“When a Situation is Not Made Conscious, it Happens Outside, as Fate.”

Understanding yourself is the closest you can feel to your ancestors.

As soon as I was born

I started walking at the same time

Two doored inns

I am going day and night

These lyrics that used to fall from my grandmother’s mouth when I was a little kid, captured me one day. I was feeling really homesick, but I wasn’t able to comprehend that the feeling of being “inaccessible” meant homesickness until I heard these lyrics so many years later. I had an urgent feeling to understand my grandmother, who currently has Alzheimer’s disease and is bedridden.

My grandmother’s Alzheimer’s symptoms started slowly when she was 65 years old. I was 15 at that time, and living with my dad 2 hours away from her. I would visit her once in two weeks. She would keep asking me and my cousins if we were cold every two minutes. I remember how it became a little joke between me and my cousins. We were not great at keeping in touch with each other, so we would text each other “Are you cold?” once in a while. It meant that we thought about each other.

One day, my grandmother offered me some Turkish tea. Black tea is consumed massively in Turkey. I said yes, even if I wasn’t a fan of it. Traditional Turkish teapots have two boiling kettles on top of each other. Upper kettle is for the tea, and the lower kettle is for boiling the water. When she was preparing, I noticed that she was putting red pepper flakes instead of black tea inside of the upper kettle.

I warned her, she laughed and replaced it with the black tea. I forced myself to smile, knowing that I was slowly losing my grandmother, not physically. I allowed myself to enjoy my tea that day.

My grandmother was born with developmental dysplasia on her hips. You would never see her complain about it, but she had uneven hips that caused her not to walk well, and have severe pain. She also liked growing basil, sewing colorful dresses, and listening to old Turkish folk while she was cooking.

Forty nine years on these roads

The flat mountains in the desert

I have fallen into the hands of homesickness

I am going day and night

When she left her hometown in central Turkey to live in western Turkey, she was in the age that I left my country to study abroad. I always knew that she missed her home even though she never talked about it. I realized how little I knew about her, how much she kept it to herself.

I tried to understand her by trying to understand myself. I noticed that trying to understand yourself is the closest you can feel to your ancestors.

In your earliest biological form, as an unfertilized egg, you already share a cellular environment with your mother and grandmother. When your grandmother was five months pregnant with your mother, precursor cell of the egg you developed from was already present in your mother’s ovaries. The precursor cells of the sperm you developed from were present in your father when he was a fetus in his mother’s womb. Mark Wolynn, It Didn’t Start With You

“They will always be with me.”

That’s what we say after the loss of our loved ones. We do not only carry their pictures and memories after their death, but also their wisdom, and unfortunately their trauma.

How?

DNA is responsible for transmitting physical traits, such as the color of your hair, eyes and skin — surprisingly makes up less than 2% of your total DNA. The other 98 percent consists of noncoding DNA, and it is responsible for many of the emotional, behavioral, and personality traits we inherit.Mark Wolynn, It Didn’t Start With You

When we experience a traumatic event, our thought process gets disorganized in a way that we lose our memories about the experience. Our consciousness uses this trick to protect us until similar experience activates the images, words and body sensations that belonged to the original traumatic event we had experienced. This, unfortunately makes us relive the same horrifying experience over and over again. Until we “we get it right”. Until we make it conscious.

What if we can’t?

We lend it to the next generations.

For example, if one of our parents had PTSD, we are likely to experience anxiety and depression. If our grandfather blamed himself for the loss of his younger brother, we borrow his guilt. If our grandmother lost a child, we borrow her grief. Sometimes, these feelings become so much of our life that we do not even think that they don’t belong to us.

Guilt, grief, shame, that were transferred from our ancestors hold a key to our healing.

We are unfortunately not capable of changing the DNA, but we can train our brains and change the way DNA functions. Of course, with practice.

Let’s practice

Finding your core complaint.

In his book It didn’t Start With You, Mark Wolynn explains that unspoken experiences that want to be declared, appear in our core language as intense and urgent words which we choose to describe our deepest fears.

What’s your biggest fear? What’s the worst thing that could happen to you, or a random person?

They may sound like this: “…that I am going to die.”

“…that I’ll go crazy.”

“…that I’ll be all alone.”

Don’t they fit to your life experiences?

Who could be the person in your family that has experienced something close to your fear?

Do you feel a strong reaction when you use your core language?

Visualization

If you know the original owner of the fear you have, close your eyes and start to visualize the person.

If you don’t know the original person, close your eyes and imagine somebody in your family who may have felt the same way as you do. You don’t have to have met, or known this person.

Bow your head, breathing deeply from your mouth. Tell them they will not be forgotten and be remembered with your love.

As you breath out, feel the emotions that we caused by your core language leaving your body.

Keep doing this until your body relaxes.

Healing Sentences to use in our visualizations and meditations

for ancestors

“What happened to you won’t be in vain.”

“I will honor you by living fully.”

“It helps to understand you.”

“I’ll use what happened as a source of strength.”

Core descriptions

What we feel about our parents are the doors that open to ourselves. The words we choose to describe our parents say more about ourselves than them. When we suffer, we prefer to avoid the pain rather than trying to acknowledge it. Remaining silent about something is the last way to heal it.

The sentences we choose to describe our parents indicates the way we know ourselves, the way we react to the world around us, and the choices we make.

Describe your mother/father:

Write down the adjectives that instantly come to your mind.

Write down the things you blame for them.

I blame my mother for…

I blame my father for…

I blame my friend for…

I blame my partner for…

Feel your body as you read your descriptions and blames. How do you feel? Is your body relaxed or tight? Do you still associate them with these adjectives?

Visualization

Visualization exercise for your mother/father

Take a moment to feel the connection or disconnection you feel towards your parents. Visualize them standing in front of you. Do you welcome them? Do they welcome you? If there was a flowing energy coming from them to you, how much would it be? Do you feel discomfort or anger in your body? Take deep breaths until your body relaxes.

One must have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. Nietzche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Even if the pain is so much bigger, science says that the more we repeat and revisit these images, the more they integrate in us.

… by concentrating on positive words and visualization create new neutral pathways in our brains and we improve our perception of ourselves and people we interact with. When we visualize a healing image, we activate the left prefrontal cortex which is associated with feelings of well-being. Mark Wolynn, It Didn’t Start With You

Healing Sentences to support visualizations, and images:

Imagine your parent saying these sentences to you.

“ My needs made it difficult for you to have space for yourself.”

“It must have been overwhelming with my emotions.”

“My feelings do not have to be your feelings.”

“You’ve been taking care of me, and I’ve been allowing it. You do not have to do this anymore.”

“This has been way too much for a child.”

Rituals

Support your inner work by placing a picture of your ancestors on your desk, or next to your bed. Write a letter to them, light a candle for them, and keep developing images about them.

For a deeper practice and understanding of the family trauma:

Resources:

Wolynn, M. (2017). It Didnt Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle. Penguin Publishing Group.

For my grandmother M,

I will always love and honor you.