All the gifts and wisdom you’ve inherited
We inherit from our ancestors so much more than trauma.
Today, I was reminded of my late father who passed almost twenty years ago.
He was opinionated, demanding, strict, and even stern sometimes. When he said “No”, there was no arguing. B or C grades where not an option, and good enough was a disappointment in his eyes.
He was also a kind, generous, wise man. He told me what being loved unconditionally by a man felt like, what respect and caring for others was about.
He was a hard worker and a visionary.
He survived losing his father when he was just a kid, and studied harder than anybody to earn a decent wage and support his mother and siblings.
He tricked German guards to survive and then escape a nazi camp in Tunisia during WWII.
He opened his own company just after the war, in his late twenties, and reinvented himself in his thirties, when he decided to move to France with his young wife (my mom) and a toddler (my brother), leaving everything he had behind and starting from ground zero.
He lived in a cellar in Paris while creating his interior design business, a field he knew nothing about. He became one of the most renowned sofa designers in France in the sixties.
He, the son of a cobbler, not able to afford food every day, became the CEO of his company and the manager of three store fronts in Paris. No matter how hard he worked he was back home every night and spent two months vacation with his family every year.
On the day of his passing there was a line of friends and family members who shared about how he helped them, with a loan, a gift or advice.
So yes I may have inherited some of his perfectionism and tend to be demanding of myself and others. But I also received his grit, his perseverance, his resilience. I love learning and sharing knowledge because of his own love for education, even though he never went to college. Fear doesn’t guide my life, and I was able to reinvent myself over and over again. I hope one day to consider myself as wise as he was.
Working on transgenerational healing, I often guide my clients to forgive their parents and grand-parents for the trauma or pain that was caused and that they inherited. But it is essential to remember that we also receive so many gifts and positive qualities from our parents and ancestors. We inherit their DNA, learn from their actions and their wisdom, and are at choice day after day of what we want to do with this inheritance.
We all receive so much from our parents:
- their DNA, and the environement we were raised in
- their qualities and their imperfections
- their words, positive and negative ones, and their beliefs
We receive from copying their behavior or deciding to do just the opposite. We receive sometimes consciously but most of the time we receive without even knowing we did.
This may be the most important part of intergenerational healing, whatever you’ve inherited from your ancestors (good or bad), you are at choice of following their path or going on the opposite direction. The first step is to bring those inherited beliefs and learnings back to the conscious, so you can chose what to do with them.
As Carl Jung said: ““Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Your ancestor inheritance is a gift. What you do from that gift, is your choice.
