92: Honoring Our Ancestors & Letting Go of the Guilt and Suffering of the Past
Are you looking to heal from generational trauma but feel guilty moving forward? Are you afraid that by moving forward you could be forgetting the very real struggles of your ancestors? Are you afraid if you don’t continue to talk about it, then you are not honoring your family?
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This is a follow up episode 90: Generational Trauma: How to Heal the Impact of Family & Parental Trauma. In this episode, I focus on how to honor our ancestors and their experiences, while letting go of the guilt for leaving behind their suffering and trauma. Healing generational trauma involves taking the wisdom, lesson, and pearls from our ancestors, and being comfortable leaving behind the suffering. In this episode, I discuss how and why we honor our ancestors, and how doing this will help us to free ourselves of the guilt and shame so many of us are carrying. I discuss how generational trauma often feels like baggage and what we can do to begin to let go of that heavy burden.
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Introduction: 00:14
Main Content: 01:57
Outro: 22:54
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Amanda Durocher [00:00:01]:
Welcome to New View Advice. I'm your host, Amanda Durocher, and I invite you to join me here each week as I offer advice on how to move through whatever problem or trauma is holding you back from living life to the fullest. Let's get started. Hey, beautiful soul. Welcome to New View Advice. I'm Amanda Durocher. And if you're new here, this is a healing centered advice podcast where I offer guidance for the healing journey.
I don't believe I have all the answers you seek. I believe you have all the answers. You just may need a new view and a little help along the way. Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode. Today's episode is a follow-up episode to episode 90. Episode 90 was generational trauma, how to heal the impact of family and parental trauma. And I wanted to do a follow-up episode today because I wanted to do an episode where I specifically focus on how to honor our ancestors and their experiences while letting go of the guilt for leaving behind their suffering and trauma. Healing generational trauma involves taking the wisdom, lesson, and pearls from our ancestors and being comfortable leaving behind the suffering.
Amanda Durocher [00:00:58]:
Are you looking to heal from generational trauma but feel guilty moving forward? Are you afraid that by moving forward, you could be forgetting the very real struggles of your ancestors? Or are you afraid if you don't continue to talk about it, what your ancestors went through or what your family has been through, then you're not honoring your family? If so, you're not alone, and this is the episode for you. In this episode, I discuss how and why we honor our ancestors and how doing this will help us to free ourselves of the guilt and shame so many of us are carrying. I discuss how generational trauma often feels like baggage and what we can do to let go of that heavy burden. Today, I'm going to talk about 4 ways we can honor our ancestors. But before we do that, I just wanted to mention that if you haven't been to my website yet, you can check it out at newviewadvice.com for more free resources, including journal prompts, meditations, blog posts, and more.
Amanda Durocher [00:01:44]:
You can find that at newviewadvice.com, and all the show notes from today's episode will be at newviewadvice.com/92. So with that, let's jump on in. Today, I wanted to do a follow-up episode to episode 90 about generational trauma. In episode 90, I really focused on how many of us need to heal from the impact of generational trauma and how so many of our parents unknowingly passed down the impacts of their trauma and familial trauma. But today, I really wanted to focus on the experience of honoring our ancestors and letting go of the guilt so many of us are carrying. I think so many people feel guilty for wanting to let go of family patterns, trauma, and belief because of a hyperawareness of the struggle of those who came before us. I know this has been true for me. I know this has been true for my partner, which is why I really wanted to do a follow-up episode to episode 90 because I think that this step of honoring our ancestors is so important for so many of us.
Amanda Durocher [00:02:40]:
And it's not always talked about, the importance of honoring what came before us and also allowing ourselves to let go of the guilt we may be carrying. I think this can be so hard because many of our ancestors survived very real trauma, such as wars, genocide, slavery, the holocaust, famine, poverty, injustices, racism, death, violence, and so much more. And when people experience traumatic events, they continue to carry those feelings and stories with them, and then they can pass them on to next generation. This is very often unconscious that they are passing on the trauma throughout the generations. I've talked about it in other episodes, but I think when we're traumatized or we're abused, there's this unresolved energy that lives within us, and it has to go somewhere. So sometimes it ends up unconsciously or unknowingly being passed along through the generations because I believe that this trauma at some point needs to be witnessed and seen. And so it's passed on until somebody takes the time to view it, to look at it, and to honor it, and also to let it go. The metaphor that I like to use for generational trauma is think of generational trauma as a suitcase that was left at your front door by older generations.
