Trauma Fluency + Forgiveness: Ancestral healing
Grief, Rage, Compassion, Confusion & The Path to Ancestral Healing
I watched a beautiful YouTube short yesterday - for ease, the transcription is below.
Every word is true. And yet, as one would expect from a 60 second short - it paints an incomplete picture, one that can leave us confused. Stay a few mins for my musings and reflections below and let me chat a little about what, based on 20 years of watching people heal, it takes to find a peace that's rooted and real.
"We are living in a time where it has become fashionable to blame our parents, to dissect them, to diagnose them, to explain ourselves through their failures.
But here's the dilemma: we have learned how to critique our elders without learning how to honor them. We speak fluently about trauma, but rarely about sacrifice. We analyze their emotional limitations from the comfort of vocabulary they never had access to.
Many of our fathers were not taught to feel. They were taught to endure. Many of our mothers were not taught to process. They were taught to survive. And survival built the ground we stand on. Reverence does not mean blindness. It does not excuse harm. It means remembering context. It means acknowledging that progress without gratitude becomes arrogance.
You are not self-made. You are inherited. Inherited resilience. Inherited endurance. Inherited imperfect love.
And one day, you will be the imperfect elder. And the next generation will see your blind spots clearly. The question is: will they also remember what you built?
Because a culture that forgets its ancestors does not become enlightened.
It becomes unanchored."
As I was watching this, it occurred to me that perhaps throughout the duration of this training—or even toward the end—I hadn't offered the equalising voice that brings us back full circle to a place of compassion – to the place where we extend our caregivers the same compassion we have hopefully begun to learn to extend ourselves
But then I stopped and considered this more carefully, and realised that my decision not to do so explicitly had conscious at the time of formatting its curriculum.
Buddhism talks about wisdom and compassion needing to be held in equal measure; one without the other becomes problematic. Many of us have emerged from ancestral and inherited trauma that has conditioned us into what Buddhism sometimes refers to as “fool’s compassion,” and what in Western psychological language we might understand as codependency: an orientation in which we have learned to extend so much “compassion” or understanding toward the other that we are unable to extend the same compassion toward ourselves.
The empathy for their experience is a function of denial – a necessary adaption that has allowed us to tolerate the intolerable and explain away the pain people who were supposed to love us caused, and never took accountability for (let alone mended with any meaning).
As such I was aware when creating this training, that many of us—perhaps even the majority of us – whilst journeying it, might be find ourselves beginning to wake to how much we really suffered, how much we may still be suffering, and what some of the roots of that suffering actually were. And that that would be vital. Painful, but vital. That’s the funny thing about truth – the facts are always friendly.
Even when the truth hurts, it is also always relieving - because slowly all the puzzle pieces fall in to place - we make sense to ourselves. We begin to see that we aren’t an isolated issue, the anomalous one who has something “wrong with them”. Trading the pain of suppression and confusion for the sharp and crystallizing pain of truth is much like pulling a thorn from your foot – one that you hadn’t realized was there, even though somehow every step of our life was painful in a quiet way you had learnt to tolerate because you didn’t know any different - not pleasant in the moment of extraction – but after – you feel better.
And the rage and grief that can awaken in us as we do this is not pathological. It can be (and often is) an entirely healthy and necessary force. Anger, fight, flight and disgust exist within sentient creatures for a reason: they help us move away from, reject or defend ourselves against that which causes us harm.
My experience, having watched hundreds of people move through therapeutic process and healing over nearly two decades, is that there is often a need to pendulate away from an unhealthy, imbalanced compassion—the kind of compassion that leaves us unable to hold our parents accountable, that encourages us to continually explain away dysfunction, and that ultimately allows us to remain in relationships or patterns that wound us, make us sick and leave us confused.
Anger is the movement toward holding others accountable. It is also the heat that begins to melt the ice of the necessarily armoured heart, and bring forth the grief that has been frozen in time, awakening a gentler aspect of our inner reality we had had to lose contact with.
What I have born witness to over and over again is that when people have never been permitted to deeply live and feel this phase of their healing, something can remain unfinished. It is almost as though an essential developmental process has been missed.
Human beings naturally move through developmental phases in which autonomy is established. Perhaps the most obvious is the so-called “terrible twos,” when we have tantrums, stomp our feet, discover boundaries and learn the extraordinary power of the word NO. Later, as teenagers, we rebel. Again, beneath much of that potent rebellion is the developmental movement toward autonomy—the emergence of the sovereign self. The sacred experience of discovering: I am a me I am separate from you. I have my own boundaries, needs, desires, values and truth.
