You can’t turn on the News without questioning what is happening here? How can people treat each other this way? Even if you intentionally avoid the News, you still catch glimpses of current events on a radio blurb or something your scroll by on social media or even a friend feeling so overwhelmed about the injustices and spills all the details over to you.
Where does all of this violence originate?
I believe within our 1st environment of the family.
The individual is shaped by how they are loved and cared for within their family. The family is influenced by the culture, the culture relates with other cultures and too often we let our differences get the better of us.
Hurt people … hurt people. The deepest inner scars come from a young child who naturally loves their parents and those same people hurt them based on their own pain that informs all of their reactions and responses in parenting and in life. Our children’s brains pattern after our caregivers and their stable sustained connection. Our optimal development grows with healthy attachment, when that isn’t available all kinds of coping strategies are formed.
These are the reasons why you may struggle with intimacy in your marriage today.
Or why the natural needs of your child exhaust you. They are calling out, whining for or melting down about the very thing you had to close your heart to all those years ago.
I was just reading, The Body Keeps Score by Bessel Van der Kolk. This quote from his book expands upon if our trust is broken within our own home environment, we often end up out in the world without the essential ingredient of trust.
“What I think happens is that people have terrible experiences and — we all do. And we are a very resilient species. So if we are around people who love us, trust us, take care of us, nurture us when we are down, most people do pretty well with even very horrendous events. But particularly traumas that occur at the hands of people who are supposed to take care of you, if you’re not allowed to feel what you feel, know what you know, your mind cannot integrate what goes on, and you can get stuck on the situation. So the social context in which it occurs is fantastically important.”
The understanding about what we inherit from our family grows in fascinating areas across the globe. There is a school in Mexico that starts off the children’s education by applying what we’ve learned about the history of the family to understanding how to best support the student.
Brazil is applying the understanding of inherited family trauma into their legal system.
Europe, the US and Canada apply this knowledge into select medical practices, prison systems and family mediation. It’s worth celebrating that the profound nature of this work is finding its way beyond traditional therapeutic models. Respected colleagues share about this work – creating world peace, one family at a time. This approach absolutely promotes how love can flow within a family, within a community, within a culture … across the globe.
As we each look around the world today, I’m sure we can certainly agree that the more peace that is created, the better for all of us, including our children and those who come after them.
