ancestraltrauma

The climate change that happened from around 4000 BC—documented in the Bible as The Fall—shattered Neolithic human physiology. It created homo patriarchus, patriarchal man, hell-bent on conquest and the stockpiling of surplus to offset the extreme feelings of shortage stemming from centuries of drought, desertification, and famine. Among the traumas homo patriarchus incurred in this […]

As soon as the Toyota Landcruiser’s heavy tyres crunched onto the gravel road, I felt it in the pit of my stomach. Fear. It was only a few miles off-road to the Wadi al Muaydin in Oman—gravel, not even proper desert. Yet it was there. An unmistakeable fear of the desert, despite never having spent […]

I have written extensively about ancestral trauma—the deep-seated, many-generations old traumas that we all carry a distant memory of from the dawn of patriarchy. I’ve also written about the inevitable consequences of clearing trauma—experiencing rage at having had to endure that traumatic experience. This week I encountered the nexus of the two: the rage that […]

One of the characteristics of trauma that may seem confusing from the outside looking in, is that the more traumatised we are, the more we defend trauma. However, when we understand how trauma works, this seemingly paradoxical stance reveals itself to be entirely congruent with the emotional mechanics of trauma. The more traumatised we are, […]

In Trauma exists as a series of ripples, I describe the multiple, interconnected sources of trauma that may exist in our lives. This trauma is inside our minds, our psyche, our physical cells—our DNA. Yet even this doesn’t help us comprehend the full extent and impact of human trauma. Once we raise our children in […]

In What is ancestral trauma? I describe the key psychological wounds that humanity suffered as a result of the drought, desertification and famine that gave rise to patriarchy. Here I want to focus on the second of these wounds: zero emotional and sexual growth. Patriarchal societies are implicitly zero emotional and sexual growth societies because that […]

In mid-2018 I wrote a blog titled The 3 layers of trauma – ancestral, generational, current-life, in which I ascribed all trauma to one of these categories. Fast forward 18 months and the 2021 Intergenerational Trauma Conference (ITC). I’m now seeing trauma in a much more nuanced way. There are key layers—5 of them—but it’s […]

I have long wondered why some people talk about their issues while others don’t. I’ve often mistaken ‘can’t talk’ for ‘don’t want to talk’. More recently I’ve started to explore the realm of pre-verbal trauma. The fog is lifting. Pre-verbal trauma is trauma that occurred before we developed the capacity for language. The talking cure Before […]

Bringing the unconscious to light is never a random process. Inflexible processes rule our journey. We only identify these processes as we repeatedly experience them. One of the rules is that we uncover issues in sequence from the least to the most buried. This accords with the homeopathic principle known as Hering’s law of cure, […]

In the personal healing world, we talk about the ‘healing journey’. What does that mean? We’re on a journey to healing. Yes, obviously—but where’s it taking us? What’s the destination? At this point, words like ‘wholeness’ and ‘wellbeing’ often emerge. These are concepts, not destinations. A destination is a place on a map you can […]