INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION
When a person comes into my practice with a request for help, he or she brings at least his or her parents and grandparents. If a couple comes to me, the two partners bring twelve more people with them.
What do I mean by saying this?
What I mean is that the person or the couple are carriers of the legacy of their ancestors. The chance is also high that they will pass this legacy to their children. If the legacy is a negative one, it is advisable to transform it.
This is why I always ask the people coming to me about the background of previous generations.
Two questions arise: what is transmitted, and how is it transmitted?
What is transmitted? Values. Like solidarity, equality, justice. Like beliefs in own superiority and other people’s inferiority. Like entitlement for revenge. Like a license for violence. These values and beliefs flow from one generation into the next and the next and the next. Humanistic values like solidarity, equality, justice counteract iniquity, exploitation, intolerance, brutality. In other words: counteract different forms of violence. Violence means: victims and perpetrators, means trauma. Think of the collective trauma of marginalised discriminated minorities all over the world. The phenomenon is not reduced only to them, it can be on national scale. Think of the genocides in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia. Violence begets violence in endless cycles.
It seems to me that the cycle of victim and perpetrator is the main dynamic of existence on this planet.
The consequences of violence, discrimination, poverty, war express themselves through communities, through the families who form the communities, and through the individuals who are members of the families. Thus individuals and families are the repositories of the legacies of trauma and entitlement. They manifest in families in toxicity and dysfunction. They manifest in individuals as rage, grief, anxiety, entitlement to take revenge, hatred, guilt, shame, addiction.
As depression, suicide, crimes, divorces, incest, rape. They affect not only the individuals and families who suffer, but in various forms society as a whole. Ultimately, through long chains of interconnectedness, they affect the whole planet.
How are entitlement and victimhood transmitted from one generation to the next?
The mechanisms are complex, I’ll only name them: Biologically – this is the subject of epigenetics; through transmission of psychopathology from parents to children; through collective societal cultural values imprints.
Mental institutions are merely populated by women, and prisons merely by men. Women inherit mainly the legacy of grief and fear, men inherit mainly the legacy of rage, hatred and entitlement.
In the 20th century alone there were world wars, many local wars, revolutions, and genocides. War is a blueprint for collective history which sweeps in its wake individual destinies.
Impersonal unpredictable forces hold sway.
At the core of it all, besides avariciousness, is, according to me, identity.
Why IDENTITY?
Identity is not a monolith, it is a complex composite. Everything we call “I, me, myself, mine” and “we, ourselves, us, ours” are aspects of the composite. Lets say that all elements of the composite form a one-pole tepee under which we take shelter. Our identity is the pole which keeps the tepee together. If someone slings mud or throws a rock at the tepee, the pole and thus the tepee are in danger.
The biggest threat we can experience is a threat to our identity, and we defend it tooth and nail. If we see a way to strengthen the pole, to strengthen our identity, we do it, whatever the costs.
This is the power of IDENTITY.
Collective identity is handed down from and enacted by one generation to the next generation. If Identity defines us, Avariciousness is our nemesis.
Related to identity, the lesson of history is according to me, this: Without being part of a collective identity, we are lost. Being part of a collective identity, we are imprisoned.
If we want not to get lost, if we want freedom instead of incarceration, we have to expand our collective consciousness beyond our narrow national, ethnic, religious identity; we have to clear social structures of the victim-perpetrator dynamic, which for centuries dominates trans-generationally the transmission of trauma and poverty.
Published end of 2020 on my YouTube channel
