Something that continues to be true about the work that I do is that piecing together the forgotten or lost history within our families is a powerful aspect of healing our wounds. We carry a lot of weight on our shoulders in this life. We feel responsible for things that do not belong to us, we see ourselves as the cause for things that we didn’t start, and we wonder that if we were different than we were, would we struggle so much?

These very questions are at the heart of the wounds we have experienced in our lives, triggered in the present by reminders that lead us to feel like we may not belong in this world. We seek a sense of belonging, community, and togetherness, but we often feel like we are on our own island as the only person who feels the way we do. What we often don’t realize is that this feeling lives deep within us not because of anything we caused, but because it has been buried for generations in our family history only to be unearthed by those of us who are all too curious to understand what is going on internally.

However, curiosity can cause a problem. “Why bring all of this up?” they might ask you. “The past is the past…let it go” you might hear. There’s no reason to dig up old skeletons, right? Here’s my advice: Don’t listen to whoever they are. Listen to you heart and your gut that seek to know the truth about your history, where you come from, why you feel the way you do, and how you got here. The lost and forgotten traumas of our families are exactly the remedy to longstanding generational trauma that has led us to where we are today in our world forever repeating the same patterns that we have seen for years and years.

Your curiosity does more than you think. Even if only one other person is impacted by your search for truth, you have done something; you have changed something. In fact, you have shifted hundreds, if not thousands of years of the same cycles, patterns, wounds, pains, hurts, and traumas that those before you could not escape from. Maybe they couldn’t or maybe they didn’t want to. Pain is pain after all.

But as I always like to say…the only way out is through, so we might as well go through it.