Gwynn Raimondi, MA, LMFTA

Ending Cycles: Processing the Past & Changing the Future

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No one is innocent in the tide of history. Everyone has kings and slaves in his past. Everyone has saints and sinners. We are not to blame for the actions of our ancestors. We can only try to be the best we can, no matter what our heritage, to strive for a better future for all.

~Diana Peterfreund, Across a Star-Swept Sea

When we look at cycles of trauma, it is important to remember that often there may not have been a choice to not pass the pain forward.  Talking about trauma at all is a relatively new development in our human (western) history, and in the early days of recognizing and trying to find ways to process trauma, we only looked at the trauma soldiers experienced and lived with.

It has only been in the last forty to fifty years that we began to acknowledge the trauma that comes with abuse and assault.  And it has only been about twenty to thirty years that we began to recognize the impacts things like poverty, being witness to abuse, or living in a family where one or more members had addictions issue has on us.

Add to this that the somatic (body-centered) trauma therapies are also a relatively new thing. It wasn’t until 1997 that Levine’s first book Waking the Tiger introduced the wider public to the ways that trauma lives inside our bodies and how we humans prevent ourselves from processing it.  That was only twenty years ago.

The amount of research and acknowledgment around trauma just within my own lifetime (46 years) is amazing.  We have come so far since the early 1970s, and I believe we likely still have a long way to go.  And I also believe we are getting there.

I share all that to remind us that we couldn’t know what we didn’t know.  I don’t  know how many times I have heard clients say “I wish I would have started this work earlier/years ago/when I was much younger.”  But the truth is that this work, body-centered trauma processing work, is a very new phenomena and likely you actually could not have started this work earlier, because it didn’t exist.

And yet.  While it is not our fault that information was not available before it was available, it is our responsibility now to do the work to create change, within ourselves, within our families, and in our greater communities and world.

Breaking cycles of abuse is something that has only been talked about for the last fifty or so years.  And then it was only spoken of quietly.  Greater social conversations didn’t begin to happen until the 1980s, in part thanks to Alice Miller and her body of work.  We didn’t even consider that beating children would or could have long term, life-long, impacts on them. And it wasn’t until the Adverse Childhood Experiences study (ACEs) which was initiated in 1995 but then not really talked about until twenty years later, that we knew those impacts were beyond psychological and spilled into our actual physical health.

And even so, I know my maternal grandfather talked about his abusive step-mother and how he swore he would never treat his child the way she treated him (now I have no idea if he actually kept this promise to himself, but evidence says he probably did).

So, even though the greater social conversation was not there, I do believe we have within us the “moral” (for lack of a better word) compass to know abuse, domination, authoritarianism, and othering are not right, okay, or humane (or for that matter actually human).

We are in the infancy of truly understanding how the traumatic experiences of our ancestors are passed down to future generations.  We are in the infancy of learning how to examine and process these traumas – especially the ones we don’t actually know about. There is still so much that is unknown, and frankly there is so much that cannot be known for several more decades as studies continue to watch families move through more and more generations.

And.

Even with this being true, I believe we all know deep within ourselves that the past impacts us.  Historical past, ancestral past, and our own lived experience past.  We may not have all the data and research to back this up (yet), and still we know.

And this is where our own responsibility comes in.  It is not our fault what was done to us or our ancestors.  It is absolutely our responsibility to make the change within ourselves so that change out in the world can occur, so we can end the cycles of abuse, oppression, and domination.

So we can all find our ways to freedom.

So we can all be a part of creating a world where all of us are free.

I believe part of that work is for us to look at our ancestral, historical, and personal pasts and to unearth what we have internalized; to examine it; to unlearn what we know is not right or just; and to create space for change and doing different for ourselves and for the world moving into our futures.

I talk more about all of this in the 10-minute video below:

This essay is the fourth and final in a four part series I have written exploring ancestral, inter-generational, historical and cultural relational trauma and internalized misogyny.  I hope you found the series helpful and informative.

This essay series is also to introduce the themes we will be exploring in the spring circle I facilitate: Unleashing Ourselves: Processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny. We begin April 1.  You can learn more here.

To read the other essays in the series, go to the links below

Defining Ancestral & Intergenerational Traumas and Internalized Misogyny

Connecting the Dots

Connecting Individual and Collective Traumas 

Ending Cycles :: Processing the Past & Changing the Future (this essay)

The importance of processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny

More About the Unleashing Ourselves Circle

You can find the FAQ for this circle here.

