well hello hello everybody good afternoon to one and all and wherever you are in the world listening to this broadcast at this time welcome to reclaiming authenticity finding one skirt to reclaim that which has always been in you very happy to be with you here today each and every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time noon Pacific Standard time now if you're a follow-up just broadcast I just want to thank you for your continued support and just want to remind everybody who might be tuning in for the very first time that the each and every week these broadcasts focus on the integration of spirituality and our mental health and it's all within the context of our relationships with ourselves others and God or the device and go run into individuals folks to just stay don't get the concept of integrating spirituality and mental health because of what they've been taught
it's meant to be exclusive or how can I say Science & Faith
yeah we just coexist in the same sentence was along the same context but the integration of these two aspects are very much important because we can just look at spirituality and you know what I find meaningful growth in Opportunities and so forth and we can just focus exclusively on her mental health insights and transformation at that but when we put the two together and we understand you know the the integration of how one supports the other and vice-versa wonderful transformation occurs in us so in again these this integration is placed in the context of our relationships because we are relational beings we are social creatures that everything that we do in terms of our spirituality and our mental health that has to be lived out in one way or another through the context or in the context I should say
of our relationships and if you want more information about me or if you want to leave me her comments about Today show I invite you to visit the website it's www.pbs radio.com reclaiming authenticity so that's www.bvs.com that all one word reclaiming authenticity if you would like to be part of the show and you would like to call in and give you the number here that's 888-627-6008 that's 888-627-6008 and I'll be taking your calls after the break and just in case you can't stick around for the the whole show today for the whole hour or maybe you want to go back and listen to the other shows you can go back into the archives and
listen to the ones that you missed and these broadcasts are now available for download on Audible and Amazon music before we get into today show just want to mention that if you would like to subscribe to these broadcasts you may do so just by visiting the website and you'll see the banner at the top of the page you can just click on a subscription blank and then you'll go from there as far as the information and just want to remind everybody that you do not need to subscribe in order to access these broadcasts but again it is much appreciated if you do subscribe so again there's all the information right there on the website so many people asked me like what do you believe you know what you know what what's your understanding of this integration of spirituality and mental health
you know just how did you ever come to this understanding and why this particular theme you know when you could be talking about other things and I kind of said quite frankly it date comes from two deep-seated beliefs in me
I have the first place is that you know I'd like to buy truly truly believe that everybody has the answers within themselves you know when I deal in the mental health side of things in the world is a counseling therapist a trauma therapist you know the last place that people want to look for their answers is within themselves and you know what this to mean that we want to complicate things you know we don't realize that you're not just stopping and taking a look within ourselves is really putting a sauna a rather unique because when you think about it we know the kind of Lies We want to lead you. We we know what brings us happiness we know what brings us joy and peace and contentment and so forth and we'd know what does it and so pretty much people know the kind of life that they would like to leave however
as we go along in Life or maybe we're in the wrong place at the wrong time and something traumatic happens to us or let's say we're going along in life and because we have never dealt with our past or our past hurts or pain or disappointments our frustrations or whatever the case might be these unresolved issues just keep popping up they keep following us into one relationship after another whether those relationships are personal or professional and so that understanding people do have the answers within but they struggle to get past some things in their life and so the second deep-seated belief really ties into the first one and the second one is that I truly believe that we all come into this world already equipped and Grace with everything we need and inter
Darla in for this life I should say in terms of our our giftedness or our skills or talents or strengths are character traits and so forth and yet again when you go through life and we may experience some very unpleasant things which make us question do I have anything good in me am I good or we might hide our giftedness because let's say we were teased or ridiculed at some point in our life but nor we were told you no time and time again that there is really nothing special to us tomorrow we would never amount to anything which is 150% garbage right there that message so anyway we can all go through life and we do not realize our gifted or we might be aware of our skills but it's going to be a long time coming before we allow ourselves to be vulnerable
