Transcriber: Heba M Reviewer: Hani Eldalees
The musician Joni Mitchell wrote.
We are stardust billion year old carbon,
we are golden caught in the devil's bargain.
I see patterns that repeat, connect and often entangle us with our families,
organizations and cultures across distance and throughout time,
we have inherited a lot from those who came before us.
We're not born a blank canvas.
Scientists at Emory University conducted an experiment they gave male mice
a mild electric shock coordinated with the scent of cherry blossom.
They bred those mice, and even after two generations,
the descendants reacted as if they had been shocked when they smelt
the same cherry blossom scent.
And inherited survival mechanism triggered by potential danger,
initiating the state of fight, flight or freeze,
this largely unrecognized condition steers humanity.
At a recent workshop, a lady called Jill shared her life of incompletions,
she never saw anything through relationships, jobs, university.
She couldn't see the point,
but we learned that her grandmother's first child became sick despite efforts
to save the child. The child died, what was the point?
This traumatic event was kept secret from Jill's mother,
who was the next child later manifesting in Jill as a sense of powerlessness
and helplessness
by identifying the source of Jill's issue,
we could create clarity and focus on new perspectives.
Mark Cuillin, a leader in the field of inherited family trauma,
says remaining silent about family pain is rarely an effective strategy
for healing it. The suffering will express in the fears and symptoms of
a later generation because inherited experiences connect us to our systems
long before we are born, and long after we die.
I was driving through my local town of Bovver at its heart,
its struggles socially. It has been on the front line for over two millennia.
And as England is a country built on conquest over seen invasions from
the Romans, the Jutes, the Saxons, the angles, the Normans, the French,
the Germans, the traumas of conflict are left with the survivors
and their descendants for generations and often repeated.
And on this day, it was Brexit battleground as
a line of riot police facing a thousand anti-immigration protesters as
yet another scene in those history. Let's dive into this as a systemic practitioner.
Visualize, if you will, the anti-immigration protesters.
See one of the men.
Observe his emotion.
Picture his face and hear the sound of his voice.
Now, you weren't there, but you've just created what you think he was like,
our minds access memory, imagination and inherited experience
to prejudge and prepare us for the unknown.
But with this resource, it's often difficult to remain on neutral ground.
Now, let's imagine something that wasn't in our picture,
the protester with his parents standing behind him.
His father, the son of a soldier killed in Dunkirk whose body was brought to
the shores of Dover. At times, this man belongs to the system of protesters,
but at other times he belongs to the group of grieving war survivors.
Like myself. By adopting a systemic lens gives opportunity to see people
and not just the groups into which we place them,
it can break the cycle of perpetuating conflict,
revealing avenues where once there were none.
This is how I choose to see people, my compassion grows.
I remain open to connection, and that's where healing begins.
And it reminds me when I'm at my most vulnerable,
how my own prejudgement prejudice is fed by my fears.
I recently worked with a lady called Sonya,
whose ancestors were thrown off a ship still in chains.
The few that reach land began the population of the island.
Now, Sonia was a descendant of a cold blooded act, and she, among others,
understandably inherited the trauma in the form of rage against a vicious past.
With this insight. Time and a little care,
we were able to free Sonia in the present.
Shifts in perspective create the potential for change.
My grandfather, Benjamin. He was drafted in World War Two from
the then British colony of Guyana, where I was born.
His grandparents were witness to slavery as children.
Benjamin married his sweetheart Rosalind, and together they had four children,
one of whom my mother journey to England to become a nurse in the NHS,
shifts in perspective create potential for change.
What do you remember of Benjamin? He was a father.
A romantic soldier, a British citizen.
In contrast, these two people also had four children,
one of whom remain in Canada. One was lost in World War One on Vermes Ridge.
Another was a pianist who squandered his money in Paris on wine, women and song.
What a disgrace. The family hid that secret for years.
And then Walter, who's a captain and became an accountant.
And perhaps these two people also had four children, one of whom Ive married Walter
Walter and Ive lived in Hampstead in London,
Ive owned a clothes shop on Regent Street, they have two sons. One became a doctor.
My father.
My path wasn’t the medical profession, my passion was music,
and could it be that over 20 years
on the road I’ve identified with this excluded great uncle musician in Paris?
It's quite possible and perhaps his creative expression continues in me.
Because by ignoring, hiding,
suppressing issues in systems almost guarantees that they will be expressed
in some form. By someone at a later time or later generation.
Do you remember Jill's grandmother and the trauma of losing
the child kept secret? What’s the point? manifesting generations later
as a sense of powerlessness and helplessness.
By observing the origin of Jill’s issue enabled Jill to give birth to new
motivation. And Sonia, whose ancestors were thrown off a ship still in chains,
swam and reached the island.
Sonia is now no longer the descendant of victims, but incredible survivors.
These gentle shifts in perspective can unchain us from the past.
And the people of the town on the front line,
long after the guns have fallen silent,
some of those descendants
of the survivors are still fighting that battle.
And the anti-immigration protester, his parents standing with him,
now his grandfather in clear view.
In the system of men and women, we are fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons,
daughters, the descendents of the fallen. And a little hope was born, perhaps.
This is how I choose to see people.
My compassion grows, I remain open to connection,
that's where the healing begins,
because inherited traumas teach us that there are no winners, we simply survive.
But unlike mice, we can thrive.
We can wake up and smell the cherry blossom simply as cherry blossom.
So we are stardust billion year old carbon.
We are golden caught in the devil's bargain.
With a little attention, we can read the patterns that steer our systems.
Regain the courage to free ourselves from the cycles of the past,
determined who we become and consciously shape our destiny.