What if I told you that healing generational trauma patterns can make you happier and healthier than you ever thought possible? And, it’s so simple, that if you can read, you can heal it yourself, with the added benefit of staying true to your Christian faith. After healing my own generational patterns, and doing hundreds of client sessions, I’m sharing one of my favorite tools that you can start using today.
Today we’re going to talk a little bit about the laws that govern all things by talking about generational trauma patterns. We’ll cover what it is, what actually drives our behavior and these patterns, I’ll share a little bit of my own experience of healing, and then I’ve got a simple tool that you can use for less than $20.
What is generational trauma?
How do you know if you have generational trauma patterns in your family? Well, it’s pretty simple. You’ll look at the patterns that you see in your own life and in that of your parents, your grandparents, your cousins, your aunts and uncles. If you have poor relationships, abuse, mental illness, addiction, poverty, money issues, any of these things. And it’s usually more than one thing.
Now, it is possible for someone to be in an otherwise healthy family and experience, say mental illness or addiction, but usually when you have these patterns, there’s someone that got the pattern started, it gets passed down through the generations in your family tree, and then eventually it comes to you.
However, you are the chain breaker because you are the one who’s willing to do the work to acknowledge these traumas to face them and do something to intervene.
We were born into the families that we have with a purpose. So if you have experienced a lot of trauma yourself, or if you’re suffering from the effects of generational trauma patterns, please realize that in God’s plan, there’s a purpose for all of that, all of it.
All of these things can be used for our good and will help us understand the lessons that we’re here to learn. And it will all make sense when we pass through the veil again and return back home.
Where do these generational trauma patterns come from?
But where do these patterns come from? Well, it goes back to the age old nature versus nurture. Whether it’s a traumatic pattern or a healthy pattern, the source is the same.
These patterns can be inherited, passed down in the genes, just like your hair color, your eye color, and even some of your preferences. They can also be learned. You observe the way that your parents treated each other and treated your siblings in your household or whoever raised you, and then you repeat those same patterns because that’s how you think things should be.
Ultimately, though, it is all driven by our programming and that programming, like I said, can be passed down genetically.
There is some research now that shows that grandchildren of individuals who were in the concentration camps have their own memories of actually being in the concentration camps, even though they never had that experience themselves.
I’ve seen this with some of my clients, and even for myself. I’ve had memories of experiences that definitely did not ever have. And the same with my clients, and it’s very possible that these things have just been passed down genetically.
Energy, beliefs, and the formation of patterns
We need to remember that we are beings of energy. Even these solid bodies. Everything is energetic, and energy is meant to move and to flow. And our programming is basically these energy imprints that we have, that we have inherited, that we’ve been given, and that we’ve chosen throughout our lifetime. It’s a combination of our thoughts and our feelings, which gives us our perception of an experience and leads to our beliefs.
Think of a belief as a thought with a strong emotional tie to it.
People often say of a family, these kids were raised in the same household, why are they so different? Because their experience was nothing like each others, even though they’re in the same household. They’re each individual, each sibling has their own packaging that they come with.
You have your own nature of who you are, so you respond differently to the same inputs, the same communications from people than other people do. It’s all different.
Your parents also treat each child differently. They don’t treat you the same. It’s not the same household.
I am the first born. I have one younger brother. My experience in the first year of my life was dramatically different from his because I was the only child for that time. A year and a half later, he came along and he came into a household where there was another sibling, who was a girl. It would’ve been different if he came into a household with another sibling who was a boy.
So all of these things come into play when we talk about our beliefs that are formed and how we experience trauma and respond to it. We all have completely different perceptions. We come to earth with pre-programmed beliefs.
You are a spirit child of heavenly parents. You were formed and created in a certain way to be a specific personality. You have traits that you had eons before, however long it was before you came into this human form that leads you to generate new beliefs throughout your life because you are born into a certain place at a certain time with a certain family.
Because we’re on this big long trajectory, you’re pre-earth life determines what happens and where you end up here currently, and then these experiences continue after you die.
The trauma of birth — a personal story
So we have all of this programming. It is strengthened by our emotional responses to events, which gives us our perception and interpretation. For example, one of the things I found through my energy work is that everyone is challenged by the process of birth, even if you have a smooth, uncomplicated birth process.
The process is inherently traumatic. You are coming from this spirit world where everything is beautiful and light. You don’t really understand what you’ve gotten yourself into to come into this form into a human body, and you’re in this space where you are big and bright, and you are condensed down into this little human form.
And you come from this dark space inside of your mother’s womb, through this birth canal, into a place that is loud and light and has all of these sensations coming in.
My brother and I were both breech, my mom, bless her, and I know that the doctor had to use forceps for my delivery. I’ve done a number of healing sessions around my birth process.
