Ancestral Trauma/the Darkest Woods
No one likes to be abandoned. Emotions react badly to abandonment too. Abandoned emotions become manipulative and sneaky.
The darkest woods you will ever walk through are the debris of your mind. The scariest monsters you will ever meet are the ones you go to sleep with at night. Do you know these monsters I am talking about? Have you met them yet? I caution you that once Pandora’s box is open, even Zeus didn’t know how to close it. Jupiter, the King of the gods himself, didn’t know how to tame evil.
The thing about hiding the malice of the world locked in a box is that it’s not a solution to the problem of evil. Malevolence, when tucked away on a shelf, dust collecting on its surfaces, it waits, sometimes, for centuries, to be released.
It might not even be you that opens that box. It might not even be your daughter or granddaughter. Thousands of years from now, your predecessors will have to unlock, examine, understand, and release all of your monsters. Likely, that won’t happen.
The likeliest scenario is that the monsters you hide from will fully possess if not you, then your children, your grandchildren, or your great-grandchildren. Monsters breed and accumulate when they are left to their own devices in-prisoned in a person’s soul.
Matter cannot be created or destroyed. Emotions are matter, believe it or not. There are significantly real. Expressed emotions can be destructive, yes. That is a general concern. However, expressed emotion can also be beautiful, stunning, mesmerising — expressed emotions like art, a marriage proposal, or a child’s laughter. Suppressed emotions are a gloomy mood with no good reason at its best and a cancer diagnosis at its worst.
There is another side to these suppressed and unexamined emotions. Ancestral trauma. The feelings, thoughts, and behaviours that we think suppress, trust and believe that you are passing it on to your children. You cannot suppress emotions. You can only pretend that these feelings, thoughts, or belief systems no longer matter. All of those unwanted emotions will sneak through the cracks and take over your life. Yep, yep, they will Take Over our life.
No one likes to be abandoned. Emotions react badly to abandonment too. Abandoned emotions become manipulative and sneaky. They get their way, probably without your knowledge. You’ve pushed them back into the unconscious. The unconscious is everything we don’t have an awareness of. All the above might help you understand why you might be clumsy in some ways: keep spilling coffee, burning your food. Or this might help you get to the bottom of why you keep getting into arguments with your friends or lovers.
Revealing what is unconscious is not easy. These are dark woods. But it’s much easier than walking through life blind and with a limp. That’s why Carl Jung recommended that we make the unconscious conscious or it will direct our lives. And I’ll add to this thought to say, and your unconscious will control the life of your predecessors.
May you be well,
May you be happy