again from we go through this life being a functioning from a place of wound or even the you know Victor but instead of a place of healing and wholeness and embracing our uniqueness if I there is so much more to us than what we have become so far and this is really what reclaiming authenticity it's all about you no finding that courage to be able to look inside of ourselves and reclaim that which has always been and not
because we often fail to look within ourselves for that which we already have so on that note I hope your heart is well this day and if you are struggling this day I am glad that you you know tuned in and hopefully today's message will bring you the rest and comfort and the piece that you need so welcome to Today Show it's entitled A Line in the Sand what divides our heart
well throughout history there have been certain events or certain diseases shall we say that have carried a a social stigma and have often struck fear in contempt into the hearts and lives of people locally or even around the world and down through history it could have been something like leprosy and you're early Biblical times or tuberculosis in ancient Greece or the Bubonic plague in the Middle Ages or the Aids HIV AIDS and the late 20th century and now we have covid and so forth but in all of these aspects you know societies have really displayed a pattern of purposefully disenfranchise people who are different who recite me of contracted these and other diseases and so forth initially that this reaction from society
what is considered justifiable because they saw it as something necessary in order to prevent the further spread of communicable diseases
however many Afflicted people interpreted be in quarantine as society's way of displaying contempt for that
and as a result many people felt stigmatized by their illnesses or they felt shunned or alienated from fully participating in their communities as persons of value dignity and worth the author Erving Goffman he noted that the Greeks originated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs or designed to expose something unusual and negative about the moral status of the one who bore that sign okay and these signs which were imposed you know by Society were either cut or burned into a person's body which stand advertise his or her condition whether you know it was a slave or a criminal or a traitor and defied to all who saw it that the one who
this was attached to was a blemish person or ritually polluted and above all they needed to be avoided but such markings. Are they spoiled a person's social identity but also cut them off from society I just force them to live in isolation in a very unaccepting world and from this aspect it appeared as though there was no way to remove this outward sign let alone recover from the emotional wounding from such harsh treatment
this wasn't always the case samples that I'm thinking of now just back of the days of the year like save the ancient Israel a purity laws where distinction was made between the holy or the profane and the clean versus the unclean and this this language comes in when we start talking about stigmatization and so forth as cleanliness being the the norm normal condition that was displayed by most people know anything else then whether it was just after sickness or disease are coming into contact with blood or etcetera was a consideration of outside the norm or a deviation of the norm and then they're for the carrier or the one who came in contact with these things
they were separated from a. Of time from the community to avoid further contamination and yet over time what started off with a temporary isolation the practice eventually became an acceptable way to expel people permanently people who shall we say polluted Society by their conditions and this expulsion this Behavior was true for not only people who had my dentify about condition or identifiable stigma but also for those who had a condition that was not readily seen such as a mental illness
well in today's society not all the signs of socially and terrible diseases are immediately visible in a specially the early stages of you know whatever is considered outside the norm and yet one such a condition was learned by Society or situation was learned by Society you know society's overall contempt for what is Dean does unacceptable Behavior are flawed character really reduce that person from a whole and unique individual to a tainted or discredit what
and then when Society imposes this kind of stigma on a person and an ultimately it leads to the person's disenfranchisement okay that is placing them in a context which he or she is accorded the social right to have his or her voice be heard or their vote counted or whatever and such persons are then really rattled relegated to like a second-class citizen status or political subjugation and yet on the other hand
that to be enfranchised meant that a person enjoys the benefit of full of Mission to let's say political Freedom a right and a privilege the extended by Society to all people who are you going to have the freedom to exercise full participation and the Affairs of the community that is just something that they thoroughly enjoy that so we're there is disenfranchisement there is also an opportunity to enfranchise people to bring them back into society the society once kept them out of arm's length than Sophie well throughout history physical boundaries have also been drawn and redrawn often based on the outcomes of wars and conflicts and Conquest