Yet these are precisely the developmental movements that many of us were required to suppress – because emotionally immature and internally unstable caregivers couldn’t handle the ways in which it triggered them.
And so, in order to develop a healthy adult ego—one capable of moving through the world and contributing to a world that is itself healthier, that is quite literally more healed—those developmental processes may need space to emerge later in life, in ways they were never permitted to emerge earlier.
If we don't live them, if we don't allow space for them, something within us can remain developmentally arrested.
We have to return to meet the fears that a young child or adolescent naturally encounter:
What happens if I'm cross with Mummy?
What happens if I disagree with Daddy's rules?
What happens if I say no?
What happens if I become fully myself?
And underneath these questions there is often a much more fundamental one:
Will you still love me? Will you stay?
What so often prevents people from entering fully into grief, rage and holding others unquestionably accountable, is the fear of losing the love that, whether it was explicitly stated or never spoken at all, was understood to be conditional.
And at some point in healing we may have to arrive at a place where, in order to save ourselves, we become prepared to lose that love. This, too, is an act of compassion. It is compassion toward self.
This is not about perpetuating the trauma arc, or creating another round in the ping-pong of harm. It is not about coming at our parents with violence. I have always said that this work is not about demonising our parents or constructing a narrative that hunts down the “bad guys.” But, it is about becoming willing to encounter the truth of how things actually were—and then allowing enough space for the feelings that exist in response to that truth to arise.
Knowing why somebody is the way they are does not mean excusing what they did.
We may understand that our parents emerged from their own paradigm: an environment in which they too were not nurtured, in which they too were repressed, in which they too were harmed or abused, in which they too were not sufficiently nourished and therefore could not fully flourish.
That understanding matters.
But when understanding becomes the reason we cannot hold somebody accountable, it ceases to be compassion and begins to become collusion.
We collude with the dysfunction. We enable it. We normalise it—not only for ourselves, but for the other.
And this is not love. This is not healing.
Coming to terms with the truth may sometimes require difficult conversations. It may involve very raw human emotion that isn't always neatly packaged and edited. Because the constant need to package and edit ourselves is simply another attempt to retain control—another way of hiding from the terrifying question:
What would happen if I were to just let it all rip?
Our parents, in theory, are supposed to be the ground. They represent the archetypal ground in which we first discover safety. And if we weren't—or still aren't—safe enough with them to let it all rip, to let it all show, to let it all hang out, then somewhere inside us the question remains: where in this world am I safe?
Whether we can ultimately find that safety with them, whether they are capable of providing it now, is beside the point.
The deeper work is that we begin to find enough safety within ourselves, within some deeper experience of life, or perhaps with another, that the truth can finally be named so that what has never been voiced can find voice. We can call our caregivers to the table to talk knowing that if they do not respond as we may need, hope or deserve them to – we can return to understanding and empathy elsewhere.
As Levine says, “trauma is what happens in the absence of an empathetic witness”.
To be the child of a familial lineage who is willing to speak the unspoken; who is willing to bring the skeletons out of the closet and into the light – is a brave and sacred act.
Because, this is not just about personal healing or arrogantly flaunting our “trauma fluency”. It isn't about apportioning blame or pointing a finger. It is about giving an entire lineage an opportunity to wake up, to take accountability, and to heal. This is courageous work.
And perhaps this is why teachings like the one contained in this beautiful short can sometimes become confusing – because a 60-second poetic reflection can evoke enormous confusion within someone who is still moving through these layers of their healing.
It can evoke doubt.
Should I hold them accountable, or should I forgive them?
But this is a false choice.
Trauma fluency and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Accountability and forgiveness are not mutually exclusive. Understanding what happened to our parents and acknowledging what they did to us are not mutually exclusive.
In fact, one may need to arise from the other over time.
For all of us, myself included, the work is to slowly cultivate the kind of balance that he is pointing towards: to develop a healthier compassion that neither negates what was done to us nor negates what was done to them. Wisdom and compassion. One is good – both are better.
But forgiveness cannot be demanded.
A forgiveness that is rushed toward, that is imposed by others or on to self, that is not given the time to sprout organically, will often continue to do harm to both parties – because it keeps us all bound in the loop – the cycle of suffering.
Healing takes time.
Healing generations of trauma, takes even more.
It is not your responsibility to be the one who consciously and directly bears the accumulated pain of a long lineage—to finally feel everything that generations before you could not feel—and then somehow also be the one who immediately “gets over it” and arrives at forgiveness.
