the age of 20, up to into their mid 80s. And some of those men lived through the AIDS crisis in which they lost the majority of their friends during that time. And some of the older gentleman that that group hadn't still to this day come out. And the trauma that they carried from the collective experience of what they went through was absolutely huge. And it was amazing to witness them in that and to acknowledge what they had experienced. And acknowledgement is huge. When we go deeper into this trauma work, but also beyond our genetic lineage. And also within our community, you can look beyond that into a very deep spiritual element of actually, what about our past lives that we've lived? What about the land that we grew up on, even in Ireland, the trauma of what famine holds within our, our lineage with the land. So I think it's so important as we're journeying through this kind of inherited trauma, we acknowledge that actually, we inherit trauma from so many different sources, and acknowledging that actually, these are all huge things within our life within our energy within our body, that can potentially give rise to dis ease. So taking a very narrow view of looking at just one element of this can actually prevent us from fully understanding who we are, where we came from, and how we can heal on really, really deep level. And that is a journey that I have been on for years and will continue on for the rest of my life. And as you peel one layer back from the onion, another layer just pops up and becomes very apparent. That actually, okay, we need to do another little bit of healing for this now. But that's what the the joy and the mystery of life is all about. But within this episode, I really want to go a little bit deeper into that inherited familial trauma. And this is the intergenerational trauma that I talk about with regard to how trauma within your family line has been passed down from generation to generation. Now it's really interesting because Carl Jung said something really, really interesting with regard to what remains unconscious will be experienced as fate. Now, Alberto Villoldo he's this absolutely powerful and magical shaman that I really really love his work through the four winds society, he's essentially brought shamanism from the east to the Western world and his teaching people waking people back up to their shamanic history, in past lives and to the power that they hold as shamanic healers in this life, connecting us back to the land. He has this really beautiful books about all of this. And he talks about fate versus destiny, that fate is fated to us through our family lineage, essentially, where we repeat patterns that aren't healed from generation to generation to generation. So fate, he believes is fatal. Where as destiny, it's a path, it's a path that our soul came here to fulfil. And when we heal familial wounds, we step from fate into Destiny. And we dream our world into being we dream that destiny into being when we begin to heal the wounds of our ancestors of our intergenerational wounding and trauma. So generally speaking, I love to go into a bit of what is held within the subconscious. So as we go through life, basically, we have our conscious mind, it's everything that we're kind of thinking about on the day to day, but in the subconscious mind, that's the depths, that's the shadow that we hold a lot of the wounding and the trauma that was just too big to be felt within our lifetime, and within our familial lifetime. And of course, as we journey through our life, we accrue so much trauma in our body from our own personal life experiences. But within our family lineage, we have had great traumas. And there has been great sadness and grief, that within the family lineages that came before us, there wasn't therapists, around a lot of the time, although there was beautiful community settings and healing was more of a community undertaking. And there was beautiful healers connected to the land, we've kind of largely lost touch with a lot of that these days. And although we have wonderful healers, in very many forums here today to help us on our journey, a lot of people come through to me, they're like, you know, I've been in talk therapy for 10 years, and I'm just not getting through these blocks. And I'm thinking to myself, well, you know, sometimes talk therapy can bring things from the subconscious into the conscious for processing. But what I tend to find through my work is, for some people, it's actually a deep energy that's held within the body that can't be accessed through talk therapy alone. And oftentimes, when we go deeper into the energy of that, it's an energy that they hold in their body that doesn't even belong to them. It's actually an energy of wounding and trauma that's been passed down through the family line bestowed upon them, and then they have taken it upon themselves to actually heal and release that energy on behalf of themselves and all the the beautiful members of the family that came beforehand. Now, when I talk about familial trauma, there's some new, quite key themes that tend to represent themselves in my clinical practice. And they tend to be within the family. Was there any element of abandonment? Did anybody die by suicide?