and when people cross the boundaries you know once they have been drawn on the map or once they've been do you know the natural boundary markers and stepped out of their designated areas of the consequences involved either a penalty to be paid at stole a detainment or even people were turned around and told to go back where they came from. It's almost as if it's like you stay on your side of the line you're not welcome over here
well I started thinking of this historical pattern and it is quite a pattern I will admit but I was reminded of the Primera movie that was just released last week it's called Kashmir files which they said it's a 2022 Indian Hindi language film portrays The Exodus of the mass Exodus of the kashmiri pandits during the Kashmir Insurgency which the movie portrays as a genocide with a fictional story line
and actually the the Kashmir Insurgency or the Kashmir files just has a long long history and you know this just didn't happen out of the blue these lines on a map or not just drawn overnight because it's God goes back to the 1947 agreement signed between you know the British government who was leaving India and the pakistanis are quite simply it was called the partition
and so back in August of 1947 when after about three hundred years in India the British finally left in the land was partitioned into two dependent nation-states the hindu-majority India and then the muslim-majority Pakistan and almost immediately there began one of the greatest migrations in human history as it's referred to as being some Muslims do you know just track to the West and East Pakistan and where millions of Hindus and six headed in the opposite direction and still there were many hundreds of thousands who never made it now according to an article that I read back in the New Yorker in 2015 across the Indian subcontinent communities that had coexisted for well over a thousand years
each other in this terrifying outbreak of violence in our with the Hindus and a six on one side and the Muslims on the other and it was a mutual genocide as expected as it was unprecedented
and it was almost as if when the lines of the partition were drawn on a map they were also drawn on people's hearts
and in the Punjab and if the Bengal area is providence's that you're part of the India's borders with the West Indies Pakistan respectively.the the violence was especially intensive you know there were massacres arson forced conversions Mass abductions Savage sexual violence and Thanksgiving one report that I had seen that Sons 75,000 women were raped and many of them were then disfigured or dismembered
and so there is a long history of Oppression and suffering of the cashmere he's in this region and depending on who you talked to the Pakistan claims most of the region based on its muslim-majority population and then China claims a largely uninhabited regions of the chin and the checksum valley so encouraged you to watch the Kashmir files at a theater near you I think it's out in most theater is starting today or definitely tomorrow
but as we consider you know the history of people who have drawn lines on maps and the people who feel as though those lines have been drawn on their hearts
has anything changed from the say those days gone by
maybe we still have geographical boundaries we still have on spoken boundaries that have been defined as an us-versus-them mentality
and we have sayings such as people who come from the other side of the tracks or well you know about those people
in fact again what we look at maps and we see the violence surrounding and what's come out of as soon as the lines were drawn on the map where these lines also drawn on the people's hearts you know it we get a sense that it also divided People based on external parents has of let's say race or color or Creed nationality religion excetera
and either way you know Geographic or boundaries were often established to Define who's in who's not who's permitted to live here who's not
and yet how many times do attitude so Prejudice and bias judgment and stereotypes often draw deeper boundary lines in our hearts
one of the most striking in my mind that one of the most striking a disturbing historical characteristics of societies is that it has always existed a pattern of disenfranchising the weak and the wounded you know people who have been labeled as unlovable Untouchable and therefore well they're unreachable
and for some disenfranchisement was due to their disease or their illness and for others it was due to their poverty and stay for others it was due to their gender or their race or their religion or their politics or social class and many in society preferred such people as it were you know not to be seen let alone heard from
and yet just as the Christ from our ancestors and those who have been victims of crimes against humanity just as those voices can never be silenced
so too are the cries of the disenfranchised heard above the din of everyday life
you see their cries are not only her deep within the soul but also their pain and be giving a voice to those who speak for them
call culture as there were and and are very specific laws sometimes explicit you know most of time in Pleasant that were given to the people that guarded against taking advantage of the disenfranchised and other words
they're meant to protect those who are forced to live in separate from others either within the community or forced to live in isolation
and what these laws were distinct about was his perspective of maintaining a distance and as I mentioned earlier it was the division between clean unclean or wholly versus profane and so forth and you know who's acceptable and who's not who needs to live over there and who needs to live here or whatever the language is and by today's standards some people might consider these these codes are these Purity laws