That is too much weight for any single human being to bear no?
We are participating in a process of healing within that lineage. We are doing the best that we can in any given moment. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of inherited trauma are not healed in one generation. They are not healed overnight.
And yet I do believe we need to remain open to the wider view: that we are all intimately interlinked; that hurt people hurt people; and that our family lines emerge from hundreds and thousands of years of suffering, survival, war, fragmentation, industrialisation and patriarchal suppression (within which all peoples suffer)
We can trace these wounds back and back and back, all the way to the beginning of beginningless time—to the original trauma of separation from Source. In that separation, confusion arose, and that confusion has continued to spiral endlessly out - until we found ourselves here.
This is what Jesus was pointing toward when he said, “Forgive them, they know not what they do.”
It is what Buddhist teachings point toward when they ask us to understand that every living being has, at some point, been our mother. Or, if we were to express this through a more Feminine lens rather than patriarchal one rooted in men led traditions and teachings, perhaps we might say: to understand that every living being has, at some point, been our child.
Not simply as a poetic idea, but as something we might come to directly understand.
If we could truly experience the degree to which we are interconnected—intertwined and entangled in ways that our limited perception and confusion prevent us from seeing—then perhaps we would not hold one another - including ourselves - to such impossible standards.
And yet—and this is the seeming paradox—it remains an act of love to hold one another accountable. We hold one another accountable precisely because we are interconnected. Because we can raise one another up. Because through accountability we offer each other the possibility of emerging from confusion and returning to a place where we can meet one another with greater sanity, respect and care.
To hold a parent accountable, to actually let them see our raw pain and rage then - can actually be one of the most compassionate and loving things we can do—not only for ourselves, but for them—whether or not they are willing, ready or able to receive the reflection that we are in this lifetime.
More so, it is vital to understand that sometimes the most loving, compassionate and wise action is not to have someone in your life, whether or not they understand why. To not permit someone to cause you further harm literally denies them the ability to continue to create more negative karma for themselves. Forgiveness does not automatically make relationship sustainable. Compassion does not require proximity. Understanding the circumstances that shaped our parents or caregivers does not mean that healthy relationship with them is necessarily possible.
One of my first teachers used to say that “what is right for you—what is truly good for you—is always ultimately good for the other person too, without exception, whether or not they know it yet.” This is a complex teaching that has taken me years to understand deeply, but one that has proved itself to me time and again.
And yes, one day we will be the elders with the blind spots. Hopefully the generation that follows us and our own children—will be more conscious than we were. Because that is the trajectory of healing. That is always the hope for humanity.
But - my hope is that the vital that demonstrates that steady inter-generational progression, will be that when our children come to hold us accountable and to discuss where we tripped, flailed, or failed, we will be able to receive what they bring.
Perhaps we will be able to listen, to learn, and to meet their experience with love, humility and accountability—something that very few of us ever experienced from our own parents.
Because it is through that relational collaboration that a lineage heals – not by the adult child continuing to be the parent for the parent who never grew up.
And so the relationship between trauma fluency and compassion is incredibly complex. One does not negate the other. As they begin to alchemise together, they will create different outcomes for different people.
And this is why I didnt move more deeply toward explicit didactic teachings around forgiveness in the training - because when it is brought too early, I have seen it has the strong tendency to send people flying backwards - to regress to the seemingly safer and more familiar place of understanding, than to stay with the complex emotions that arise in the face of truth. And because, I have learn to trust that when a forgiveness that is rich and real is ready to emerge, it simply does. This can take years, sometimes decades, and often comes and goes and grows over time. No direction, ideals or moral principles need be imposed.
What is required of us is a level of psychological maturity that moves beyond binary thinking: beyond the idea that either our parents harmed us or they were harmed themselves; that either we hold them accountable or we forgive them; that either we honour our rage or we find compassion.
The deeper work asks us to become capable of holding two seemingly dissonant truths at the same time.
Because it is so often within seeming paradox that truth is to be found.
And this is why I think it is important to understand the beautiful sentiment contained in this short with far more nuance than a 60-second reflection could possibly convey.
Without that nuance, something intended to open the heart can inadvertently send us catapulting back into fool’s compassion: back into a false humility that asks us to abandon ourselves in order to understand another.
And to me, that would be a crying shame.
So - stay with the rage and the grief when it surfaces, let compassion rise and fall, let confusion lead the way, and over time, you´ll find a place of peace that is real and rooted. And hopefully, whether in this life or those to come, so will they.
PERSONAL HEALING AND PROFESSIONAL TRAINING WITH AIMEE
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