Deeper waters
“To know your generational story firms the ground upon which you stand. It makes your life, your struggles and triumphs, bigger than your lone existence. It connects you to a grand plotline.”
― Cicely Tyson, "Just as I Am"
Deeper Waters explores the evolutionary phenomenon of inherited family trauma, in an effort to better understand our purposeful role in the bigger picture, designed for the greater good.
Generational Trauma
the family story
Each life is unique and complex in its own right. The span of our experiences is a mix between the mundane and the dramatic; the down-trodden and the inspiring; the stagnant and the energizing. And everybody has a story to tell.
When life-changing stories go untold, the deeper truth doesn’t dissolve, but instead, it continues to flow through the bloodline, determined to make itself known. The deeply buried truth will eventually rise, often appearing as fate or fortune. When really, it’s just nature.
“I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It always seemed to me that I had to…complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished.”
-Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
"If you know where you’re coming from, it is harder for people to stop you from where you’re going."
— Matshona Dhliwayo
the Unfinished business
as presented by Mark Wolynn in It Didn’t Start With You
After I read this book, I knew right away that I was the one who had been assigned the job of resolving a multitude of generational traumas. After all, I was the only one left, and my pain was too great, my circumstances too extreme, for it not to imply something bigger.
Over the last three years I became obsessed with hunting down clues and historical details that would tell me more about the events that were experienced by those before me; and how those may have paved the way for my mere existence and the upheaval in which I found myself.
What I discovered throughout this process not only opened my eyes, but also helped me truly understand what it means to persevere.
noteworthy points:
Their untold stories
The many, many lives that molded into one.
