253. Breaking the Cycle: Ancestral Grief, Epigenetics, and the Power to Change Your Legacy
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Henry: Hello, I am Henry Emmons and welcome back to Joy Lab.
Aimee Prasek: And I am Aimee Prasek. We are in our series, our grief series, inspired by the work of Francis Weller, and today we are exploring the Fifth Gate, ancestral grief. Stay here if you've missed the first four gates, that's fine. Head back there after, to episode 248.
I'll also note it is March, which means we're shifting to our new Element of Joy, which is Equanimity. And I have to say, if there's a gate that requires equanimity, it is this one, because we're talking about grief that isn't totally ours. It's inherited.
So, Francis Weller describes it as unacknowledged and untended sorrow of those who came before us. This includes the more collective losses, like lost connections to [00:01:00] land, language, art, rituals, songs, stories, like so many pieces of our ancestors that have been lost.
It includes collective traumas they have endured; war, displacement, colonization, persecution, slavery, genocide. And this is tough to accept because I think for one reason we may not know we're caring this kind of grief. We may not know these stories even though our body knows them, which leads to the other reason where that I think this can be hard to accept and it's the idea that we can actually carry grief across generations.
How can that make scientific sense?
Actually, it makes a lot of sense. There's a growing field of research on intergenerational trauma, a lot of it leaning on epigenetics, the study of how experiences can change, gene expressions without changing the DNA itself.
So maybe some of the most [00:02:00] famous studies in this area are on Holocaust survivors' kids. So this is work pioneered by Dr. Rachel Yehuda. Yehuda found that children of Holocaust survivors had different cortisol levels and stress responses than the matched controls. So, even though the children themselves hadn't experienced the Holocaust, they inherited altered stress physiology. Research here is also controlled for different variables to get more clear if maybe just growing up with a parent who has had such a big trauma might be more of the cause, like more of kind of a nurture interpretation, but still these altered stress responses tend to remain.
There's an old paper in the mid sixties that looked at the long-term effects from concentration camp experiences. And this quote just caught me. The researchers were describing just three patients, they were working with in psychiatric care, but [00:03:00] here's what they wrote. "The parents are not broken conspicuously, yet their children, all of whom were born after the Holocaust, display severe psychiatric symptomology. It would almost be easier to believe that they, rather than their parents, had suffered the corrupting, searing hell."
So this makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. For example, if your ancestors survived famine, it would be adaptive for you to have a metabolism that stored fat more efficiently. Or if your ancestors faced constant threats, it would be adaptive to have, an altered stress response, either more vigilant or alternatively, but just as much an effort to protect you, like a less sensitive stress response, you know, that might not be burdened by as many stressors. Which might sound like a good thing, but having a healthy stress response, not too much, not too little, is where we wanna be. So these [00:04:00] inherited alterations, adaptations were originally protective, but they can become harmful if they've kind of outlived their use.
Henry: Yeah, I, I find this area of epigenetics to be so interesting and, and you know, it is hard to get your mind around it. This idea that even if we don't know the stories of what happened, these things get passed down the generations. It seems so weird,
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: But it does make sense in a way, because extreme stress gets lodged in the body and genes are essentially carrying the body's information from one generation to the next. And I think it can even skip a generation, it seems, because you know, it can show up in a grandchild, for example, who knows nothing about the trauma that their grandparents went through. So to me it all seems kind of mysterious, but I [00:05:00] also realized a long time ago that the body contains many mysteries that we are just barely scratching the surface on understanding.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: I also really like the notion that whether we think of this as a biological or a psychological thing, what we do now with our own lives and maybe with the lives of our children, it can break the cycle of pain and loss that has just run through the family. It can end here. There's hope in that, even if it's just really hard to face this.
