3 Steps to Making Peace with Family Trauma
It is curious what is in the bookstores at this time in the novel! Bye (Albin Michel) by Valérie Perrin, the heroine investigates her aunt, an ordinary woman who is not at all ordinary, an opportunity for the author to study childhood wounds. Gail Faye, whose jacaranda (Grasset), as we end, is still in the race for Goncourt, exploring the history of Rwanda over four generations. In the personal development department, American Mark Wolin attracted: his bestsellers have been translated into more than thirty-five languages, This pain is not mine (Le Courrier du Livre) sold twenty thousand copies in one month.
These works, though different, show how much this matter of heritage resonates in each of us, calls to us, calls to us. As if we all have to come to terms with what we have been given to experience on a cultural, physical, emotional, emotional and mental level. As if we were invited to find in our memories those elements of our history that would allow us to write our own, in the first person singular, without combining too much in the plural, in the name of those who first gave us Is .
scope of a circle
This process of integration, sometimes disintegration, that allows integration appears to have some therapeutic properties. It is also at the center of all the work in this sequence when in session we go back in time to understand our inner conflicts, our resistances, our blockages, our repetitions, some of our desires, these dreams, these needs that are beginning to come. from nowhere. At least not from our side. Perhaps from a greater distance, or from a greater distance. This is the puzzle that 20th century soul experts are already trying to clarify. Freud, in totem and taboo (Peyot, “Petite Bibliothèque”, 2004), highlights the possibility that the unconscious can be transmitted from one person to another. Carl Gustav Jung moves forward with his theory of the collective unconscious and opens the way to a transgenerational approach.
Following them, psychoanalysts such as Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok wonder: How is it that, even when they benefit from therapeutic help, some patients continue to feel bad? Something stumbles and runs away. Yes but what? Everything about their history has been studied. If suffering, anxieties, problems related to love or image, self-confidence or esteem often date back to childhood, could it be that they sometimes go back to the distant past, to a previous generation, or even upwards ? Or that events long forgotten or quietly passed continue to operate without our knowledge?
An indelible impression?
But it is to one woman that we owe the development of this approach: Anne Anselin Schutzenberger Published in 1988 Aha, my ancestors! (Descly de Brouwer, 2009), tells the general public how our education but also our heredity leaves a mark. “Man is born into a family which transmits to him a conscious and unconscious inheritance, including mission, visible or invisible family loyalty. In this way an impression is formed very early. It will live on in the memory,” she writes. Psychologists and psychiatrists distinguish several forms of transmission: the so-called “intergenerational”, “when it concerns facts of life that are clearly perceived or known, spoken or not” (a profession, a disposition). ; and “transgenerational”, “when it is related to inheritance or invisible transmission” (a trauma, a family secret).
Of this stuff, some should not only be kept, but cherished: this taste in music, this accent, this curiosity for others and the world, a nose, curves, an old chest of drawers. And then there’s what’s too heavy to bear: feelings of anger or fear, physical weaknesses, an obsessive-compulsive disorder or addiction, an obligation to play a role or stay in place, defense mechanisms. With this loyalty to our ancestors we don’t know what to do. “It is important to make it visible, to be aware of it, to understand what binds us, what controls us and what, possibly, should not lead us to redefine this loyalty,” says Anne Anselin Schützenberger.
taste of freedom
The idea of looking into the past for the why and how of the present is prudent. However, vigilance is necessary. In a society that searches for meaning but is deprived of reference points, it is tempting to seek out those who cause our trouble, even our misfortune. But the purpose of this investigation is not to make us eternal victims; But to reclaim our freedom to act, to think, to feel, to choose consciously. Above all, this reparations should not be hidden from sectarian abuses: MIVILUDS (Inter-Ministerial Mission for Vigilance and the Fight against Sectarian Abuses) thus warns of false memories inspired by questionable practices.
Philosopher Charles Pepin enthuses, “Our past is not a prison; it does not lock us into any destiny.” living with your past (Ellery Editions, 2023). Without denying it, without surrendering to it, we can maintain a more flexible relationship with it: we can change the representations, theories and ideas that it has stuck inside us, reducing the associated emotions, those wounds. We can fix what He has given us. » Especially since our mission is of supreme importance: If it is up to us to establish a peaceful and fruitful relationship with our memories, it is also and perhaps above all that we transmit very beautiful memories in our turn.