Amanda Durocher [00:03:44]:
Most people see this suitcase as a reminder of the pain and suffering of their ancestors. Some people choose to open the suitcase. Some people try to hide the suitcase. Some people deny the suitcase. But most often, you know the suitcase is there, and it just sits and takes up space within your house. You may find yourself carrying this suitcase from room to room, constantly looking for a place to put it. Sometimes it's hidden in the corner. Sometimes it's the centerpiece of the room.
Amanda Durocher [00:04:09]:
But it's a piece of baggage passed from 1 generation to the next. There will be times when you put the suitcase in a closet, but then there could also be times that you put the suitcase in a closet trying to ignore it, and then somebody from your family calls and reminds you about that suitcase that's sitting in the closet. Or a family member comes to visit and they take that suitcase right out. And so many of us continue to carry this suitcase throughout our life even if we don't want it. And not only do we not want it, many times we feel guilty about not wanting it or even thinking about throwing it out or discarding it. And this is because we know that the contents of the suitcase are important and sometimes shouldn't just be thrown out and never looked at or acknowledged. And this is because we know the contents of the suitcase are important and they deserve to be looked at and shouldn't just be thrown out, even though that may be our first impulse, just to throw out this suitcase. So because of this, we continue to stuff the suitcase somewhere in the house.
Amanda Durocher [00:05:04]:
But when healing, we realize that the healing journey is about cleaning out our house, redecorating our house, and choosing what we keep and what we want to let go of. The healing journey is about turning the lights onto our house, looking around, and beginning to choose what lives within our house. It's about taking responsibility for what is in our house. So the question for so many of us is, what is the right thing to do with the suitcase? How do we deal with it? I believe that the best thing we can do with the suitcase is to open it. We go through the contents of the suitcase and we really take it in. We honor what's in the suitcase. We honor what our ancestors and our family put in the suitcase, including the trauma and suffering. And we choose to clear what doesn't serve us and we keep the contents of the suitcase that we choose and we consciously and intentionally leave for the next generation, only the contents that will help them thrive and grow.
Amanda Durocher [00:05:57]:
Maybe the suitcase has some photos that you want to hang on to, but other things that you no longer wanna keep in the house. For example, to bring this back to reality, you may discard the fear that you've been carrying on and that's been passed through the generations, but you decide to keep the resiliency of your ancestors and choose to pass down that legacy of resilience and courage. We honor our ancestors because their real pain deserves respect, and oftentimes we can see them more clearly than someone on the outside of our family. We understand their experience because of the beliefs, stories, and way of being that's been passed through our family. We understand them, and it's easy for us to see the humanity in our ancestors. For example, in my own life, when I have worked to heal my own generational trauma, I have looked at my father and how he was raised and how my father worked very hard to give me a certain type of life that he deemed acceptable. It was what he wanted for me. It has taken me years to accept that I'm not gonna be who he wanted me to be, but I can understand and honor why he wanted those things for me and where those beliefs for him came from.
Amanda Durocher [00:07:03]:
But I've chosen to let go of the expectations he had for my life. But I've chosen to keep some of my father's great qualities that have been passed down to me, such as his work ethic, such as his moral code, such as his empathy for other people. Those are things in the suitcase that I decided to keep and that I hope to pass on to other generations. But things I decide to let go of, for example, are my father's anger. It's not that I don't feel angry, but I could see in myself that I reacted to people the way he reacted to me. And I can see that that is a generational pattern that I've chosen to let go of. I have a different relationship with my anger, and that's okay. It's okay for me to let go of the suffering of those who came before me, but I have taken the time to honor it, to see it, and to be with it.
Amanda Durocher [00:07:49]:
By honoring the past, we are not forgetting it, overlooking it, or denying it. We are choosing to see it with respect, empathy, humanity, and love. By honoring our ancestors, we take the lessons and the pearls. For example, instead of carrying the suffering, we carry the resilience, we carry the courage, we carry the spirit, We carry the creativity. We carry the love forward. We see how strong our ancestors were. They may have not been perfect, but there is always a pearl within suffering. I think what heals so often is seeing the pain, feeling the pain, and releasing the pain, whatever that pain may be.
Amanda Durocher [00:08:20]:
Many of our ancestors' family members and parents don't want us to feel this way. They don't want us to be carrying this burden. They don't want us to feel so burdened. They don't even understand that they passed on this burden. But it's human to pass along suffering, And it's through honoring and seeing this suffering that we can begin to let it go and its impact on our lives. This episode also was one I wanted to do because over the weekend, my partner and I spent time honoring his ancestors. So I mentioned in my last generational trauma episode that Evan's grandfather was a holocaust survivor, and that was an experience that was traumatic, obviously. And he didn't talk about it much, but Evan has seen in his own life the impact of generational trauma, how surviving an experience like that, the beliefs created about safety and security were passed on through the generations and to him.
