We all might be wanting to feel some compassion at the moment, it’s a good feeling to feel. But what about those who hurt us? Can we ever feel compassion for them?
Yes we can. By healing our inter-generational trauma.
We carry the trauma of our abusers, parents, grandparents and beyond. This is through nature (epigenetics) and nurture (how we were treated by the significant adults around us).
In addition to this, we carry parental introjects. These are the thoughts and beliefs that our parents carried that we absorbed as our own, as a baby, through mirroring. These introjects can be helpful of course: love, kindness, warmth; but they can also be harmful: anxiety, depression, self-hatred etc.
We can work directly on both the introjects, and the generational trauma, using AF-EMDR, and we can actually heal – and yes, we can even feel compassion for our abusers.
I remember my first experience of this. Stuff around my childhood sexual abuser was still coming up, even though I’d been working on it for some years. I did some intergenerational work on him, and boof! Suddenly I saw him not only as the sad, pathetic man that he really was, but I also witnessed him with compassion for the first time. I never, ever, ever thought that would be possible. But it happened.
Since then I have worked with clients using this protocol around their abusive parents, grandparents, husbands, wives – any abusive “others” in their lives. With the same astounding results.
Healing intergenerational trauma IS the gateway to compassion.
Author: Lucinda Gordon Lennox
Lucinda works at TRC London