Connecting Individual & Collective Traumas

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Not knowing trauma or experiencing or remembering it in a dissociative way is not a passive shutdown of perception or of memory. Not knowing is rather an active, persistent, violent refusal; an erasure, a destruction of form and of representation. The fundamental essence of the death instinct, the instinct that destroys all psychic structure is apparent in this phenomenon. . . . The death drive is against knowing and against the developing of knowledge and elaborating [it].

~Dori Laub, Listening to Trauma

Collective trauma is something that a community experiences together.  It is the ways events like the hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, and other natural disasters impact the communities that are affected by them and how those communities collectively respond to the event.

Collective trauma can also be seen when we look at racism, misogyny, homo-phobia, xenophobia, able-ism, etc.  We see collective trauma in the survivors of genocides and in refugees of extremely authoritarian regimes.  The peoples those “otherings” are directed at also experience a collective trauma.

These are traumas that, if you aren’t a part of that community, you don’t experience and may even have trouble understanding.  They are also traumas that intersect and many of us are members of multiple “collectives” who experience othering, oppression, and hatred.

A community that experiences a collective trauma is made up of individuals, who each experience and internalize the traumatic event (or attitudes) in their unique ways.  How we as an individual may respond to a collective traumatic event is also dependent on our own personal trauma history, our resilience (or lack of), and how our personal and prior collective trauma histories impacted us.  How each individual responds to the event also reflects and influences how the collective as a whole responds.

The individual and the collective are intertwined, one really can’t exist without the other.

(To clarify the use the of the word “event” – that word truly only speaks to actual one time things – like hurricanes – and not to the traumatic impact of cultural hierarchies or attitudes or otherings.  Unfortunately, I don’t quite have a word for that – so, I’m calling the trauma of cultural hierarchies an “event” even though it is perpetual and most certainly not a one time thing.)

If we look at misogyny (and really all aspects of our patriarchal culture) as a collective trauma, we can begin to have another way into understanding not only how it impacts each of us individually, but also how it perpetuates and insinuates itself within our culture. We can begin to see how misogyny is a key component in what I call Cultural Relational Trauma – how it others women and isolates us from each other and from ourselves.   We can see how misogyny impacts all our relationships, with women, men, and non-binary persons.  We can see how we collectively perpetuate it through silence, jealousy, and competition.

As women, we have collectively and individually, consciously and unconsciously, bought into the stories of how we are not enough, how we are too much, how we are bad, stupid, untrustworthy, incompetent, frail, fragile, and my all time favorite: evil.

We can see the double-bind our culture, and we ourselves, put us in when we consider sexuality, spirituality, motherhood, womanhood.

We can see how these stories and attitudes have actually caused not only individual traumas (because women are just property after all and can be beaten, raped, used and abused at the whim of their male intimate partner), but have also traumatized us as a collective, leaving us in a place of actually not trusting or believing other women, how we think about what women can and can’t do in the workforce, how we judge other mothers, how we accuse other women of  “playing the victim” or the martyr.

We other each other.  Even when in almost every way we are the same, and most especially when we have any obvious differences (like the color of our skin, socio-economic status, perceived sexuality, intelligence, education, etc).

And when we other each other, we are buying into, being complicit in and compliant to, and perpetuating our misogynist culture.

Our othering of other women, is how our internalized misogyny shows itself.

Our voices running through our minds about how we are too much or not enough is how our internalized misogyny shows itself.

Our shame, that we carry and that weighs down every fiber of our being, is how our internalized misogyny shows itself.

These are all traumas.  These are both the cause and the effect of the trauma.  Internalized misogyny is its own trauma that we perpetuate within ourselves and out in our collectives.

I am a firm believer in systems theory.  I believe we are all a part of multiple systems, from the micro system of our actual body to our families, to our communities, and further out into the world.  When one of us is traumatized, we all feel the ripple effect.  This is not only a lateral ripple reaching out to others living in the here and now, this ripple spirals, reach out into the now and also back to our ancestors and forward to the persons yet to come.

The traumas of our ancestors had and continue to have their own ripple effects and collective and internalized misogyny is one of them.

I talk more about all of this in the 12-minute video here. ‘

This essay is the third in a four part series I have written exploring ancestral, inter-generational, historical and cultural relational trauma and internalized misogyny.  I hope you find it helpful and informative.

This essay series is also to introduce the themes we will be exploring in the spring circle I facilitate: Unleashing Ourselves: Processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny. We begin April 1.  You can learn more here.

To read the other essays in the series, go to the links below

Defining Ancestral & Intergenerational Traumas and Internalized Misogyny

Connecting the Dots

Connecting Individual and Collective Traumas (this essay)

Ending Cycles :: Processing the Past & Changing the Future

The importance of processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny

More About the Unleashing Ourselves Circle

You can find the FAQ for this circle here.

