Humanity is ‘walking backwards through the Fall’
Photo by redcharlie on Unsplash
The past does not stay in the past. It courses through us, mostly bubbling like an underground stream, occasionally breaking the surface. For some of us—like me—the stream becomes a torrent and floods into our lives. It’s often only then that we begin to listen to the water’s voice. And that voice is ancient.
As someone with the gift of pattern recognition, when I listen to that voice, I’m looking for patterns—which I translate into principles and processes: chaos into order. Over many years of trauma recovery, three principles have become quite clear:
- We must return to the inception point of a trauma
- The inception point of humanity’s trauma was the Biblical ‘Fall’
- What happens to the individual (micro) happens to society (macro)
When we triage these principles, it becomes clear that humanity as a whole is literally ‘walking backwards through the Fall.’
Let’s look at each one in a little more detail.
Return to the inception point
In her family memoir The Architect of Desire, Suzannah Lessard writes that there was “something about our family that we needed to know.” We must find out what—this is the task. The only way out of a trauma is by going back to its inception point, the point the rupture occurred, and reparenting it.
To do that, we need context. We must understand the physical and emotional circumstances that caused the original trauma with enough clarity to be able to reconnect with its unprocessed psychic content.
Often these traumas stem from family members in recent generations—known events that happened to known ancestors at known times. Yet we also carry much deeper echoes of trauma—unknown events that happened to unknown ancestors at unknown times. These ancestral traumas we must also revisit.
In Inside Degrees, Elias Lonsdale writes: “The past, what was suffered and lost, is what speaks inside… You are going to need to return to the past places and see them again. Otherwise, nothing goes right. Sometimes you have to go way back to get on with anything.”
Way back—to the so-called Fall of Man.
MORE > The only exit from the past is by going back through it
The Fall
Whatever we may think of the Old Testament, it’s an extraordinary snapshot of human emotional history during the emergence of patriarchy. Its authors knew something catastrophic had happened to them—yet they lacked the language of trauma.
To convey our collective traumatisation, the Bible’s authors invented the idea of ‘original sin’—a doctrine I was deeply opposed to when I was younger.
What they wanted to convey was not a moral problem, but a genetic one: the Neolithic decline—the event that preceded and gave rise to patriarchy—corrupted humanity’s original psychological database, which was then passed down through epigenetic inheritance and spread around the globe in waves of conquest and colonisation.
The story of the Fall, Chapters 2 and 3 of the Book of Genesis, are an attempt to communicate that drought, desertification, and famines spanning several thousand years—from around 4000 BC into early historical times—broke the human psyche.
When I created this site, I was adamant I would only report on emotional mechanics I’d stress-tested to my own satisfaction. That original sin was the ancients’ way of trying to explain generational trauma—what the church calls ‘generational curses’—is now, for me, in that category of rock-solid truth.
MORE > Christianity’s ‘original sin’ is generational trauma
Micro/macro
We still carry that broken model within us, within each of our family systems. That is ultimately the “something about our family that we needed to know” that Suzannah Lessard refers to.
While each of our families carries unique instances of wounds, the underlying sources of wounding are common to all of us—and all date back to the Fall and the shift into the patriarchal era. Early psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich writes:
“The character structure of modern man, who reproduces a six-thousand-year-old patriarchal authoritarian culture, is typified by… armouring against his inner nature and against the social misery which surrounds him. This… armouring is the basis of isolation… fear of responsibility, mystic longing, sexual misery, and neurotically impotent rebelliousness… It is not found in the stages of human history prior to the development of patriarchy.”
This is how I work with my clients: recognising the universal principles behind their unique experiences. What happens at the micro level of the individual rolls up to the macro levels of family, community, and—ultimately—the species.
The people working on trauma may seem like a minority. They tend to be the most sensitive members of their respective families. Yet each generation is more sensitive than its predecessor. This can only mean the numbers will grow exponentially.
I now see that they are the vanguard of a species slowly funnelling into and through trauma resolution, by the only avenue possible—back through the past. By walking backwards through the trauma of the Fall and reversing it.
We are truly living in Biblical times.