which not only categorize people that were objects as cleaning or unclean. They also banish people from being the community you know some people might consider these these security codes as being extreme
and yet I think what needs to be emphasized hear that it was a state of on cleanliness that was never meant to be permanent and this is where it comes in protecting those who are considered unreachable unlovable and so forth
and interesting you go back through religious literature and are we seeing in the major major religions that God demanded Holiness in everyday life and yet God never abandon the people
Provisions were often made in these codes are these laws for people to be redeemed from their unclean conditions and to be welcomed back into society
pay for it for example when I give you this one example yeah once approached by a person's condition let's say from an infectious disease had returned to normal or enough time had elapsed the person would be readmitted to the community by having a member of the clergy or a priest or you know some other ruling figure pronounce him or her clean and then certain sacrifices were then offered to complete the ritual of purification now unfortunately by the time of Jesus's day in the first century this practice of temporarily quarantining unclaimed people became an acceptable way to expel them
permanently
and I got this Behavior was justified by the perception that unclean people somehow polluted the rest of society by their conditions
so this was one of the reasons why the you know let's we got to set some clear boundaries here unfortunately those boundaries became permanent a person had no way to heal from being isolated or to be cut off and so forth unless you had somebody who crossed those boundary lines whether they were written or Unwritten spoken or unspoken
because they saw something more than a person who is excluded they saw something more than a boundary issue they saw a person who had been
cut off from society and needed to be brought back yet needed to be cared for because they didn't see an illness they didn't see a crime they didn't see some other condition you know that that kept them outside the city so it might be wise and they reached out and they brought them back in and because they've crossed the boundaries you know literally and figuratively they were punished for it you know almost as if to say to society like these boundaries are a joke these boundaries are meant to keep people out not to whatever is told the people at their the benefit for
but again
what are the boundaries that we maintain in our hearts
and again if you do just like infectious diseases you know I deal with you know you don't know mental health and mentally ill people were even forced to live in isolation or with like condition people that's all we have to do is just go down through history and we see one example after another and as a result you have figures who took no Delight in the systems of the day that labeled ridiculed or excluded the weak and the wounded
and the guns you don't know people who went beyond the laws of their day and reaching directly to the person then bringing them back in
so whenever you find a person who saw disenfranchised people oppressed by A system that had gone to say off the rails you know therefore I mean they not only slot you wanted people out but they also healed them and brought them back into Community but I would really love to hear your heart on this matter so again if you would like to call in that number is 888-627-6008 that's 888 6 to 7 6008 and I'll be taking your calls after the break again you are listening to reclaiming authenticity and of your host dr. James Howard be with back with you in one minute
okay welcome back I'm dr. James how come you are listening to reclaiming authenticity just want to share with you a quick word about next week's show ironically it's going to be held on Friday April 1st yes April Fool's Day okay titled the tetris of forgiveness now if you're over a certain age you remember playing the video game Tetris yeah that's the game that the these blocks would drop-dead all different shapes they would drop down the screen and you had to quickly turn them or flip them around and stack them in a way that you could have avoided building up a wall you know the idea was to clear as many blocks as possible and of course the more successful you were in eliminating your blocks the more difficult the game became this came so fast you have like a split-second to like flip it and drop it
and again get out there with the music would start going faster and faster which probably throw you off your steam as well but would you believe that game Tetris has a lot to teach us regarding not only the emotional walls we build to protect ourselves and to keep others away when we've been hurt or wounded or disappointed but this came also shows us how we can find Healing from these emotional and psychological and physical and spiritual wounds
because just as these walls go up Brick by Brick
they can also come down Brick by Brick
so we're going to take a closer look at that next week so if I should the tune in Next Friday April 1st 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time noon Pacific Standard time for the tetris of forgiveness right here on BBS radio.com Station 1
well as I was sharing earlier in the show it's just in dealing with how lines are drawn on a map to say this is the territory and sometimes they were just like natural markers of that's like rivers are or mountains or or whatever or emotions you know and that the times other boundaries were drawn as result of the end of a conflict or a conquest and such boundaries were meant to indicate that certain people live on this side of a certain people live on the other side of the line
