How do we heal family trauma?

Let’s recognize that, no matter how good your childhood was, no matter how great your upbringing, your parents fell short in some way or another.

For some of us it was maybe something not so extreme, for a lot of people it was very hectic and a chaotic place to come from.

Families usually doesn’t synonym with peace, joy, understading, support or love.

What do we do when, as we become older, as we’re adults, we realize that we are carrying a lot of our unprocessed stuff, especially into our relationships?

Maybe a distrust from our mother projects itself onto our fear of the feminine, our incapacity to open up, to explore our emotions as men.

A father that wasn’t present, that abandonded you or your mother, expressed itself as a rejection of the masculine within you which may look like a rejection of structure altogether.

Having a hard time finishing projects that you start, having a hard time keeping up with discipline, habits, consistency and focus.

What do we do about this? How do we heal? especially when the most probably option is that an apology is not gonna come from our mom/dad.

Maybe they’re already dead, maybe what they did was so bad that we don’t want to talk to them ever again, what to do?

First, you got to separate the archetype from the person, father/mother are a sacred archetype, they are bridges, people who facilitate a body for you to come and live this experience.

They’re people that are in charge and responsible for taking good care of you, help you solidify who you are in your first years of development.

The archetype has certain expectations that, at least in the world that we live today, are hard to meet.

Most parents have children because they don’t know what else to do with their life, because they feel that’s the next step, a lot of times, out of a mistake, a happy and joyful mistake, it is rarely out of a very conscious choice of bringing our life into existence.

What happens is that nobody taught them, chances are that their upbringing was quite troublesome, their own parents were absent, violent or many other things.

If you’ve talked with your parents you may know, if you haven’t, it’s a good thing to ask…

There’s the archetype of father/mother, then there is the person, if i recognize that the person is most likely flawed and has a lot of good things but also a lot of unhealed, processed unconscious stuff – I can start to have compassion and create an enviroment where i’m more likely to forgive them.

If i hold them against the ideal archetype of their perfect self (perfect father/mother, divine mother/father) they’re always gonna fall short, then i’d judge them because they were not enough for me.

Because they did not raise me in the perfect way and although this is justifiable, every parent should raise their kids with love, support and tender loving care. Although we can agree on that…

We need to face reality, understanding that our parents, your father/mother or both are human beings. You have a lot of positive traits and also a lot ugly ones.

Nobody in this world can give something that they themselves don’t have, whether that is money, love, attention, understanding – your parents gave you from whatever was in their bag, good and bad.

If they had had more within them they could have given you more, but they didn’t, so when i separate the idea of a father from whom my dad is as a man, then i can have more compassion for him.

Because i extract the expectations, the pressure that i have assigned on him, because he was my dad.

“Nico, should we just tolerate everything they did wrong just because they’re human?“

Well, it’s not about tolerating or condoning but it is also not about condemning, here it’s about what is useful for you in your life, your development.

This is after working with probably thousands of people and helping them heal, this is accepting that you cannot change the past, however, you can change how you relate to it.

How you experience it, you cannot change the way in which you grew up, however, you can change the emotions that you carry about the bringing that you have.

You cannot change your dad/mom or what they did when you were younger, but you can transform the way in which you experience it, so you free yourself and you free them from that resentment, that hatred, that anger that may be within you.

That starts the moment that you can accept that they are also human and as humans, they had a lot of work to do, the uglier they were the more pain they were feeling inside and didn’t know how to process.

Remember, that pain that we don’t want to heal is pain that we want others to feel, the more pain that your parents inflicted upon you, whether emotional/verbal/physical stems from deep rooted pain within them that they didn’t know what to do about.

However, it’s like the person whose finger is broken and everything they touch hurts, then they realize that the world is painful and it hurts, then everything is to blame and to judge, without realizing that what hurts is the finger.

A lot of parents did this, they got angry at you but the anger had nothing to do with you, it was their explosion of repressed stuff.

Where it comes from/why it happened – that’s topic for another blog/video.

To start healing your relationship with your parents: Separate the archetype, understand that your parents only facilitated the body for you, but the life that you are was given to you by the divine father/mother.

You’re a son of the sun/earth, God is your father – if you don’t believe in God then the principles of creation, the universe, the energy that goes underneath all of it, the creator of life, that is the energy that gave you life and love.

That energy has never left you alone, it’s always been there, ready to embrace and support you whenever you open the doors.

If you remember this, you realize “I am son of the sky, of the earth, life was given to me by divinity and this body was given to me by a couple of parents who didn’t know better.” that’s okay.

You can forgive them and you can forgive yourself for carrying the grudge, carrying the weight, for drinking the poison of pressure, like the saying, drinking it and expecting somebody else to die from it.

It’s not useful, it’s not going to serve you and above all, it doesn’t free you, you’re bound to repeat the same thing with your children if you don’t forgive your parents, the things you dont heal with your family line are things that are going to pass down to whoever comes after you.

Separate the archetype from the human being, have compassion, understand the human being as somebody with flaws, qualities and probably a lot of defects, understand that your life was given to you by something greater.

The body was facilitated by somebody else and that somebody, like you and i, was just human.

We can cut him/her some slack for they knew and they did what they did, had they known better they would have done better. As we all would have.