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.

key points:

A long time ago, starting in the colonial outskirts of Virginia and moving south to the Appalachian mountains of East Tennessee, there lived…

…a daughter of the Cherokee tribe, kidnapped and thrown into slavery;

…the son of a renowned grist mill engineer, who discarded his pregnant mistress;

…teachers and missionaries who communed with indigenous tribes;

…colonialists born from royalty, such as Capt. Thomas Carter;

…Revolutionary war heroes like Capt. William Sumter;

…soldiers who fled, fought, or died in the Civil War;

…men who built naval ships in Norfolk for WWII;

…self-proclaimed Baptists by day, and violent drunks by night;

…a handful of daughters who ignored social codes and Jim Crow laws;

…one whose mother could never forgive her;

…an adored woman whose hometown established a day in her honor;

…a father who sent his daughters to the workhouse;

…a sister who knew her brother’s dark secrets, and would receive shock treatment for hysteria;

…a husband who possibly murdered his wives;

…and a wife who possibly murdered her husband.

When the wild nature of these stories gathered together in one place, it was right here in my body.

These are the forgotten stories of my ancestors.