Podcast E24: Epigenetic Trauma

In this podcast, Mette Miriam Sloth talks about epigenetic trauma, also known as generational trauma. It is trauma and pain that are passed down from generation to generation, and which we carry within us even though they are not originally our own.

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  The podcast describes a strong impulse to break these patterns and stop the transmission of trauma. This impulse is especially strong in our current time, where there is an increased awareness of trauma and its influence on our lives.

  Relationships and intimacy are often the areas where these traumas are expressed. We may experience shutting down, becoming angry, or reacting with coldness towards those we love the most. This is because our nervous system has been programmed to react in a certain way in situations that resemble the original traumas.

  Working with generational trauma is a heroic journey, which can feel lonely and challenging. The culture around us is often not mature enough to understand the depth of these traumas, and we can feel misunderstood and alone with our struggle.

  But there is hope and opportunities to heal and free ourselves from these patterns. By becoming aware of the situations where the traumas are activated, and working to change our reactions, we can break the chain and create a new future for ourselves and future generations.

  The podcast focuses on:

  • Identifying the specific situations where the traumas are expressed, especially in close relationships.

  • Understanding how our nervous system has been programmed to react in a certain way.

  • Learning to handle these situations in a new way that breaks with the old patterns.

  This relates to women's longing for connection in the following ways:

  • Both themes deal with deep, unconscious patterns that affect our relationships. Just as women's longing for connection can be rooted in unmet needs from childhood, generational trauma can also have a profound impact on our ability to create healthy and fulfilling relationships.

  • Both themes emphasize the importance of becoming aware of our patterns and working to change them. Just as women can learn to set boundaries and navigate their longing for connection, we can also learn to identify and break with the generational traumas that limit us.

  • It is important to remember that healing from generational trauma is a process that takes time and requires patience.

