woman scrubbing tile floor

The past two days my mother and I have been spending time in her hometown of Sturgis, SD. Sturgis is a small city, boasting a population of 6,914 people. If some of you think Sturgis sounds vaguely familiar, one week a year it boasts international fame as the host of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.

My mom told me that every time she comes to visit her family in Sturgis, many painful, uncomfortable childhood memories resurface. As she shares some of these stories with me, they raise similar feelings inside me. 

Transgenerational trauma is sticky. It gets passed down in our words, our habits, our subconscious memories, and our actions. Many parents wish to give their child (or children) a better life than they had. But the energy from our ancestors clings to us and grabs onto our children as well.  

Some of that energy is useful and brings with it great strength. The love of music and animals, a strong work ethic, a knack for talking with anyone about anything, self-reliance and independence. These are a few things I am proud to inherit from my ancestors. 

But there are things I have inherited that don’t serve me well. A tendency to put ourselves down, to use sugary foods to cope with stress, to overthink and spiral, to second guess ourselves, to shy away from asking for help. Just as we all inherit a risk of certain diseases (like diabetes or high cholesterol), we also inherit a set of stories, thoughts, and habits that can hurt us.

Heather Ash Amara, author of Warrior Goddess Training, recommends that we thank our ancestors for the things we’ve inherited that serve us well. As far as the other stuff, she invites us to let go of whatever is not working for us. 

We don’t need to blame our parents, grandparents, or great grandparents for the shitty stuff they passed down. It’s much more helpful to simply let those things go and create new stories that do work for us. Blame only keeps us stuck in those same shitty stories.

Many of us think we can just ignore the things we went through in childhood and start fresh as adults. But that doesn’t really work very well. Because even when we move away, never talk to our birth family, and completely reinvent ourselves, those stories still persist inside of us. 

The more we try to run away from the ugly stuff we don’t want to look at, the more power it has over us. The boogey monster under our beds grows bigger and scarier the more we try to ignore it.

What sucks is that when you finally face these things, it can be wicked painful. It’s like having this old nasty wound that is infected and never fully healed. The only way to help it heal is to take a scrub brush and scrub the ever-living crap out of it. 

We have to scrub until it’s raw so the tissue underneath can finally start to heal. Luckily, we don’t have to do this all in one sitting. We can do it bit by bit, allowing ourselves time to rest in between periods of healing. 

But if we really want to heal, we must commit to coming back and continuing to scrub until the wound is clean. We do this little by little, for every single story we have. We gently but persistently clean our stories until we are only left with the ones that actually work for us. 

As Heather Ash Amara notes, it’s a lifelong process of cleaning, but the first intensive cleaning is the hardest. We will have to keep coming back to make sure our stories are working for us as we change and evolve, but it gets easier. 

Just as we need outer hygiene to remain physically healthy, we must also maintain inner hygiene to keep us mentally, emotionally, and spiritually healthy. When we bring to our cleaning ritual a sense of curiosity, love, and care, we strengthen our relationship with ourselves. It gradually becomes enjoyable and exciting instead of painful and scary.

The beauty of this process is that it allows you to honor the unique gifts our ancestors have given us while also creating new gifts of our own. When you take full responsibility for your stories, you will experience a delicious freedom. 

With each story that you clean and claim as your own, and with each story you let go, you will feel places of tension release. You will feel yourself settling into your own skin. The world becomes less chaotic and more manageable, and you feel more at peace with your place in it.

I encourage you to start this gentle cleaning process. Pick one story to face and work through. It doesn’t matter where you start or how old you are when you start. Just get started.

Dr. Jess has been finding herself on one adventure after the next since quitting residency in September of 2021. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest with her 3-year-old rescue dog, Lola. Dr. Jess blogs about her experiences, advice for times of transition, and whatever else tickles her fancy.

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