My maternal grandfather was a police officer and he shot and permanently injured a black man in the Chicago riots. Shortly after he was murdered by The Black Panthers while on duty coming back from escorting a class of disabled children on a field trip. My mom was only 4 years old when her father was run off the road on his motorcycle and hung in a tree. My family never recovered. My mother’s brothers later died of addiction related complications while still in the prime of their lives. 

I don’t think what my grandfather did was right. He made a wrong decision to shoot a man for stealing and harming property. He was a young police officer and he had been raised in an area where the Klu Klux Klan still had a strong presence. His own grandmother was a full blooded Native American and his grandfather was an Iroquois chief who had seen his people and culture destroyed. He made the wrong choice in that moment and his lineage is still suffering as a result. 

It may seem that crimes against humanity and injustices go unpunished at times and as a Systems Therapist i have seen the very real consequences that get passed down generationally. Trauma gets passed down in both the victim and the perpetrators lineages until justice can prevail. The bible says God will “visit (avenge) the iniquity (sin and guilt) of the fathers on the children, and upon the third and fourth generations of those who hate.” Deu 5:9. When a family has benefited at the expense of another group of people such as in slavery very often the children and grandchildren identify unconsciously with the victims of the abuse or exploitation and may struggle with issues such as suicidality, bulimia or other self abusive addictions. Until the trauma in the lineage is seen and addressed they may not be free from such affliction. Often the family needs to do something physical to honor and make repairs such as contributing to a cause on the behalf of the victims. 

Personally, I grew up in the south In a small town next to a plantation house that had been passed down to a slave and had turned into a drug dealership that still had pig roasts and gospel on sunday morning complete with fighting dogs and fighting chickens. As a child I was once chased by some of the fighting dogs and came within an inch of my life. Our house wasn’t in the ghetto which was a few miles away on the other side of Matthews but it was something like a mini ghetto where I grew up. My parents paid $75 a month for the house I grew up in and my dad did landscaping work as needed for the owners to keep the price low. 

There was a little black boy who lived next door who was my primary playmate for years. During my first few years of elementary school my best friend was a black girl until third grade when she told me matter of factly we couldn’t be friends anymore because white people and black people don’t like each other. Up until that point I had never thought much of our differences. What she said was shocking and made me sad and I began to notice the social segregation in which we lived. I felt the wounds of slavery, injustice and discrimination deep within my soul and silently vowed to do all i could to liberate humanity from slavery and injustice. I actually thought I must be a reincarnated black woman like Harriet Tubman when I was a child!

I noticed in middle school that the black kids were treated poorly by the white kids with privilege which really upset me. Not being in the in crowd I was treated poorly by both whites and blacks. In fact I was afraid to walk down the hallway between classes because nearly every day I was sexually assaulted by young black men in my school who would constantly grab my booty among other things. Once I was even physically assaulted by a black girl for no known reason. She came up behind me and hit me over the head with a large book as hard as she could and nearly knocked me out. For some reason I don’t ever remember going to the school authorities about the abuse. I just accepted it as part of middle school I guess. The verbal abuse and teasing was even worse from the white kids. The abuse was just passed along to whomever was vulnerable and I was different. 

My family wasn’t from the south and i had curly hair and people both black and white would always ask me what nationality i was? I would answer “Im American just like you”. The fact that I was different and they couldn’t place me made them uncomfortable. It was worse for my sister. I looked Irish with pale skin and auburn hair which gave me some privilege but she looked Italian like my father and both blacks and whites thought she was milato. She was abused endlessly by both white and black kids and as her older sister I constantly had to defend her. Middle school was hell. My life did get a bit better in high school when suddenly all the things that made me different and weird suddenly made me cool and one of the cool kids. 

After college I moved out to the west coast and was able to escape the southern social segregation and hostility for a while. Moving back to the south it feels heavy with history, sometimes even like being in a war zone. Is the civil war over one might ask? There were young men in my high school I went to with civil war flags on their trucks who would tell you it is not. I even worked at a country club as a teenager downstairs in the casual dining area with all the black workers and servers and there were still paintings on the walls of slaves made out to be caricatures serving white people. I was horrified and wanted to scream, is anybody else seeing what i’m seeing here? WTF? I hope to God they have since had the good sense to paint over those walls or maybe have turned it into a museum to show how unenlightened and barbaric people used to be. 

The sad truth is that progress in the realm of “gender”, “race,” sexual orientation, social hierarchy and wealth stratification changes all too slowly even if it may change dramatically at a legislative level. This is because as humans we are programmed at a deep non verbal level, the level of the body and the unconscious, and because traumas and beliefs are passed down genetically through lineages. Traumas will continue to repeat until what underlies them is seen and an authentic soul movement is made in a new direction. 

The point is, at this time on the planet we have the tools to resolve personal and collective traumas. This is the work I do personally and as a clinical therapist (MFT) clearing ancestral and even past life wounds. We no longer need to pass these traumas to our children and grandchildren when we can do our own work to clear them for ourselves, our lineages and the collective. Now is the time to say this stops here with me and goes no further. The work you do on yourself can heal your lineage in both directions and your family system. Systemic work is more powerful than personal therapy. I’ve seen that there is a limit to what you can work on personally. If you’ve done personal growth work and still feel stuck you may need to work from a systemic and ancestral perspective. Even one session working this way can be the equivalent of years of therapy. I know because I’ve done both and I think therapy is valuable for the incremental changes but sometimes you need the bigger soul movement to get traction to get where you want to go. You need to work at a deeper level. At the level of the body and the unconscious. At the level of ancestry and soul. Blessed Be Dear Ones.