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51 Did anybody experience war? Or was there death within the family, even premature death, and oftentimes, because I do a lot of fertility work, it's a lot of energy within the womb space for women, of the death of babies that came before. So all of these things create an energetic imprint, or a blueprint within someone. And oftentimes within the family lineage of the people who came before us. The grief was suppressed within the body. When people experienced things they just got on with. This is a lot of what I hear within my journey with my clients. My granny just got on with it. She was very resilient. She held it very well. She held the energy and the grief and the trauma very well, but that was actually passed down through the line, you know, from generation to generation, because it wasn't felt and released. And oftentimes, especially within Ireland, you get this kind of this saying of Jesus, what would the neighbours think? You know, everything is swept under the rug, everything's kept behind closed doors. And when I mean closed doors, the doors of the heart get closed, everything gets locked down in the body. But when we are younger, we're like energetic sponges, it's almost like you're a brand new gorgeous sponge. And the bucket of water that's brought over beside you is the familial energy, the environment in which you grow up in. Someone comes along and squeezes you as a brand new sponge and dunks you into that environment. And as you expand all of the little pores fill with the water of the environment. And when I say water, it's the emotion. So then when someone takes you out of that bookish, which is the environment in which you experienced as a very porous, young little sponge, you are filled, every little pore is filled with the water. That's from the bucket. So you think to yourself, you then go off about your life, but you're full, every pore has been filled up, and you are none the wiser. Because some of this stuff, some of this trauma, you managed to pick up in the womb space, from your home, perhaps there was a birth trauma, perhaps your mother or her mother had experienced great trauma and grief in their life. And as a little baby, you were held and nurtured and held in that energy. And that became the norm for you moving forward. So it's really quite interesting how this presents itself. Some people come in to me, and we do a lot of ancestral healing work. And, you know, I've had multiple clients that have come through to me, they said, out of nowhere, and depression came over me at the age of 1618 24. And when we delve deeper into the family history, we find out that actually, at the age of 24, an uncle died by suicide, or at the age of 16, a mother's sister passed away. And that literally has repeated itself. It's almost like the grief awakens in the child unknowingly, at the exact age that someone's perished in the family history. And it's really quite fascinating. When you actually begin looking back through the cycles of what happened within the family line. Generally speaking, when you actually look at the research, there's been a lot of research in mice about this type of work. And a lot of the the, the research that's been done in mice, it's done because actually, mice give birth within 12 weeks or so. It's a short gestational period. So you can actually study multiple generations of mice, one after another, quite consecutively. And you can get through the research quite quickly. But it is really fascinating what actually comes out from that research, and the research into kind of how one generation impacts the next generation. We call that epigenetics. And it's how genes basically are impacted or turned on or off between one generation and the next. And the research in mice is actually really, really interesting, because it shows that a lot of stress that was felt within a grandmother's pregnancy, that's still evident within the behavioural, the physiological, and the metabolic will imprinting of offspring, which are essentially two generations below. So there's some really fascinating work about this. And there's a great saying that says, you know, genes load the gun, but it's the environment that pulls the trigger. And not everybody that's born with a genetic predisposition to something or a disease will actually go on to express that disease. But it's the environment, it's the bucket of water that you're being dunked into, that is essentially going to really be one of the key elements in which a disease or a genetic expression comes to light. Now, there has been some work done, and there's been some fabulous people who have studied a lot of this in humans as well. And there was a lot of work done in survivors of the Holocaust. And so there has been some fascinating books written about this and people like Gabor Ma Tei and Bessel van der Kolk have some beautiful books, The Body Keeps the Score, when the body says no, these are all wonderful kind of documented descriptions of what I'm actually discussing now. And both of them talk a lot about the Holocaust and even survivors from the 911 attacks and how that has actually impacted offspring of people who were pregnant at that time. It's really quite interesting because there's a beautiful In a series of beautiful studies that were done over many years by a professor at Stanford University called Bruce Lipton, and he basically discussed the fact that DNA was impacted by negative thoughts, feelings and emotion, and that signals from the environment can activate or silence genes. So this ties into the discussion essentially on the environmental triggers that give rise to the genetic expression of conditions or dysfunction that happens within the family lineage. He also documented that emotions alter the cells in the offspring that are within the uterus. So emotions have a biological impact on the physiology, the metabolism and the behaviour of offspring, which is fascinating to me that's within the womb. And there's documented evidence that essentially shows that this can be happening even as early as the first trimester of pregnancy, which is wild. Essentially, he showed that chronic emotions can pre programme how children respond to their environment, how they respond to the bucket of water, that they're dumped into as little sponges when they when they're born. Now, with regard to Holocaust survivors, it's really interesting because those who survived the Holocaust research was done into looking at their cortisol levels, which is a stress hormone. And they experienced such heightened nervous system responses. And, you know, the hormones, the stress hormones they were producing at the time, of the experience that they went through, the body went into such a state of fatigue afterwards that they actually began to document lower cortisol levels, the body wasn't producing as much cortisol after the event. What was fascinating was when they actually studied the children of Holocaust survivors, the children also have had lower cortisol levels as well. So it's almost like that imprinting then got passed on to the children. So in order to heal these wounds within the family line, you start having to think to yourself, well, you know, how do we heal this? How do we heal this. And the bottom line is we need to feel it to heal it. So what I tend to do is bring my clients on a journey of embodying or imagining what the wounds of the trauma may have felt like for their loved ones. And, you know, sometimes I find it really interesting because when I'm doing the energetic work, and kind of trying to identify where the root of a lot of this trauma that people hold in their bodies is,

