Putting a Stop to the Heartbreaking Generational Curses and Traumas Of The Past For A Better Future

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Covid did a number on my mental health, resurfacing traumas that had remained dormant for too long. After a significant spiral, I knew I had to do something different to avoid the oncoming aloofness that was once my mother. 

So when Elevation church began talks of the word for the year, I opted to participate. After several weeks of prayer and reading the Bible, I received my word, inheritance. It made zero sense to me, but I liked it because a few years prior and continuing into 2021, a big focus of mine was breaking generation “curses.” 

Generational curses began to show themselves really as generational traumas. And when I looked at generational traumas, I began to understand that the traumas created responses that became learned behaviors passed down from one generation to the next.

Now my word began to make sense. The healing I do would ripple effect on those around me, causing those it touched on to inherit healing rather than trauma. Knowing that healing had a ripple effect gave me the strength to keep going. 

There’s a story in the Bible about a woman who washes Jesus’ feet with her tears, but I never understood it until I cried what I imagined those same tears. I cried what felt like an entire ocean day in and day out as years of repression surfaced. Only this time, because I had developed a relationship with God, it no longer hurt me in the present. As odd as it sounds, I balled my eyes out with this sense of peace and comfort that I can only attribute to Him. And the more I cried, the more I knew I would be fine.

And just when I thought I couldn’t cry more, the day came when I began crying in a way I never knew possible; harder than I’d ever cried before. So much so that I dropped to my knees as tears streamed down my face. I tried to catch my breath, But my tears were soaking through my pants and onto the floor around me. 

Everything around me was so wet that wiping my tears only resulted in me moving wetness from one place to another. But when it was over, I felt a release. As though I had been set free from the chains of my past and the generations before me. I finally understood how that woman could wash Jesus’ feet with her tears. She had to of been crying that much. 

I understood my assignment, I had to put in the work of changing learned behavior, so I could stop inheriting the anxieties and depressions that were passed down to me. What had seemed impossible prior now felt like a welcomed challenge.

It was now time to take a closer look at myself and reconsider the patterns of behavior that felt familiar and comfortable to me. For someone as stubborn as myself, this wasn’t easy or fun. But I knew that to evoke change; I had to do something different. So I began with my stubbornness that has often kept me from doing anything unfamiliar. 

Once a day, I had to do the opposite of something I would typically do. It didn’t always have to be something big. Sometimes that looked like reframing a lousy thought or taking a different route home. Some days it meant saying yes to something I usually wouldn’t do or saying no to something I typically would do. I won’t lie; in the beginning, the difficulty level was equivalent to pulling teeth. 

My brain did not want me to change. But I learned that my brain was built for survival and would do most anything to keep me in “comfort” as a way of keeping me from the unknown. Knowing this provided some relief. Because I kept doing the same things, my brain was trained a certain way and would *simply* need to be rewired. Easy in the sense that it can be done but extremely difficult when put into practice, especially for someone so stuck in her ways and routines. 

What else could I have inherited aside from trauma, addiction, and pain? Though I wasn’t sure that I’d ever have children, just in case, I wanted them to be able to inherit something different from me. Mother or not, could I leave behind a better legacy than the one I was currently living? 

I had become so used to living with Anxiety, Depression, and Complex PTSD that I never even thought twice about them. Don’t let it define you; instead, use it as a tool, my spirit nudged. Much like trauma, healing can also be passed down through generations, which was enough to keep me going.