and again it's almost as if When lines were drawn on a map those lines were also drawn and our hearts because it is communicate an us-versus-them mentality you know that we live on this side but those people over there they live on the other side and then stigmas come in and prejudices and everything else
and something else that's reinforced by Society down through history is that well you pretty much had to stay on your side it's like you don't cross these boundaries because if you do the group that you are leaving feels betrayed you know where you going what are you doing you know don't forget where you came from don't forget you're one of us
and so forth and yet we also have one example after another down through history and literature and so forth of people who crossed the boundaries that just geographically but cross the boundaries in their own Hearts because they fell in love with a person from the other side
classic example Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare guy we get it but how many people have you known maybe you're one of them you know one of the things people have done that who married outside the so-called boundaries whether it be marrying outside your age bracket or marrying outside your gender or marrying outside your race or marrying another outside of socioeconomic status and just the reactions are just unbelievable and instead of looking at the you know the person with the value dignity and worth its looked at as do you know where this person comes from do you know what those people are like
and it is caused quite a division not just in families but towns States Nations and throughout the world
but take a look at this another way I'm just how do communities heal
from history
cuz when you look at not only the pain that the individuals and Society carry you want so you know have to begin asking the questions can anything change what can be healed what can get better what is resistant to change why is it resistant to change and so forth and one of the things that I discovered and I'm just dealing and then my own research into individuals who struggle with trauma but also when communities experience. Collective trauma that recovery and healing is often a very slow process
and this is due to the fact because the emotional mental physical and spiritual wounds often you know evolved the means by which people not only identify themselves but can also be used to exclude others who have not experience the same trauma okay the factors shared traumatic psychological effect group of people and or societies and yet for people who did not experience an event firsthand any psychological physiological or even spiritual effects on the person we're often passed on and that's experience symptoms of trauma vicariously
now the traumatic events witness Pine entire Society can really stir up Collective sentiment on the resulting in a shift and that society's culture and its actions guy and I'm sure all familiar with well-known Collective traumas but I'm just going to run down and this is a shortlist even. It's like its goes on forever that's the short list of collective trauma that history has been responsible for we have the cathars genocide we have the slavery of African-Americans
we have the Nazi Holocaust
we have the sun guard genocide
we have Stalin's Great Purge
we have the Armenian Genocide of 1915 we have the 2nd of genocide the massacre at Wounded Knee in South Dakota
and the mistreatment of indigenous people through the boarding and Industrial schools in the United States Canada Australia and other nations
we have the Estonia disaster in Sweden we have the Rwandan Genocide we have the My Lai Massacre the doc for genocide
the Belgian Congo we have the non king massacre we have a fascination of world leaders we have the sock genocide of 2014
we have the shooting tragedy on Kent State University in 1970
we have the India partition of 1947 and the Kashmir Massacre
we have the Cambodian genocide and the Khmer Rouge
we have the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center the Pentagon and the crash of Flight 93 and so on and so on and so on
get out and an interesting Lee enough that at the sites we received Memorial placards or and or statues that are often directed to constantly remind people of the the loss that communities have felt
and although well intended to never forget these reminders make moving beyond the traumatic event or traumatic experience almost impossible for some people especially when annual observances often stir up feelings of pain and unresolved grief and feelings of helplessness and in some cases but in some cases instead of empowering people to transcend this energy of emotional and psychological wounds
trauma is inadvertently passed on to succeeding Generations
are they strong relations may take on such trauma vicariously because of their in direct involvement through Community associations or Blood Ties or other filiation such as Integrated Systems
one example that I'm thinking of is that the Anthropologist Maria Blanco developed an unpublished intergenerational diagram that accounts for the effects of colonization violence on subsequent Generations in South America and this particular diagram by Blanco can be traced directly to the history of indigenous Australia and she was able to measure things out all the way out to the 5th generation would hurt her diagram is it on the first generation men who were killed imprisoned or enslaved in Subway or unable to provide for their families okay
and the second generation what generation removed
the majority of men abused alcohol and or drugs to cope with the loss of their identity and diminished sense of self-worth