And in this particular session, I had a friend who I was working with who was helping me, and I felt this immense amount of sorrow and I started just crying uncontrollably because the emotional feeling was that I had caused my mother pain. And so there was this strong emotional imprint of remorse for coming into the world and bringing her pain.
If we don’t recognize, heal and clear these things, these emotions stay with us in our body throughout our lifetimes, and they govern how we perceive, how we think about things, the new beliefs that we form. This process is happening all the time.
Sometimes it’s happening consciously, but far more often it’s happening subconsciously below the surface.
You don’t even realize the judgments that you’re forming, and our beliefs are such that we keep reinforcing them unless we choose a different pattern, unless we consciously choose to do something different, to think about things differently, to address these traumatic patterns that we’re seeing in our lives.
We’re simply recreating and reinforcing the same beliefs and the same stories as we try to make sense of our world. It is not necessarily good or bad. You just have to decide if these patterns are working for you or not.
Beliefs live in the body
These beliefs are chemical responses. They are things that happen within our body.
If you’re not quite yet convinced of that, think of something, an experience or a person that makes you really angry or where you have felt a large degree of fear. And it’s usually easier to see this from the negative aspect, because those are the things that give us challenges. Notice what you notice in your body. If you think about these things, you can get your heart rate elevated pretty fast just by thinking about an encounter that made you really mad.
That’s how our emotions work, and that creates and fuels our beliefs. So it’s ultimately through our body, through our emotions that we can go back and change our thoughts. They’re intricately linked with one another.
How to heal generational trauma
How do you actually heal the generational trauma patterns?
Well, the starting point is to notice the recurring patterns in your life that are not working for you.
It might be easier if you’re just starting to notice the patterns that you see in your other family members, because it’s usually easier to see things in others than it is in ourselves. Notice what you’re experiencing repeatedly. Most people have patterns that they notice that are not serving them either with money, around their relationships, or with chronic health challenges.
And as you notice the patterns, just pick one and then notice your thoughts, your words that you speak and your feelings associated with that.
Becoming aware of traumatic patterns
The way this all started for me was when I went away to college. One of the first things I realized in college and after college was I was not having romantic relationships that were working for me, and I started to think, why am I choosing these people? Why am I making these choices? This is not what I want. This is not fulfilling.
Something is not working because these relationships were just painful. They weren’t physically abusive, but they were emotionally abusive. They were not healthy, and I didn’t understand why I was making these choices.
What I started doing was looking at my family patterns and trying to figure out where they came from. And then I started doing my family history work, and that helped me see all of these things. And also by talking with my parents.
My parents did their best to change the patterns that they saw, but it’s not usually something that has changed in one generation. It’s very, very difficult to change anything in one generation. It takes three or four or sometimes more.
I know that following Christ and accepting the gospel is probably one of the best things that you can do to change the patterns that you are experiencing. The more you can strengthen your relationship with your Savior, the more you can follow the commandments, make and keep covenants that will help you dramatically to improve these relationships.
As I started to look at my family relationships and my family patterns. I learned that through both sides of our family tree, we literally had everything. We had abuse, we had alcoholism, we had mental illness, we had poverty. I have an uncle and a great-grandfather who were both murdered. Pretty much everything.
Also, listen to the words that you hear in your family.
I went down and spent Christmas with my parents for many years, and after I got married, my husband and I would go visit. We were at this point where we were both looking at our patterns in our lives and and consciously working to change and make new patterns for ourselves.
We came back one Christmas and I said, "I don’t ever want to hear the phrase, “That’s too expensive” ever again." I realized that in my family, that was a really common phrase, and it’s, I think a very common phrase in many families. But is that serving you? Is that helping you?
I decided that that’s not helping me. I don’t think anything is too expensive. I might not have the finances for it, but that doesn’t mean it’s too expensive. So this was a lack mentality that I was seeing that I don’t want to perpetuate.
When you heal yourself, you heal your family
As you heal your own patterns, you are also healing your family patterns. How do we heal this generational trauma? You heal yourself. When you heal yourself, you heal your family as well.
That happens in part with your family that is living because as you change, literally everything around you changes. Your relationships with your other family members will change just by you changing the way you think, the way you feel, and the words that you speak, everything will change.
The $20 Tool: “Feelings Buried Alive Never Die”
Now, there is a tool that I want to share with you that is fantastic that you can start using on your own and you can start using it today. It is in a book called Feelings Buried Alive, Never Die by Karol K. Truman. This is one of my favorite books for healing. I love it because you can do it for yourself. It’s simple, and she explains it very clearly.
In all of the years that I’ve been a healer, which is my entire adult life, my goal has always been to empower my clients and my patients to have their own tools for healing, because these things are going to be ongoing things in your life. You’re going to need tools to help you get through your life and to create the life that you want for yourself.
One of the things that’s important to remember is that the beliefs that you have are, that are harmful for you. The beliefs that are in your family around whatever your family’s traumatic patterns are, are not truths. They are formed by things that are not true, that are not your highest good, that are not what Christ would tell you is true.