Connecting the Dots

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We’re all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.

~Liam Callanan, The Cloud Atlas

Sympathy is only meted out if you follow all of
society’s rules for how a victim is supposed to behave.

~Nenia Campbell, Cease and Desist

We live in a patriarchal culture.  The way this culture, our culture, presents itself is one of domination, authoritarianism, and oppression.  There is a hierarchy in our culture with able-bodied, CIS, heterosexual, socio-economically abundant men at the top of the hierarchy.  Women, are always below men in this hierarchy.  White women below white men, black women below black men, Latina women below Latino men, etc.

Men first, then women.  There is a hierarchy for women only too, based again on color of skin, able-bodied-ness, sexual orientation and presentation, socio-economic (and marital) status.

It is import to note the hierarchy, and the hierarchy within the hierarchy.

This is the way our culture presents itself.

It is also the way our culture keeps us in line, on our leashes so to speak.

Our culture clearly defines our place in the world for us, and if we dare to step out of that well defined box, well, there are repercussions.

Historically speaking, the repercussions have meant torture, rape, and death.

Depending on the home, these same repercussions may be in effect to this day.

Going back to the hierarchy, it is clear that women are less than men.  We are not considered equal.  We are below.

This “less-than-ness” has been around for a very long time.  It is how patriarchy took hold in the first place – by convincing society in general that women should be subservient, that we are not competent, that we are not to be trusted, that we are evil.

Once these stories became rooted in general society, they insinuated their ways into our homes and families.  Once there, they seeped right in our minds, our bodies, our very essence and being.

The perpetuation of misogyny, the hatred of women, is dependent upon these stories.  It is dependent upon not only society in general believing that women are inferior; it is also wholly dependent on how we, as women, view other women and ourselves as inferior.

When we begin to consider how our literal survival (as in to continue breathing and having a heartbeat) was dependent on, in the beginning, us not speaking up and out against these stories, and then through the course of time us wholly believing and internalizing these stories, we can see how we became isolated from other women and from our own female self (this is also true for men, however, I am speaking directly to and for women at the moment).

Other writers and coaches call this passing down of the inferiority of women the “mother-wound”.  I actually refuse to use that term because I believe it perpetuates the idea that women are responsible for our own oppression and continues to put the mother at the center of the cause of all the ills of the world and our own personal ills.  I believe the term itself, “mother-wound,” to be complicit and compliant to our misogynist patriarchal culture.

I have called this a “patriarchal” wound in the past.  That name is still relevant and fitting, as it is a wound, or more to the point, a part of the trauma, we as women experience living in our current culture.

 

And.

I am finding that term to even be a bit sterile and to not take into account, at least not blatantly, the reality that this wounding and trauma has been going on, and being passed down, for hundreds and thousands of years.

I believe we need to remember the context for why we (women) began to believe these stories of our own, and other women’s, inferiority.  We need to look at the consequences of what it meant not to believe them for our ancestors.  We need to consider how the trauma of watching our mothers and daughters being tortured and murdered impacted us then and still impacts us today.

We need to look at the ancestral trauma that lives within us and how it presents itself as internalized misogyny and disrupts our relationships with other women and with ourselves.

I talk more about all of this in the 12-minute video below

This essay is the second in a four part series I have written exploring ancestral, inter-generational, historical and cultural relational trauma and internalized misogyny.  I hope you find it helpful and informative.

This essay series is also to introduce the themes we will be exploring in the spring circle I facilitate: Unleashing Ourselves: Processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny. We begin April 1.  You can learn more here.

To read the other essays in the series, go to the links below::

Defining Ancestral & Intergenerational Traumas and Internalized Misogyny 

Connecting the Dots (this essay)

Connecting Individual and Collective Traumas

Ending Cycles :: Processing the Past & Changing the Future

The importance of processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny

More About the Unleashing Ourselves Circle

You can find the FAQ for this circle here.

Defining Ancestral & Inter-generational Traumas and Internalized Misogyny

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Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history.

~Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

I spoke on a panel once with a famous new age author/guru in leather pants and she said that the problem with women is that we don’t “speak from our power,” but from a place of victimization. As if the traumas forced upon us could be shaken off with a steady voice- as if we had actual power to speak from. 

~Jessica Valenti, Sex Object

Welcome to my new educational essay series On Ancestral Trauma & Internalized Misogyny.  Over the next four weeks I’ll be talking about Ancestral, Inter-generational, and Cultural Relational trauma and their various intersections.  It is a chance for us to explore how the past – both recent and millennia old – impacts us today, specifically how trauma has been passed on through the generations, particularly mother to daughter, and become curious about how we can begin to process and dislodge these generations old traumas and woundings.