and what made matters worse that in one particular act the Queensland government passed it was the Aborigines protection of alcohol and opium active I think it was 1897 this act removed abusers of alcohol and drugs to be relocated to reservations okay but it didn't offer any support to overcome their substance use and abuse issues
about the third time the third generation came around the intergenerational effects of violence started to be manifested in increased physical and emotional spousal abuse and other forms of domestic violence
and then families were also disrupted when the at-risk children were taken from these mothers and placed with non-indigenous families and even though I'm talking about Australia here this is something that the Native American Indians are struggling with even today we look at what's going on in the reservations in South Dakota and what are we doing with that risk children while we want to get them out of the home spot there are being placed with non-indigenous families and so they are forgetting where they came from their forgetting their Heritage they're forgetting who they are
and so forth and so that that practice that fight still continues
so by the time the fourth generation again for Generations removed from the original experience this original begins to be re-enacted against spouses and children and it's kind of an interesting Norm of culturally accepted Behavior like this is who we are this is what we do this is something that we identify with and this is you know you very much characteristic of our people of our community
and then the 5th generation that she also looked at though the cycle of violence is repeated and compounded as unresolved trauma fuels not only more violence but it's also recognized them through severity and social distress and other words it's starting too no pun intended hear bleed over into larger entities starting to bleed over in through other parts of society
now in counseling children and adolescents who has parents and Grandparents were stuck in their trauma they the children and adolescents often describe you know their parents and grandparents as stuck and therefore because they're stuck their damaged or they're preoccupied and emotionally Limited
as a result children struggle to develop a sense of trust or a healthy self-image social skills and safety in relationships
traumatize parents also have difficulty with their sense of identity and autonomy or appropriate self-soothing mechanisms that same sound very clinical affect regulation and maintaining a balanced perspective when life you know when life challenges come up
The Pact parents often display inappropriate numbed and disassociation and those responses to Everyday stress
and certainly you no other issues also include you know changes and self-perception such as very reinforced chronic and pervasive sense of helplessness or paralysis of initiative when they just they can't take the initiative I just feel stuck in a mobile dealing with shame and guilt and self-loathing essential defilement or stigma and essentially a sense of being completely different from other people
and following up on this an author adkinson also linked historical events associated with the colonization of the Aboriginal lands to increases in the rates of Family Violence and child sexual abuse and family breakdown in indigenous societies so an ongoing challenge for healing trauma and survivors becomes extremely difficult when in Tyre communities and culture has become stuck in their traumas related to war genocide torture Massacre and so forth
and these cases let me know I'll be the first one to say this traditional counseling is hardly effective when everybody is traumatized a kind of reproduce itself and as long as the social causes are not addressed and the fenders continue to benefit from the exemption from their crimes of course of trauma is going to continue
but you've heard me you don't want these shows previously that the trauma has potential to disconnect us from who we truly are you know who we are as souls and the reason for this is because trauma places such a distorted template over our own perceptions another words, says do us well that's all there is that's all there is to you this is all the rest this is as good as it gets
these are all lies and distortions that come from other wounded people who have yet to embrace themselves for who they are
Casa Sol
attack once we Embrace ourselves as Soul we may be astonished to see the power of our soul to not only transcend trauma and transform our wounded energy but we can certainly Empower others to do the same and still has history teaches us many have fear the resiliency and power of the soul and therefore have tried to sign it and I threw killings and murders and genocide starvation and force the simulations humiliations degradations looking at people as Savages primitive and backward unworthy unlovable and therefore disposable as those in control see fit
and what is very heartbreaking to me is that we go back down through the atrocities that have been committed throughout history that how much of these atrocities have been committed in the name of God you know by people who should see themselves as so first and foremost
even when killing is done in the name of the dancing God's kingdom the only thing that is truly Advanced is the distorted view from those who will do anything to hang onto their power
I get weak we can live with hope there are things that we can do come across another article is back in 1998 it was between Vengeance and forgiveness Facing History after genocide and mass violence and this was not a cool that that really looked at the legation commissions what what their role should be and you have to keep that first and foremost like these are the goals and to do it thoroughly so that healing and be thorough and you know some of these roles include creating public awareness of atrocities or obtained full account to build a record for history okay so that hello maybe history shouldn't be repeated again