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05 people say to me, Oh, my God, I'm, I feel like I'm crying, but they're not my tears. I feel really sad, but I feel sad. For my granny, I feel sad for the loss of my aunt. I feel sad for the loss of my uncle that died as a baby. But they acknowledged that that's not their energy, they're grieving on behalf of one of the family members. And it's beautiful to witness that. Because people can hold that in their hearts, allow it to rise and release, and then they themselves feel lighter. So what's really, really fascinating and what I find really, really interesting is when you actually look at the science of inheritance, actually, and I love talking about energy and how energy impacts the body. But when you think about it, a grandmother who's carrying her female baby in the womb, at five months gestation, that baby contains all of the eggs in her ovary that she's going to be born with, for the rest of her life. So the genetic information that gives rise to her children is present within the ovary, which blows my mind. And essentially, this has happened from one generation to the next. So when you think about it, all the women who came before their life experiences, the trauma that they experienced during the pregnancy, even the birth, a lot of that is imprinting energetically onto the DNA that exists within the ovary of every lady, every woman that comes generation after generation after generation. What's really quite fascinating is that eggs reach a stage of development that halts until they actually get to the point later in life, where a sperm fuses with the egg, and it goes on to then go into the next stages of development. However, man, they also have the precursor cells for all the sperm that they're going to have. So there's multiple ways in which both parents can impact us on an energetic level, and the lineage, how that's actually impacted. On our body. Now, funnily enough, we obviously carry trauma with our parents. But what I tend to see is, it's actually a lot of wounding within the grandparent lineage, within that line, I tend to find has a huge impact on people coming through my door. So it's the losses, the griefs, the traumas that their grandparents experience, it's almost like, it skips or magnifies, as it goes through the parental era into the grandchildren. And a lot of the healing that I tend to do is within the grandparent time, and ultimately, these emotions can be huge things like fear can be awfully debilitating. But it's also really important to remember that feelings can be beautiful. Feelings can be love, they can be joy, they can be elation, so you also have the ability to really be impacted by those emotions. In your earlier years, too. It's all it's not all about trauma. Because within the family lineage, behind the trauma, there are also strengths, there is resilience, there is power, within the family lineage, too. And you know, sometimes on this journey we become, we can become quite fixated on the fact that actually Oh my god, there's been so much trauma, trauma, trauma, trauma. And I do see that a lot of blocks within the body and the predisposition to disease is linked to trauma. But it's important to remember also that we have the ability to actually reclaim the beautiful gifts and the strengths that run within the familiar lines as well. It doesn't always have to be about the trauma as such. So that's really, really lovely. And one thing that I read, which I really, really resonated with me, we can't change our DNA, but we can alter how it functions. And I love this, because with regard to trauma, when we feel it, we heal it, but also within the environment that we live in. Keeping in mind that when we consume energy through foods, through beautiful interactions with people through our community, when we really work to heal on a deep level and nourish our body with things that support gene expression in a favourable way, like foods, you know, exercise, all of these things are going to support your healing alongside your trauma processing. And one thing I will say as well, there's been some amazing studies done looking at the impact that meditation can have to literally alter the expression of genes. So although trauma can impact us on a deep, genetic and energetic level, we also have the ability to impact the genes that are expressed within our own body on a day to day basis through how we live our life. And it's so important to recognise that our body is so precious it is literally this gorgeous vessel that carries our soul around. And when we treat it with respect, and we heal it on multiple different levels, provide it with the nourishment and the energy that it needs. We can alter the expression of our genes, and we can change our fate into Destiny. So I just wanted to wrap up the end of this episode by talking about the healing work that I do in the practice. So I do a lot of ancestral and intergenerational healing as part of my work with bringing people on a journey to release the trauma to release the energy held within the body on behalf of the other family members that came before us. With women specifically, I tend to do a lot of womb related work because women hold the energy of trauma from All the women that came before them oftentimes in the womb space, and that has been transformative for reproductive health for women, and also in cases of fertility related concerns, which has been magic. I will also be running a retreat in France, where we'll go deep into actually healing intergenerational and familial inherited trauma, we'll be doing some shamanic work, which goes deep into the energy release of that, we'll be doing some breath work, which can really, really be a beautiful addition to your self care practice to help unlock those trapped energies within the body of trauma. And that will be from 29 to the second of May in France, in Southern France. And please check out the website. If you're interested in joining us on that journey. It's going to be a truly transformational experience, helping people step into their destiny and releasing that face which can be fatal as we move forward. So please, please please, if you liked this episode, follow rate and share and from my heart to yours, sending love and I will talk to you again next week.

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