The thing I believe about epigenetics is that it is not predetermined. You know, it doesn't say that this is how things have to be. So these changes that occurred in gene expression can also be reversed. So [00:06:00] if your ancestors developed a stress response that is no longer adaptive, you are not stuck with it forever. When you do the work of healing, whether that's through therapy, mindfulness practice, just finding ways to create more safety in your life, you are literally changing your biology and that changes what you pass on. So there is real power in this. You can be the one who breaks the pattern. You can be the generation that says, "This stops here."
"I'm going to feel this grief. I'm gonna tend to it, and I am not gonna pass it forward in the same way."
Aimee Prasek: Yeah. That's the empowering piece of this. I love, can I give, I don't know why I think of, epigenetics this way. I like to think of it as like a backpack. Like the backpack is a DNA, but our ancestors put [00:07:00] the snacks in for like what they think we might need the next time around. And sometimes those snacks are like not relevant anymore, but if we're holding onto 'em. Like if it's just a bunch of pixie sticks and fun dip, like, hmm, maybe we don't need all that. We'll just take some out. so yeah, like, you know, it's, we have choice.
Henry: I love it, Aimee. You know, like a snack with nuts, for example, over time it can go rancid. Right? You know,
Aimee Prasek: Good point. Even a healthy snack.
Henry: It might have been good at the start.
Aimee Prasek: Yep. But now you've got rotten nuts and your pack. Sounded odd, but yeah. So maybe you need to clean it out. Yeah, so we have something to say here and that's maybe what feels most accessible, I think what you brought up. The kind of cycles of pain in a family. Like families who have had generations of suicide, addictions, mental health issues, or abuse.
These are often called adverse childhood experiences as well. If you're growing up in this, if we experience [00:08:00] enough of them and without enough support and resources to buffer them and work through them, they can change our physiology, as you noted, and those changes can make their way through generations.
We start packing the backpack for, down the road. So sometimes this ancestral grief is more recent than it is historical or that we can sort of work with here. And as this work in intergenerational trauma and epigenetics is suggesting, you don't have to really know the specifics necessarily as well to be affected by it.
So I think the power here is this Gate of Grief invites us to do some of the work of bringing these things to our consciousness, to name them, to grieve what was lost, even if it was generations ago, even if it still exists. And not so that we can get stuck in the past or blaming our ancestors, but to actually address these losses, gain some [00:09:00] freedom from them, to create some change. And I think what is also really powerful about working with this kind of grief is that it reminds us that we are part of a lineage. Our lives are so intimately connected to those who came before us, and to those who will come after us. And that's a powerful thing to really accept because it takes a lot of pressure off of you. You're not the cause of everything. You're not in charge of the outcome of everything, but you're part of it and you have influence. That's empowering.
Henry: And I think what you're talking about really does connect to our Element of Joy for this month Equanimity, because equanimity is partly about perspective. It's that ability to zoom out and and see the bigger picture. So when we are caught up in our own [00:10:00] small story, our own suffering, it can just feel overwhelming.
Like, like it is all on us to fix this. But when we realized that we're part of this vast lineage that we're connected to thousands that came before us, and thousands who will come after that, something shifts. You know, it takes, it takes the pressure off, like you said. So we are not the beginning of this, and we are not the end.
We're part of a river that's just been flowing for a very long time. And that river has carried grief, yes, but it's also carried wisdom, resilience, love. I mean, it's all there. And I think equanimity helps us to hold that bigger view without getting lost in it so we could acknowledge the weight of what's been passed down, but not be crushed by it.[00:11:00]
You know, we can grieve what was lost, but we don't have to make it our whole identity. And there's just something really steadying about that. Equanimity I think of as being this steadiness. When you know you're part of something larger, you don't have to fix everything. You just have to tend to your own part.
You know, do whatever you can with the life you've been given, and that's enough.
Aimee Prasek: Exhale. Yeah. So there are lots of ways to bring these losses to light and to tend to your part. I think one way is to explore your family tree. Like find stories of your ancestors. Consider what was going on in the world when they were living, what stories might have been lost, what practices might have been lost.