and then transform violence into the practice of respect that restores dignity to victims and survivors
and certainly punish offenders for their crimes and to build an international order to try to prevent yuno from future tragedies
and also respond to aggression torture atrocities and so forth
and there are several positive outcomes to seeking this kind of restorative justice because it does help reduce recidivism and then PTSD symptoms as well as increased satisfaction that justice has been served but restorative justice seeks healing on both sides
okay good because I'm like retributive justice which pretty much determine if the response to a crime is proportionate to the punishment restorative justice focuses on repairing the harm caused by criminal behavior and in an ideal situation it's a mediator who helps facilitate a Cooperative effort from both sides and addressing the wrongdoing in the harm caused others
but this collaboration does not imply that the offender of such crimes that dictates the terms of reconciliation I mean that just something that is that should never be allowed but instead the impact of the crimes committed our scene for the harm that they have caused others as well as working toward attainable solutions that will bring about lasting reconciliation
and this way transformational healing is really given an opportunity to take root in All Peoples all relationships all communities past present and future regardless of where these boundary lines are drawn on a map or drawn in our hearts
I definitely think about the people who have come before us and our own healing and the healing that are really pretty much our ancestors need as well as like a chicken-and-egg the line I like what do you heal first who do you heal first is it healing that we also heal our ancestors or as we heal our ancestors do we also heal ourselves and one of my favorite family systems theory as Mary Bowen suggests that a person cannot be fully understood in isolation that is a part from the greater context of their family community culture in the world and yet Within These larger systems people struggle to differentiate themselves had to be guided by their own thoughts and feelings and actions
another words although with the visuals desire to think and live for themselves okay they're often drawn back into the you know that's a prevailing and often codependent emotional patterns that characterize the continuous wounding of families of cultures and societies and therefore systems in general or not to be discarded effective structure that gives order but they ought to provide a context from which people Define and a x reader find who they are in very healthy ways
LMN order to work through this process of differentiation Bowen also noted that families need to recognize how their present situation their characteristics tend to mirror this intergenerational dysfunction that is a result of unresolved trauma that is result of let's say Collective tragedy and so forth so the characteristics such as marital conflict or dysfunction one spouse for emotional distance and or impairment in one or more of the children often mirrors societies anxiety and instability as they experienced Wars and genocide and scarcity of natural resources and excetera
and again if the greater systems out there in the context of society are dysfunctional and if the toast things are able to be addressed and heal people then or better equipped to identify where they need to heal their own family system their own individual pain and so forth how many times do we get the message so I guess I'll just look out for number one don't go making any waves fall in line with the status quo stay on your side of the boundary
and if these mixed messages are confusing we're not allowed
cuz we need to just go back in time through history and we will see what we're really dealing with and what we have been told this may not I've always been the case
so as previously mentioned healing intergenerational trauma carries with it a great deal of courage and responsibility because we could just as easily dismiss it's important importance in the passively accept the world and then the which we live is just how it is we just have to get used to it we just need to put her head down we just need to stay on our own side or whatever
and yet these distortions are so intertwined in many many systems that it appears nothing happens in a vacuum that all may have had a hand in creating and sustaining oppression or coercion and Corruption down through the centuries
but when we embrace our so Consciousness and transcend toward the realization of who we truly are we're unable at that point to then perpetuate the dysfunction that holds a distorted way of life together
indeed the intrapersonal and the inter personal transformation is that powerful
and that's the capacity I see the potential that I see in all individuals it's there
can you see it in yourself I'm Doctor James how kind you have been listening to reclaiming authenticity thank you for spending this hour with me I am invite you to tune in to next Friday April 1st 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time for next week's show and title of the tetris of forgiveness until that time everybody take care be safe and may God Hold Us in the palm of God's hand
or jumped to leave a thousand comments or product to buy a book by dr. hope it's all there just to calm and we'll see you next Friday at noon Pacific Time on PBS radio TV