First I believe it is important to start with defining what exactly I am talking about.  These are my own definitions, and while there are other therapists who would agree with these definitions and who use this same language, others may re-categorize and re-name the different types of trauma.  I don’t think there is only one way to define these things, however so that we are on the same page, so to speak, I will share the definitions of the terms I will be using, as I use and define them.

Even though other therapists, psychologists, and psychological researchers may use different terminology it is universally agreed that there are traumas that come from our ancestral past, those of our own personal lived experience, and those that are from the culture we live in.  This series will be focusing on all three, from a historical perspective.  You’ll begin to understand what I mean over the next few weeks.

Ancestral Trauma

I define Ancestral Trauma as the biological trauma passed down to us from our blood relatives.  This shows up in our DNA and cellular memory.  The field of epigenetics broke ground in the reality that trauma is literally passed down through our bloodlines.  It has been found that both DNA contributors – as in both the egg and the sperm – can pass on DNA “trauma markers”.  It is currently unknown how far back  (or rather how far forward) these markers are passed.  Current research has only been able to look at three generations worth of data.  However my own suspicions (and I’m not alone in these) is that these markers go back as far as any unprocessed was first experienced, so in theory this could literally go back thousands of years.

It is important to note that these trauma markers or “mutable” or changeable – in other words when we process our own traumas and those of our ancestors, these markers “switch off” and then are not available to pass on to the next generations genetically.

Inter-generational Trauma

This is the trauma that is passed on through our family of origin (so for those who are adopted, this is what has been passed on to you by your adopted family as opposed to those in your direct bloodline).  This type of trauma is inflicted through action, inaction, and language.  There are certain family “habits” or idiosyncrasies that we can see “passed down.”  For example, both my sister and I have our mother’s laugh.  We also both tend to have her drunken sailor’s mouth.

Not all things passed on inter-generationally are traumatic.

However, we can also look at child abuse as an inter-generational trauma, as more often then not if a parent physically abuses their own children they were also abused as a child.  Neglect is the same way.  This of course is not always true – which is to say it is possible to also break this cycle of trauma.

We can begin to see these sorts of idiosyncrasies, be they traumatic or relatively benign, when we look at our family trees and see where divorce, known abuse, child loss, early death, etc show up.  Also examining our own actual language – the words we use and the the words we don’t – to see different ways this is passed on.

The key to inter-generational trauma, is that while it is part of our lived experience (for example abuse), it is also not originally or wholly ours, which is an important aspect to remember.

Cultural Relational Trauma (CRT)

This trauma is what in inflicted on us by our culture, or in our meta-socialization.  It is how our culture encourages us to “Other” those who are not exactly like us.  I believe this is where racism, misogyny, ablism, homophobia, classism, etc all stems from.  In some ways CRT is from our families of origin also, however the messages come from beyond those who cared (or were supposed to care) for us.  It is the messages we receive from the media, from our neighbors, from our religion, from our laws.  It is a more wide spread, and therefore more insidious, message that we internalize.

This trauma is also something of our lived experience, but also not ours.  It can be unraveled and dislodged, just as lived experience and ancestral traumas can be processed and moved out of our bodies.

Internalized Misogyny

This, in a nutshell, is our hatred of women as women ourselves.  Men can be misogynists, but they can’t have internalized misogyny.  When we internalize the messaging of our culture and or family of origin, it is messages about ourselves that we are internalizing.

Internalized misogyny shows up in the ways we judge other women and also the way, as women, we judge ourselves.  It is the holding ourselves and others to essentially mythological beauty standards presented by our culture.  It is the way we judge other mothers and their parenting, and yet do not offer support for mothers to be “better” parents.  It is the way we shame other women, and ourselves, for being too much this and not enough that.

Internalized misogyny is the way we unconsciously do the dirty work of our culture – it is how we are complicit in and how we perpetuate the subjugation of women.  It is also part of our ancestral and inter-generational trauma, as well as our cultural relational trauma.

It too is learned, and I firmly believe what can be learned can also be unlearned.

All of these different traumas influence and impact us.  Sometimes consciously and mostly unconsciously.  These traumas are part of our “Shadow Self” and when we bring them into the light, examine them, and begin to understand them, we are able to then begin to make conscious choices about not passing them on to future generations.

I talk more about all of this in the 10-minute video below.

This essay is the first in a four part series I have written exploring ancestral, inter-generational, and cultural relational traumas and internalized misogyny.  I hope you find it helpful and informative.