Uh, You could go to ancestry websites or interview older family members, look at photos, head to the [00:12:00] libraries. I actually did this back in 2009. I interviewed my dad's side of the family to try and understand his life and death since he had died from suicide. I was looking for that one cause. And during those interviews I discovered that our family had at least one suicide in every generation for as far back as great grandma was willing to share.
And all of a sudden I kind of woke up to this reality that I couldn't just look at my dad and his death so like one-on-one. Because clearly, as my family tree was showing me, he was not alone. He came with a whole world. I love, um, that's Dr. Donna Haraway's wisdom there. "Nothing comes without its world." I love that. We talked about that last episode, our interdependence, really.
And on top of that, we don't just come with a world, we grow out of this [00:13:00] world, as Alan Watts would say. I think it's in the Myth of Myself. But he noted, we do not come into this world. We come out of it. As leaves from a tree, as the ocean waves, the universe peoples, every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature. A unique action of the total universe." That river, we're part of that river. So we can look at this world of our ancestors. What did they come with and what did they come out of?
Henry: So there was Alan Watts.
I'm gonna have to read him.
Aimee Prasek: Oh my God. I love Alan Watts. I'll send you a boatload of stuff I love.
Henry: Well, I wanna say something more about holding this grief, especially if it's connected to a really big trauma because I, I think there's a fear that if we open this door, we'll be overwhelmed by it.
Aimee Prasek: Sure.
Henry: or that by acknowledging it [00:14:00] somehow we're, we're passing that on to our children. But I think the opposite is actually true.
When we don't acknowledge it, when we don't tend to it, that's when it gets passed down unconsciously. The grief becomes kind of like a shadow that follows the family and nobody knows why.
Aimee Prasek: Yes.
Henry: So how do you hold it without being overwhelmed?
Aimee Prasek: Hmm.
Henry: I think you can do it in small doses. You don't have to dive into the deep end all at once.
You can acknowledge there's grief here. There's pain that's been carried for generations. And then you can set it down for a while. Come back to it later when, whenever you feel ready again. And of course you do not have to do this alone. This is so important. Find people who can witness it with you, a, a friend, a therapist, a spiritual community, anybody who can understand your [00:15:00] heritage and help you make sense of it.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: The other thing I'd say is that. Remember that you also inherited resilience. Whatever trauma your ancestors endured, they survived it, right?
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: They had enough strength and creativity and determination to survive and pass things along, and that's in you too.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: So when you're tending to ancestral grief, you're not just inheriting pain, you're, you're also reclaiming power.
You're saying, I see what happened, I honor it and I'm gonna use what I've learned to live differently. So that's a gift you can give forward. It's not perfection,
it's not a life without struggle, sorry to say, but the willingness to face what is there and tend to it with compassion that [00:16:00] changes everything.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah. Yeah. Within this web of support, I'm thinking too, even if our family isn't physically here with us, within that world of support, we can grieve losses, we can heal wounds, we can stop cycles of harm, reclaim power. Even like, as you were noting, rediscovering a treasure of creativity, determination, strength, these aspects of our ancestors, it's hard, but what a payoff.
So the next gate that we'll work on, this will be for next episode, is the Grief We Hold for Harm Done: Harm to Ourselves and to Others. These gates don't seem to be getting easier, is what I'm noticing. They started out hard. And I don't know if they're getting harder or they're just as hard.
Henry: Oh, surely by the last gate, it's gonna feel a lot easier, Aimee.
Aimee Prasek: That's the promise we're making. [00:17:00] Well that's why we're in this together.
Henry: We're gonna get back to joy, right?
Aimee Prasek: Yeah. Yes. Grief opens the door to joy.
Um,Yeah. So we are in this together, this hard work. It, it does create space nourishment. To close our time today I wanna share some wisdom from Linda Hogan. I should clarify not Hulk Hogan's wife, Linda Hogan. I'm realizing This is Linda Hogan, who writes, she is, writes a lot about Native American culture and is Chickasaw, here's what she wrote: "Walking, I'm listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say, watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands."
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