“Undreaming Wetiko:
Breaking the Spell of the Nightmare Mind-Virus”
Wetiko, And How Ancestral Trauma
& The Unlived Lives Of Parents Affect Us
(And Your Children)
What many of us don’t see in ourselves is how the unconscious UN-PROCESSED trauma and UNLIVED LIFE (suppression) of our parents affect us, and not just what happened to us in childhood.
It is not only the apparent neglect, wounding, trauma, etc., many children or we may have experienced in childhood (especially in the first 3 to 7 years) that set up our whole adult life and resulting attachment styles and personality disorders (masks – trauma response) to varying degrees (many of the personality disorders (such as Narcissism) have become normalized in our pathological society.)
We are also UNCONSCIOUSLY affected by everything our parents avoided, suppressed (shadow), and were wounded/traumatized in their own lives and as children but never worked on it or were aware of it.
Obviously, you cannot blame your parents because a lot of the psycho-spiritual somatic work didn’t even exist back then (depending on how old your parents are) when spanking and letting babies “cry it out” were considered “therapy,” which just resulted in more trauma. Your parents were also affected by their parents, which goes down the ancestral line.
I painfully came to that realization in my own process throughout the years. Most of what I’ve been dealing with in my life was not just the obvious childhood wounds but the suppressed shadow and trauma of my parents going back generations down the ancestral line.
That’s why it is silly to think that there is anyone without trauma; it just varies and is deeply suppressed in most people, along with the shadow. Most people stuff it all down (like their parents did) and then compensate by creating a strong external fake persona that can be “charming,” “confident,” and even “successful” in the consensus world, but the achievement and desires are driven by unconscious internalized shame to avoid feeling this empty hole within, disconnected from Essence and the Divine within.
That’s also why as a parent, the BEST thing you can do for your children is to do the inner work so your children are not burdened with what you avoid facing within yourself. It also implies living a life you fully align with and being authentic, which means following your deeper calling and not suppressing it.
It implies facing all the self-defeating core beliefs you may have taken on unconsciously from your parents about men, women, relationships, money, abundance, creative expression, etc., so you don’t stuff it into the shadow of your unconscious only for your children to have to deal with it.
Obviously, no parent is perfect, so don’t be too hard on yourself either. What we need are not “perfect” parents (they don’t exist) but “good enough” parents, as Carl Jung said, and it simply starts with self-awareness, step by step (sometimes a step back), every day. And remember, all there is are lessons. Karma comes into play as well beyond the mind to grasp.
Paul Levy addressed this topic from the viewpoint of Wetiko in his newest book “Undreaming Wetiko”:
“Unresolved trauma passed down through the generations is cumulative—to the extent it is not consciously dealt with in one generation, it becomes more severe each time it is passed on to a subsequent generation.
Every one of us, whether we know it or not, has become who we are, at least in part, as a result of our parents’ unconscious, unprocessed trauma.
It is not just our bodies that are the offspring of our parents and our ancestry; our psyches are the offspring of our ancestral unconscious as well.
The portal out of which our personality crystallizes into who we are is informed by the unresolved karma and the unmetabolized trauma of our ancestors.
Our parents, who Jung suggests we should view as “children of the grandparents,” have been formed by their parents in a lineage that goes back through countless generations.
The repressed and unlived lives of the parents act like a contagious and malignant psychic virus that infects the surrounding field.
Whatever is repressed by the parents is nonetheless alive, covertly working in the surrounding environment, influencing the unconscious of the children.
The parents often remain blissfully unaware of how their repression affects other family members, who have to deal with the burden of their repressed contents.
This psychological virus is like a nonlocalized bug in the system that creates a disease and disturbance in the coherence of the family.
This virulent psychic pathogen germinates in and replicates itself through the unconscious of the children, which is the medium it uses to reproduce itself over time through the generations.
Parents’ self-reflection not only helps to heal both parents and children, it nonlocally sends ripples back through time, initiating a process of healing the entire ancestral lineage.”
More on that topic in our recent podcast with Paul Levy:
“Undreaming Wetiko: Breaking the Spell of the Nightmare Mind-Virus”
https://veilofreality.com/2023/07/06/undreaming-wetiko-the-nightmare-mind-virus-paul-levy-tcm-111-part-1/?vgo_ee=8DAHV0LnR36MAjgpvaeZwhcIHitubhSWzZK4Ngd7lpqtNck%3D%3AqxXD4g0y0lSkqRbaiz5pEIekzwoKWmkA