This essay series is also to introduce the themes we will be exploring in the spring circle I facilitate: Unleashing Ourselves: Processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny. We begin April 1.  You can learn more here.

To read the other essays in the series, go to the links below

Defining Ancestral & Intergenerational Traumas and Internalized Misogyny (this essay)

Connecting the Dots

Connecting Individual and Collective Traumas

Ending Cycles :: Processing the Past & Changing the Future

The importance of processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny

More About the Unleashing Ourselves Circle

You can find the FAQ for this circle here.

 

On Trauma: Processing or Healing?

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Definition of heal

1a : to make free from injury or disease : to make sound or whole 

…

3: to restore to original purity or integrity 

Definition of process

…

2a (1) : a natural phenomenon marked by gradual changes that lead toward a particular results (2) : a continuing natural or biological activity or function 

2b : a series of actions or operations conducing to an end; especially : a continuous operation or treatment especially in manufacture

Merriam-Webster online dictionary, December 2017

I stopped using the word healing as related to trauma over a year ago.  I did this mostly in response to what felt like an onslaught of trauma coaches and therapists talking about how by working with them you can heal your trauma and everything in your life will be all flowers and sausages because of it.

These messages impacted me in a very negative way.  At first I didn’t understand why I found the message so irritating.  I mean, I used the term “healing trauma” too.  So why did it bother me so much that these other folks were using this very common term?

With some quiet and self-reflection I found my answer.

My own personal experience of trauma therapy didn’t seem to “heal” my trauma in the ways that I thought about healing.  Using Merriam-Webster’s definition above, if we heal our trauma, we make it go away, disappear, no longer exist.

Working with my own therapists, this was not my experience.  My trauma still existed, even after years of therapies.  The events didn’t miraculous not happen.  The ways that they impacted me didn’t disappear. I still had memories, I was still triggered, I still had certain behaviors-some innocuous, some relatively harmful-that grew from these experiences.

My trauma was not healed. My trauma is not healed.  It still exists.  It’s still in me in a myriad of ways, some of which I am conscious of and I am sure some I am not.

This may sound rather hopeless.  If we can’t actually heal our trauma, if we can’t actually undo what was done to us, what is the point?

What has occurred for me, through years of talk therapy, EMDR, Sensory-Motor approach, and most recently CIMBS (a body-centered mindfulness/somatic approach), is that I can process and learn to mitigate the impact trauma has on me and my life.

The events still happened.  I am still sometimes triggered.  My physical health is still impacted.

And.

I have learned how to become aware of some of my triggers. I have learned to listen to my body when a trigger is starting and then can slow down and calm my nervous system so I don’t move into a fully triggered (and out of body, back in reptile mind) state.  I have learned how to actually feel comfortable in my own body, to enjoy pleasurable sensations and to tolerate uncomfortable ones.

I have not healed my trauma.  And I have processed much of and learned and am learning so much more about myself as I do it.

The processing of my own personal and ancestral traumas has been progressive.  It has been both incremental, with the tiniest, almost imperceptible, shifts and it has also in some ways happened all at once, with seemingly huge changes happening in very short periods of time.

It has been a process.  It will likely be a process for the rest of my life. A process of coming home to my body, of reconnecting with my Self and the world, a process of self awareness, a process of learning and unlearning, a process of soothing my nervous system, connecting to my boundaries and resources, finding my center and ground, and creating new neuro-pathways.  A process of shifting and transforming into new ways of being.

I have witnessed similar experiences with my clients, especially when we utilize my Trauma Informed Embodiment approach.  The process is slow and gentle and also results can sometimes be seen rather quickly.  This approach doesn’t make your trauma “go away,” it will not magically turn you back into the person you were before the traumatic events happened.  And it will give you tools and new ways of entering into your Self and your life that are more mindful, pleasurable, and joyful.

I talk more about all of this in the 12-minute video below.

This essay is the fourth and final in a four-part series introducing the topics we will be exploring in my new six month program Trauma Focused Embodiment Level 1.  We begin February 1.  You can learn more here.

Additionally the main focus of my individual work is trauma and utilizing trauma informed embodiment with my clients.  If you are looking for an individual therapist, you can learn more about me and my individual therapy work here.

And finally, I facilitate a free online group on Facebook where we explore trauma, grief, embodiment,and their intersections.  It is called Trauma Informed Embodiment and you can join us right here.

Other Essays & Videos in this series ::

On Trauma :: Types of Trauma Living Within Us

On Trauma :: The Physiological Impacts of Trauma

On Trauma :: The Psychological and Emotional Impacts of Trauma

On Trauma :: Processing or Healing? (this essay)

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