Amanda Durocher [00:09:07]:
And so we spent time honoring his grandfather this weekend, honoring the experience. And we were talking about that his grandfather most definitely doesn't want Evan to live in fear and live in this place of feeling unsafe and, like, worrying about security so much. That wasn't the legacy his grandfather meant to pass on. His grandfather was incredibly kind, incredibly grounded, patient, and loving in spite of everything he survived. He built a life for himself from scratch. That's admirable. He came to America with nothing and he thrived. It wasn't easy by any means, but he built for himself, brick by brick, the life that he had for the rest of his life.
Amanda Durocher [00:09:49]:
And that's what Evan wants to take forward. He wants to remember that that is something within him and within his ancestry. This ability to start new. This ability to take a bad situation and to create a good outcome from it, to not be defined by the trauma that we've experienced. And so I think that's a big part of honoring is that we wanna take the time to understand that so often our family members and our ancestors aren't consciously passing this fear forward. But the fear lives within them, and it's just passed on. So when we're letting it go, it's not dishonoring them. It's actually honoring them because we're seeing it.
Amanda Durocher [00:10:24]:
We're allowing ourselves, like I said, to open that suitcase and to look at it and to take time with it, which very often when it comes to generational trauma, no one looks at it. No one acknowledges it. It's just a suitcase that remains in the house, but it's like having this huge suitcase that nobody's talking about, but it's taking up half the room. At some point, somebody needs to take the time to look at it. So when healing generational trauma, very often, the feeling of guilt is present. And I wanted to talk about guilt because I think it's very common when healing generational trauma because I think that many of us can have the thoughts like, if I move on, am I dishonoring my family? Or am I a bad child? Am I ungrateful? Am I allowed to move forward? Will my ancestors' suffering be in vain? What does it mean to let this go? If I let this go, am I a bad family member? And the truth is, it's not your responsibility to carry these burdens of the past. But I do find in healing, it is important to honor the past. And that can be our own personal past or the past of our ancestors.
Amanda Durocher [00:11:26]:
But with that said, many of us feel guilty letting go of the past. We feel guilty being happy or trusting or lighter than our family members and our ancestors. We feel guilty going in a new way. We feel guilty even seeing this ancestral trauma because maybe it's been narrated to us as something we should be grateful for, but, actually, it's something that feels like a burden. Honoring our ancestors and the suffering of the past is about making space for the pain, seeing it, witnessing it, and letting go of the guilt and burdens attached to it. When we let something go, it doesn't mean we forget it. As I mentioned with Evan, we were recently talking about that when he lets go of the heaviness of generational trauma, it doesn't mean he forgets what his family went through. It means that he isn't consumed by it.
Amanda Durocher [00:12:10]:
He doesn't carry it as a shield against the world. Instead, he's able to see it, hold space for it, and speak up when necessary. It's not that he looks in the world for antisemitism, but he will continue to honor his family by standing up for it if he finds himself in a situation where there's antisemitism. But he's not gonna look out in the world and assume everybody's antisemitic. He doesn't have to carry that burden. It's the same with our own traumas. For example, in my life as I heal from rape, it's not that I forget what happened to me. I don't.
Amanda Durocher [00:12:39]:
I'm just not consumed by it. I'm just not constantly living from a traumatized place. I'm not so hypervigilant anymore. I don't assume that every person around every corner is trying to hurt me anymore. But, again, I haven't forgotten what happened to me. I've just allowed myself to let it go as a burden. What we've survived and what our ancestors have survived don't have to be burdens that we carry. But again, it doesn't mean we forget what happened.
Amanda Durocher [00:13:06]:
It doesn't mean that we ignore it or deny it. It's something we know is there. We know it's something that's happened. And the more that we see our own pain, we see our pain, then the more we have space for others, which is a very important part of healing. I think this step of honoring is so important because when we honor and respect the struggle of others or even of ourselves, it creates empathy. And the more empathy we have, the more we can see the pain of others outside of us. The more I honor my experience, the more I can see I was not alone in my experience. The more Evan honors his family's experience, the more he can see a similar experience in others.
Amanda Durocher [00:13:40]:
The more that we take the space to see and witness pain, the larger our perspective becomes to the pain of the world. I see in the world right now a lot of blaming one another for each other's pain. And though I understand this urge, I do not find it helpful in healing. At some point we have to let go of the blame, and we have to just take the time to be with ourselves and one another, to heal, to let go of the suffering, but also to honor the very real experience of suffering. It deserves to be honored. No human deserves to suffer, but we live on a planet with so much suffering. And I just think that right now in the world I see this blaming and this shaming and this demanding to be seen in suffering. And I get it.
