Intergenerational Trauma

My passion for the study of transgenerational trauma came out of a surprising discovery that my own life story, aspirations and even my health have been impacted by the losses experienced by the Ukrainian and Russian sides of my family. Wars, starvation, illness, forced migrations and displacements about four generations back have relevance now. When the offspring of a generation that suffered in these ways can acknowledge and fully grieve what others in the family didn’t feel safe to grieve in their lifetime, one can experience a profound spaciousness and ability to hold one’s own current pain with compassion. Turning transgenerational pain into an understanding and responding to it as a newly found resource is the highlight of my work as a therapist.

Family constellations is a deeply empathetic work that allows for processing buried strands of trauma and frozen patterns that block our nervous system from experiencing our essential being with all of its gifts. A new sense of freedom shifts old family scripts and our own inherited patterns we used to live by.

When we are born into a specific family system, we don’t choose the implicit memories, projections, and survival strategies we inherit. We can, however, learn to regulate the responses to intergenerational trauma triggers, reframe what happened, find wider perspectives and process lingering frozen emotions we might still be holding in our bodies. In fact, we can learn to embrace our ancestors’ survival strategies, their embodied resilience and cultural wisdom when we pay closer attention to what happened to them and who they were. What was once stored in our emotional DNA as burdens can become powerfully supportive in this lifetime, now and as we move deeper into life.