23/06/2026
In a recent session I become aware that my client was carrying psychological and intergenerational trauma that belonged to his grandfather involving guilt, shame, and moral injury.
So I asked what his story was. I learnt that his grandfather was involved in one of Australia’s worst industrial disasters that killed 35 people and injured many more.
Trauma can be transmitted across generations, even when descendants had no direct involvement in the original event. Passing on
Inherited emotional narratives, complex emotions, beliefs, survival defences, perceptions etc.
Moral injury can be transmitted across generations. The grandfather was carrying this type of trauma because he believed people died partly because of the decisions he was involved in.
I was able to work with the grandfather’s energy in spirit and help him process what he was still carrying. It’s always so deeply moving what transpires in that space of engagement.
Part of my client’s own self punitive behaviour and other limiting aspects of self were linked to this inherited burden and also helped shape his identity.
Every family system has aspects of its history that are difficult to acknowledge, bankruptcies, suicides, betrayals, transgressions, accidents, crimes, murders, scandals, catastrophic fates and failures.
We can find ways to honour and acknowledge their pain, not carry it.
Many of my clients are highly sensitive/empathic/psychically gifted and because of that become the carrier of an unfinished story, attempting, often unconsciously, to resolve what the family system could not integrate at the time.
This is an example of the ancestral shadows that can unconsciously be influencing our lives and what we can do to un-tangle from them 💫
