Gwynn Raimondi, MA

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.

 

Spring flowers, ancestors and origin stories

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Each year at my first siting of the crocus rising up from the winter-turning-to-spring ground, I remember my grandmother. Her yard had crocus planted in the flower beds and I remember that each spring when those flowers came up, she noted them with a wistful smile on her face. I don’t know what memories those flowers brought forward for her, she never shared that with me and in my youthful ignorance I never thought to ask. But now, and for as long as I can remember, whenever I see them popping up, I think of her.

Thoughts of her lead me to thoughts of her daughter, my mother. And I miss her more in the spring than I do most other times of year. Tulips were my mothers flowers and so when I see them I think of her.

And then there is the bearded iris and the roses that also bring these women into my mind and being and so spring is always all about them, much as the month of December is for different reasons.

But the flowers… I know why they remind me of them, but I don’t know they chose those flowers. I don’t know why both my grandmothers loved roses so. I don’t know why my maternal grandmother fawned over her iris in the way she did. I don’t know why my mother never planted a flower in her life and yet had plants and flowers that were about her in all the many ways.

I have a Christmas Cactus that blooms whenever it seems to feel like it. It was my mother’s plant and I remember if from my own childhood in the very pot (and probably the same dirt) it is still in today. The cactus has blossomed around my daughter’s birthday in April, the day of my baby shower for my son and then the same year the week of his birth (these events being about a month apart). The cactus bloomed immediately after each of my miscarriages. It has bloomed around my birthday and at the time of my grad school graduation. There doesn’t seem to be rhyme nor reason to it’s blooming and even though I am not a very woo-woo person, I tend to believe that the blooming of this plant is my mother saying hello in her own way.

My maternal grandmother loved her garden and my mother avoided gardening and I have a bit of a black thumb though I do try and then my daughter, of she is all about the plants and can’t wait for a house with a yard so we can grow All The Things. I see in her the creativity and naturalness of my grandmother, but not the harshness and I am hopeful she, my daughter, is able to stay soft in all the right ways.

My grandmother taught me that family is everything, and that they are our roots. And even with this, I consider how little she ever really shared about her family and how little I actually know about people either of my maternal grandparents came from. And while I could dig into genealogy that’s just not where I am right now in my life and knowing dates and names isn’t really what I care about anyhow. I want the stories. I want the hows and whys and feelings. I want the details that live in my body but don’t have words to have structure and be concrete instead of nebulous.

We all have origin stories, we all have people we come from, and some of us may know some things about some of those people and some of us may know a lot of things about a lot of those people and some of us may know little to nothing about any of those people. At least, if we are talking about conscious knowing, about verbal knowing, about the knowing as it relates to stories and dates and facts.

And even when we don’t know the stories or the who the people were or the dates or any of the facts, our bodies do. These people who lived before us, live within in. They are there in our DNA and show themselves in the color of our eyes or the shape of our chin or the width of our hips. They are there in our DNA and show themselves in the “illogical” anxiety and the “unreasonable” depression and “hysterical” responses we have to seemingly innocuous things. They are there in our DNA and show themselves in our resilience, and willingness to keep trying, and our strength to carry on despite or in spite of or because of it all.

These people who came before us are part of our origins, whether we know, consciously, the details of them or not.

And while these people who came before, who we may have known or may not have, who we may have known parts and pieces and aspects of but never the whole story of them, while they are a part of us and our story, they are also not our whole story.

They are a piece of our origin stories. But not the whole part. And while they contribute to who we are and how we may be in the world, we do not need to allow them to define us or to create our narrative about our life for us.

For years I compared myself to my maternal grandmother, my being and my life itself. The fact is that the egg that made me was created within her womb as the woman who would later gave birth to me formed and came into being. And so there is a tie to this woman who gave birth to my mother, who create 50% of what would become me, that I have that is beyond words and time and is all biology and physics.

But my tie to her was greater than that in ways that I can’t explain with words because they are feelings that are so strong there are no words for them. And because of this tie I wanted my life to be the life I made up that was hers. And I tried to measure up to this fantasy I had created in my head, that couldn’t possibly be real because all the facts of my own lived experience told something different. But sometimes in order to survive we push facts and reality aside so our brains can stay unschismed.

And so for years I tried to live up to a fantasy and then finally, in time I realized what the fantasy was – not real – and slowly began to let it go and started to have compassion for myself and for these women who came before me and shaped me in so many ways.

This compassion, this is the thing I hope to pass on my daughter. My hope is always that her own origin story will be something of fire and ocean and vast forests and deep knowing and so much self loving that her heart sometimes bursts.

Because as I have more compassion for me and for them I am able to make the changes and shifts in my own ways of being. To make choices because of conscious knowing instead of following a cycle because that is what one may do.

All of this and more is why each spring I offer a circle on our female lineage, on our ancestors, known and unknown. So we can bring into knowing ourselves, so we can each write our own origin stories, so we can find compassion, so we can come together in community and see we are not so alone.

We will begin on April one and there are still a few spaces available. If this sounds like your own next steps in your journey of self actualization and liberation you can find more details and request an application here.

I’d be both honored and thrilled if you chose to join us.

xoox