• Transcript

  Translated transcript of the original Danish podcast

  Host: Mette Miriam Sloth

  When I talk about epigenetic trauma or generational trauma, a lot of people resonate with it. There is a lot of pain in it. There is a very deep understanding that we carry so much more than what we carry in our own lives, which is enough. For many people, it's overwhelming enough in itself, what you carry in terms of attachment patterns and childhood wounds and so on. Um, and you could say, I think one of the best things you can be aware of here is actually, how the hell can you work with this? How can you face these shaton and how can you use everyday life to actually work with them and let them go, integrate them, release them and let them go? Because what I hear for a lot of people is that it stops f***** with me. So there can be such an impulse, such a huge, almost like an inner pressure or such an inner cry, roar, I would almost say. Like no more, it stops here. As if there is a deep impulse to say that the timeline we're living in right now is possible. Yeah, there's all kinds of shit coming up, and it's unstable, and it's chaos, and there's UFOs, there's all kinds of stuff, there's all kinds of stuff coming up. So you will also experience all kinds of dark fears. You see all kinds of things that you don't want to see, but there's also an insane amount of opportunity to integrate. It goes so fast. In my 10 years of working, I've never experienced that people can get in touch with something that hurts so quickly and let it go. There may be many layers to it, but just the fact that in a single hour we can get hold of something, come down for something released. Even if it's just one or two layers, it's a generational trauma where there can be five, 10, 20, 30 different layers that seem similar but have different flavours of pain connected around the same theme. It's a crazy healing and transformation window that you and I and our children live in. And it will probably continue to be for the next 50 to 100 years. So use it for what you value highly. So really ride the wave. I know you're scared. I know it feels like all the safety and security has been ripped out from under your feet, but there really is an opportunity to let go of so much old that something new can be born. So the way I would probably talk to you about it in terms of how you experience these generational themes. You almost have to see it as a kind of magnetism, and you get sucked into having a specific behaviour. Close in some very specific ways, which can be towards your partner. It can be towards your children. Basically towards the people that you want to love the most or that you feel that you want to live in peace, harmony, love, intimacy with typically where the darkness comes up because it basically comes up to be released. Coming up to be witnessed, integrated, made conscious, redeemed. And it can torment you. It can torment you and ride you like a mare. Why is it that it is towards the people I want a deepest connection with that I repeatedly shut down, come to smoke my defences and rule with coldness, with anger, with contempt, with disgust, with all these shutdown tendencies that are the byproduct of a very very long bompy ride through evolution that has had a primary focus on survival and deep deep deep fear that humans could not bear to feel all the time. So they had to be in reaction to the fear and constantly push it away to not feel it. So right now we live in a small part of the world that is so relatively stable and so relatively safe compared to how it used to be. You're not being eaten by a lion. You've been on the table, and your children aren't being taken away from you in a war. So in that way, it's safer than it's ever been. And therefore it's possible for these things to come up. And that's why you'll find that it especially comes up in your close relationships. So you finally have to have a lot of courage and determination to be determined if you see labels called this is how it ends here with me. So it's a soul call, a soul impulse that you are down to stop some behavioural patterns, some closures, some love limitations that have been in your family line for a long time. That's the impulse you feel. So really really really great respect for that calling. And also white it's a big mouthful. In that case, your soul has taken a big bite out of it. That doesn't mean it can't be done. It's just that so often I see people who I can see have worked for years on this and they've beaten themselves over the head because they keep criticising themselves. I should have solved this by now. I shouldn't be in this. I shouldn't be afraid of this. I should speak up here. I should have had this under control by now. But when you talk generational wounds simply inherited grief. That our ancestors have had to pass on because there was no time, space, opportunity. It was too dæ, it was too dark, there was no opportunity to resolve it. In other words, you've taken on, you've simply taken on a good chunk of our shared collective darkness and pain and said, I'm spending this life bringing these elements into the light. It's a huge task, and there's not really anyone in the culture that mirrors you on that, because collectively we're very immature and very young. It is what it is. So we have this shared consciousness that's like the equivalent of a 1213-year-old, right? So it's basically something with some prime and something with some Botox and some breasts to be done. It's very much about that or it's very much about the limited consciousness collectively has a lot of focus on how you pose on the outside and you're trying to look a certain way so you can get some recognition for it and that's how it should be it's as immature as it can be it's fine it matures over time but you as an individual if you're looking for recognition by a collective outside culture and you actually stand in a place where you want to take a mouth jump basically and follow your soul impulse. The soul is a consciousness that is always more mature than the collective incarnated consciousness, if you haven't reached further. So you will feel that you are pulling yourself away from being recognised by the culture. Because the culture will not understand you for your consciousness. So that means it also feels deeply lonely. It can feel like you've taken on an almost impossible job, and all you get is, you know, furrowed brows, and what the hell are you doing, and aren't you exaggerating a bit, and shouldn't you just get a job, and isn't it better, you know, you were kind of met with some misunderstanding about it. Except maybe a very very small group of people who understand you, who you resonate with because they have the same soul language. They they have the same frequency. They're here for the same purpose in their own unique way. And this is not to say that there's anything wrong with the culture being the way it is, because it is the way it is. It's the commonality, the shared collective consciousness levels, they evolve, they change over time. And that's kind of where we are now. But conversely, we also need, we need a So, we need some individuals to come down there and just kind of jolt the collective unconscious because we need it to take a jump because if we don't take a collective jump soon and have our heads buried as far up our arses as we have now where there's so much me me me me me me and there's so a lot of me me me me me me me me me and you think so short-term but it's self-destructive we shit in our own fear we pollute both inside and outside so we need to grow the f*** up we need to collectively grow the f*** up and there is a very strong impulse to do so and it's fucking unpleasant so just know if you, if this makes sense, what I'm rambling on about for you, if it resonates, just know that you're on such a heroic journey. Well, it's a heroic journey. Um, and there's a lot of hardship, and there's a lot of sometimes loneliness, dark night of the soul, but there's also a deep satisfaction in understanding that it's an impulse that comes through you to do this work. So if you can bring that home, then basically you also connect with your soul frequency, your soul impulse. And that's f***** ecstatic. So I can only encourage you to do that if this makes sense to you. And in everyday life, you will experience it almost as if you are trying to move away from this magnetism that almost forces you to close, say, do. And that means that every time, you almost have to move like this. You almost have to force yourself to handle it in a different way. It's a guessing situation. See if it feels weird to you. And keep doing that. Just keep doing it. And then what you can get help with from me or from others who do something similar, is basically using mindfulness to identify the places where you lock up again and again and again. Where it's like you're observing yourself from the outside. That necessary moment. Where you are observing yourself from the outside. It's this place where, almost as if in a trance, you can see you're heading into a conflict with your mate. partner or doing something with your partner. And you know, if I say it, he does it. Then I say it, then he says it, then I say it, then I withdraw, then he withdraws, then some time passes and we have a hard time coming back. It's like you know it's going to happen. It's such a train, train slow motion, but it's as if you can't, even though you know it, it's almost as if your soul impulse or your witnessing, your meditative witness that witnesses you, witnesses the body, witnesses the defences, the ventilations that are put into play, stands outside and watches, but then that will happen, and then it explodes there. And you've realised what's happening, and you know when it's coming from and stuff, but it's just like the body, the nervous system, you can't stop it. It's like you just keep getting stuck again and again. What happens here is that there's almost a kind of ah, best way to describe it is almost like a kind of PTSD reaction in the nervous system. It's become so used to a certain way of handling a certain kind of tension in a certain way. And it's been moulded over generations. So you can just see it as an ox chain that has kind of taken the same path the same way for 1000 years. And all of a sudden you find that you can also drive that way. Then you try to get these wooden wheels to go a different way, but if there's even the slightest disturbance, they crash into the same holes. That's how it feels, and it feels violent, and you'll keep hitting yourself over the head because you feel an impulse that it's possible to live differently. It's possible to do something different. So you've got that awareness. But it basically just makes you feel more pain and become more despairing and think you're a more horrible and terrible person and you are or you are weak or you are everything. You're not. You are changing something that is insanely hard to change, but it is possible. What we can work on together is basically going into the places where you see this train reg slow motion. Because what I do here is that I go in and bother you in these situations. Depending on whether you're a man or a woman, there are slightly different ways in, but I have a very hoped-for thought structure in relation to it, so they feel some intensity to it. For women, most women will typically be able to feel it in their body. So that is, if you think about a situation, you'll very quickly realise where you lock in your body. And what I help with is to go in and unlock this. I simply help you get flow in the states so that the next time you experience something similar to what would normally cause your body to lock in these situations, it's easier for you. It's easier for you to do something else. And the more often you do something else than the one that has been embedded, the defence, the closure, the locking that has been embedded for generations, when you start to do something else, you free the time and free the future. And that's f****** beautiful.