One thing, regardless of what tool you use that can be really helpful, is to take any of your experiences that you are struggling with and go to Christ and ask him to show you and to teach you what the truth is around that experience. Because our interpretation is what causes us the suffering.
My interpretation, if I go back to the story of my birth, my interpretation was that I was hurting my mom and I was this horrible person for causing her this pain during my own birth. Part of the truth is that things are painful in this life. And we all have our own experiences. That experience was mine to have and my mom’s to have, and wherever my dad was within that. We both have our own path and our own things to learn.
Ask Christ to show you the truth of a situation that you’re struggling with.
The premise of the book
The premise of the book is a lot of these things we have talked about and the idea that your emotions need to be expressed, otherwise they don’t die, and they come up in the form of physical ailments in the form of dis-ease.
This is not medical advice. I’m simply sharing my own experience and things that have worked for me and my clients and my patients that I’ve worked with, and I know that this can work for you as well.
When we have a belief, it ultimately expresses itself in our own lives. This is why we have these traumatic generational patterns.
People are abusive and are alcoholics because they have a belief of something that is expressed in that way. People stay in unhealthy relationships because they believe this is what they deserve. Or, this is just how it’s meant to be. Whatever the belief is, it’s our beliefs that are behind these patterns.
And our emotions and our thoughts intermingle and contribute to those beliefs.
In this book, she helps you change your beliefs, change your emotions, and make a choice for yourself for what you want to believe instead.
This is critical because agency is a huge, integral part of our Heavenly Father’s plan, and so you need to choose for yourself what you want to experience instead of what you’re currently experiencing.
The Script for healing trauma patterns
You get the choice. What do you want as your new baseline? In this book, she has something that is called The Script, and The Script helps you invite Jesus to work with you to identify the feeling or thought or belief, or all three, that are causing the problem that you’re having.
You go back to the origin, wherever that thing started, you come forth throughout all generations of time and eternity to where you are.
And you ask that God’s light and love and truth change that pattern throughout all of these iterations, throughout all of these generations, while you forgive yourself and others and have compassion on others.
The last part of it is what you choose to replace it with. For example, if you have identified a feeling of anger, then you would say, I choose being peaceful. I feel peaceful. And I am peaceful.
The last part of the script is the choice for what you want to choose being, what you want to feel, and what you want your “I am,” your identity statement to be. This is what gets re-put in your nervous system over this false thought pattern that you have created.
She gives you a whole list, a whole chapter of feelings that you can identify and possible feelings for the solution in case you’re not sure what to replace it with.
Personally, I basically use peace or happiness or joy for anything that I clear. These are the driving feelings that I want to experience. I want to be at peace regardless of what’s happening around me. I want be control in control of my thoughts, of my happiness, of my feelings, and not be disturbed by what other people are choosing to do. So you replace it with whatever you want.
She also gives you an entire list of beliefs that she has seen in her clients over the years, of specific beliefs to go through and change. The one of the beliefs to start with is loving and accepting yourself, because most of us in our core start with a lack of love and a lack of acceptance for ourselves. We need to love and accept ourselves first, and then we can project that onto everyone we see.
Listen to your body to process trauma
She also has an entire chapter on probable feelings causing illnesses. I love this. Each of our physical experiences is an expression of the thoughts and the emotions that are behind them that are creating them. So when you practice this, tune into your body, see what your body is actually telling you, notice what you feel there.
Notice what thoughts you have associated with something.
If you have low back pain, sit with that low back pain. Put your attention into there and notice what thoughts come up around that. Notice what feelings come up around that. Notice what story you want to say around that.
You can start using this today. You need to buy the book, it’s copyright. So I can’t just share the word for word script with you on here. That’s why I’m not sharing it because it’s copyrighted and I don’t have the permission to do that, but go by the book. It’s less than $20. It will be extremely helpful for you.
You can go through and identify your physical aches and pains, identify the emotions, and use the script.
The easiest way to do it that I have found is when you’re lying in bed at night, if you’re able to get in bed and not fall asleep immediately, find something from your day that has been very disturbing for you or that you’ve had a really difficult time with emotionally, and just use it right then at the end of the day and clear that emotion.
She tells the story in here of a man who experienced anger all of the time, and he didn’t really understand why, and every night he simply scripted for anger, and within a couple months he noticed that the pattern dissipated and he wasn’t experiencing the anger anymore.
So you heal your family’s generational patterns by healing yourself and changing the patterns yourself. And as you use the script in this book, it specifically goes back through those generations of time and through your other family members and gives them the opportunity to heal it as well.
Get healing for the generational trauma patterns
Now, if you enjoyed this, if you want help with this kind of thing, join my community. We are doing this type of healing work twice a month in a group setting. It will help clear out the energies that have created these patterns and help you form new patterns that are going to help you create the life that you want.
