By Nicholas Fry
A topic that came up in group this week was the ripple, and the long-term impact that both trauma and healing can have on our relationships. What stood out to me in that conversation is that for many years, I have been aware of the impact of trauma on generations of people in their families. Not just the children, but the children’s children. When we talk about generational trauma, these things are passed on in many ways, even on a genetic level.
So much of this generational trauma comes down to developmental and emotional immaturity, a general level of comfort with feelings. When we lack this and resist our internal emotional states, people use all different kinds of avoidance to cope: addictions, work, relationships. I would hope that the curse I have broken for future generations is regaining and allowing a connection to self that allows for the processing of emotions as information, and not as something to resist. The resistance is the problem. We pass down what we can’t let go.
But the ripple runs both directions. The same way trauma travels through generations, so does healing. Turning the tide doesn’t take a grand gesture. Most of the time, it starts with one person deciding to stop avoiding, to feel what they’ve spent years running from, and to show up for themselves. Very often, it starts because someone showed up for them first: someone who cared enough to listen, to normalize what they were going through, and to believe in them before they could believe in themselves. For me, the place I see that most clearly is at home.
In my own relationships with my children, I am very mindful to help them understand that feelings are information. It’s not a free-for-all. We have to balance the need for limits with validating people’s internal realities, but teaching my children to trust that inner voice is one of the most important things I believe a parent can do.
Second is presence. Showing up, getting on the floor with them, going outside, throwing a ball, playing Monopoly, even Roblox are just a few ways I try to attend to my children. Tuning in is the ultimate need for kids. They want to be seen in a way that’s collaborative, where they feel part of a relationship in an interactive way. I don’t think these things were very common years ago. They may have been portrayed in movies and TV, but the reality was that most of our parents’ generations were pretty dissociated and distracted by many different things.
It is said that children learn more from what they observe than from what they are told. It’s the values in action, embodied day in and day out, that condition children to create their own reality. I often say that in a relationship, we are the last person who can ask someone for change, and that our best chance is to lead by example. It’s the little things in action: the way we speak about ourselves, the world, and what’s possible. The way we correct our children when they say they can’t do something, and help show them that they can if they believe it. It’s the way we cope and deal with stress. Do they see us getting up in the morning and going to the gym, or coming home to drown ourselves in alcohol? Or worse. It’s the way we handle disconnection, and more importantly repair, never allowing disconnection to threaten a child’s sense of being loved. It’s the way we challenge them to do more and expand the way they see the world.
In our practice, we see the same ripples, shifting a bit day by day. People react to trauma in different ways. Some of us find ways to transmute that pain into a passion to help others. Recently, I have been blessed to mentor five exceptional human beings. They have their own stories and their own paths to helping others, and I get to see these ripples amplifying every day in the work they are doing. I may not have as much of a front-row seat as I used to, and I have my own grief related to that. But there will always be people whose superpower is to take the most painful thing and use it to help others. It’s really hard to quantify the millions of ways someone overcoming self-protection can change reality.
One thing I would say about being a cycle breaker: in the beginning, when you start your journey, or when you realize everyone around you is broken and much of what you know of life is the overflow of others’ suffering, it can feel like all of these things happen for no reason. Like the universe or God is picking on you in some way. Or worse, that you deserve all the misfortune that has come your way. What I know to be true now, because I have lived it, is different. Some of it is the benefit of time. Another big piece is paying attention. Every difficult thing I have ever been through has eventually made sense, and I have developed gratitude for it. As J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, in a letter Stephen Colbert later shared, “What punishments of God are not gifts?” When we learn to accept pain as part of the human experience and stop resisting it, we open up to even more joy, love, and positive experiences, and this too ripples forward as generational abundance.
May future generations trust their bodies more than their minds.
May they live in the present moment and not rely on stories or definitions to protect them.
May they live with an open heart, free from the fear of failure.
May they embrace all the lessons, good and bad, that life brings their way.
May they find joy and abundance.
May they be free from scarcity.
These are things I have touched in my own life. May they receive them as a generational inheritance, rather than the trauma passed down before them.
Thank you for being part of this with us.
Want reflections like this in your inbox? Join our mailing list
Follow along on Instagram and Facebook
