Generational imprints or family curses can mean that we repeat the same behaviors that lead to unhappy relationships between generations, or that we set up the same physical illness generation to generation. How to we break these curses? The good news is that shamanic energywork can be highly effective in helping to break a family curse. The other good news is that generational imprints can be positive and life affirming—such as the ability to make money, to maintain good health, or an appetite to learn new things—these can also be passed down the generational line.
In a previous blog post I spoke of a mother-daughter imprint that my client projected outward onto her other relationships with women. Such relationships were painful, but my client was doing great work on getting a handle on the projection. She was particularly concerned about this family curse because she wanted to have a daughter. She didn’t want to pass on the curse to her daughter in which her daughter would experience her as selfish and withholding. My client was conscious of the possibility and afraid of unintentionally passing on this imprint; she understood the strength of generational imprints having worked on hers. She knew ahead of time that she was likely to repeat a similar outcome with her own daughter.
This client has a much better chance than most of not passing on a family curse because she makes the assumption right away that she could (unintentionally) manifest such a horrible outcome. It takes a very brave and conscious person to realize that she is capable of acting in the same hurtful way that her mother had done to her. These curses tend to easily pass generation to generation because the Victimized party stays in the Victim position and cannot consider that they could ever be in the Bully position with the next generation.
My client automatically assumed that she would play out her role as mother in the curse if she did not stay conscious. In that way she took a step back from being locked unconsciously in the pattern so she could begin healing it.
However, most of my clients are not this self-aware. I had another client ensnared in a mother-daughter family curse. In this case my client was focused on how hurtful her mother was, and on how she wanted their relationship to be different. My client was firmly in the Victim position, but not only that, she wasn’t willing to give up this position until her mother changed into the mother she wanted. My client wanted vindication from her mother that her mother had treated her poorly. In effect, my client was not only staying Victim, she was refusing to grow up; she was giving away her power to her mother instead of using that power and focus to heal herself.
The complication here was that this client had a little girl. Because the family curse had not been healed within my client, it was a given that my client was already setting up her relationship with her daughter so her daughter would bear the curse. My client certainly did not intend to do this, but because her energy was focused on herself and her own pain, she could not step back enough to see how she was creating the same relationship with her own child.
What was interesting here was that people close to her could already see the curse unfolding, but my client was blind to it, just as her mother was blind to it. This client had a hard time doing what my previous client had done—she could not assume that she was very likely and fully capable of hurtful, neglectful, and selfish behavior toward her daughter. Part of this was the strength of the generational imprint, but some of this was denying the hard reality of being an effective parent. Effective parenting means sometimes setting aside our own needs to meet the needs of our child. The child can’t meet her own needs—that is the parents’ job. One cannot be an effective parent if we stay in the Victim position or the Child role. The Victim and the Child have no power—that power is outside in the hands of others. With her energy focused on how wronged she had been by her own mother, and how angry and hurt she was, she did not see that she was distracted from and resentful of her child’s own needs.
Many times what is most striking about a family curse is how it unfolds without the people inside the curse being aware of how their thoughts and actions are making it unfold. The people involved may desperately set the intention to not repeat the curse, but they do anyway. These curses have that type of momentum to them. Even though the energywork will help, once again, in this case it will take effort and practice for this client to make sure she cleans up her part of the curse so that it won’t impact her daughter.
The most effective way for my client to do this is to understand how the curse for her family works. In other words, what does the mother do in this curse? What does the daughter do in this curse? In this case the mother is so distracted and focused on herself that she ignores her daughter pleas for attention and connection and actively resents her daughter’s having needs. The daughter focuses on her pain at being brushed aside and on how if she could only get her needs met and get the attention of mother then all would be well. The key for my client is to take herself out of daughter position, which she understand very very well, and put herself into the mother position, which is the bad guy or the Bully position. The Bully position is always the hardest one for us to see in ourselves. Of course my client does not want to see herself in the mother position of this curse because the mother is the one who inflicts the damage.
Then the next step is to assume that she will unconsciously do everything and anything to act out the role of mother as defined by the curse. She will ignore her daughter’s attempts at connection, and she will actively resent her daughter and her needs. The key is for my client to realize that this is a given—this is how the curse plays out—it has nothing to do with her personally as a good or bad person. In this case the curse contains ironic elements—it is only because my client is focused on her mother that she ignores her daughter and sets up the same relationship, creating a vicious cycle from generation to generation. Each generation feels screwed by the one before it but screws the one after it all the while thinking of themselves as loving mothers with ungrateful daughters. My client isn’t generating this unhappy outcome because she’s a bad person or a bad parent—she’s generating it because she is not taking responsibility for acting out the mother role as defined by the curse.
The other side of breaking the curse is giving up the daughter role as well. She has to let her mother off the hook by growing up and not needing approval, connection, or permission from mother. Perhaps most importantly, she must give up on getting any validation or acknowledgement from her mother that her mother treated her poorly. Of course this is excruciatingly difficult, partly because of the nature of the curse, but for this client a lot of it is the inability to accept the way things are for her mother. This client will never get that relationship with her mother, ever. The longer she believes she might, the longer she wastes energy, and the more likely she will not be able to curb her tendency to play out the mother position of this curse. Many of you will object that of course the possibility exists that her mother will grow up and change like my client is working hard to. Yes, that is a possibility, but hanging on to that possibility from the Child Role and the Victim Stance is never helpful and in fact squashes the probability of that outcome. Allowing that possibility without attachment to outcome from an Adult stance off the Drama Triangle makes the possibility more likely for all involved. The key is to give up attachment to having the ideal, imaginary, fantasy relationship with her mother. That relationship simply does not exist.
In giving up the daughter position she has to give up asking for attention and connection with her mother. She has to give up nursing her pain and being angry. She has to give up on being validated. In other words, she has to deal with her personal wounds without a hope of any change with her mother. She has to be willing to heal herself, to take full responsibility for her child self, grow that child self up with nurturing that comes directly from her inner self. (All of this type of healing work can be furthered along with soul retrieval and underworld work in which nurturing resources are retrieved and installed in our psyche). She has to meet her own emotional needs and give up expecting mother to finally come through. Then she’ll be in a better position to nurture her own daughter.
If my client can heal herself and meet her needs by growing herself up from within, she will likely break this curse. This particular curse depends on her staying a Child, staying Victim. It also depends on her being the distracted, resentful mother. Any time my client feels resentful toward her daughter she has to assume the curse is in play. Any time she feels angry with her mother, she has to assume she’s fallen back into the Victim role. As you can imagine, this is hard work, staying this conscious, calling herself on her hard thoughts and emotions. But if my client plays neither resentful mother nor angry daughter, she’s stopped the momentum enough that she can choose to respond differently to her daughter. My client has a chance to stop a horrible outcome that has been tormenting her family for generations. She should think of it as her sacred mission of this lifetime.
What makes these curses so difficult is how hard it is for the person within the curse to see the pattern, and how she plays BOTH roles in the pattern once it passes to the next generation. If you know you have a family curse, please take it to a shaman. The shaman can unravel the original bind on that energetic level, but your shaman will also help you map out the curse on the mythic level to help you be aware of how it plays out in your life. Then it is up to you to do the hard work on the symbolic and literal levels of not letting it pass down to your children. Take it as a sacred mission—if you break the family curse, then you have saved generations of your family from suffering.
coming up soon, a look at typical Empath daughter-father wounds
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