Amanda Durocher [00:14:28]:
Like I said, I used to be that way. When I was first healing from sexual assault and rape, god, all I wanted to do was talk about it. I wanted people to get it. I just wanted people to get it. But what I found over and over again is that people didn't get it. People didn't meet me where I wanted to be met. And it was an inner journey, coming home to myself, where I met myself, where I loved myself, where I held myself, where I saw my self, that now I can hold space for others. But I couldn't hold space for others.
Amanda Durocher [00:14:56]:
I couldn't create safe spaces for others until I saw my own suffering. And now I don't want to demand people to see me in my suffering. Like I said, how many of our ancestors probably want to be seen in their strength, not in their suffering? That's how I feel. I want to be seen for everything I did despite what I lived through. I don't need that to define me anymore. But I did that by honoring the very real experience I lived through. And we do that with healing generational trauma in the same way. Our ancestors and ourselves and our families deserve to have that real suffering seen, held and witnessed, and it's also not your burden to carry anymore.
Amanda Durocher [00:15:34]:
So, with that said, how do we honor our ancestors, honor ourselves, and by a result begin to honor humanity and their collective suffering and pain? So I have a list of 4 things I recommend. This is not a comprehensive list of everything you can do to honor your ancestors, but these are here as a starting place for you to begin or continue your journey of honoring your ancestors and releasing the burdens and expectations put on you by your family. So number 1, the first thing I recommend is to allow ourselves to look at the pain of our ancestors but not become consumed by it. We want to empathize, and maybe this is something you already do. I talk about this a lot in episode 90, so if you haven't listened to that yet, I recommend listening to that one as well. But it's important for us to see the pain of our ancestors in order to honor it. Many of us don't allow ourselves to see the severity of what people have survived or have been through. Part of honoring our ancestors is allowing ourselves to see it and empathize.
Amanda Durocher [00:16:24]:
Or maybe you see the suffering and you are consumed by the suffering, but you haven't seen the strength that came from it. I think honoring our ancestors is a full circle journey where we see the pain and suffering, and we also see the strength they had through what they survived. That they were able to create a family. You're here because of your ancestors, so there's always strength there. And I just want to mention that because I think, again, some people can become consumed by the past. I think if you're somebody who feels consumed by it, maybe it's time for you to take some time to realize the gifts that may have come from the suffering. I know that can also be a hard concept for people, but I truly believe all suffering has a gift in it. It's like carving a diamond for the rough, or it's like healing burns away that suffering and left as a pearl.
Amanda Durocher [00:17:09]:
I have found that throughout my own journey, is that every single thing I survived has offered me a gift as well. It just takes time to find that pearl. So some ways to begin bringing awareness or understanding. I think another word for awareness is to bring understanding to something. So to begin to understand what your ancestors experienced. This could be including journaling about your lived experience, speaking with family members, reading books that resonate. For example, when my partner and I were looking into his grandfather's experience around the Holocaust, we began to read books about that time and memoirs from people who wrote about surviving the Holocaust to allow us to really be with what it was like to survive that experience. But I think that journaling you can journal about your experience.
Amanda Durocher [00:17:51]:
You can journal about what you've witnessed, what you see throughout your family. You may have family members who are open to discussing this with you, but I just also wanna offer that not everybody's family is going to wanna talk about the past, talk about trauma. So you may have to find other ways to begin to bring awareness to this experience other than talking to your family. Or you may have a family that's open to talking about it. That's gonna be an experience that's individual for each and every person. My second suggestion is to set aside time to honor your ancestors and what they've lived through. So some ways to do this is, 1, my favorite way to honor experiences is through ceremony. So I love to do ceremonies.
Amanda Durocher [00:18:27]:
I think ceremony is a beautiful way to honor ourselves, our ancestors, and others. Creating ceremony is all about creating space in our busy lives to honor an intention. I believe that by creating the space for healing, we are inviting healing into our lives. So many of us are so busy. We're always on our cell phones. Ceremony is about finding time to be with the present moment. Healing really only happens in the present moment, so ceremony is a great way to create space and time for this. So I like to do ceremonies in nature, but ceremony is a very personal practice.
Amanda Durocher [00:18:57]:
It doesn't have to be fancy or it can be super fancy. It's really what feels good for you. But I think the importance when talking about ceremony is just carving out a time and being present with what is. And so I like to bring objects. I use crystals. I know not everybody's into crystals. But I like to use crystals or objects from nature. I like to bring flowers to ceremony as a way to honor and to kind of leave a flower on the earth as a way to honor the ceremony I just had.
Amanda Durocher [00:19:24]:
But I invite you to find a way to be with this experience that you're moving through and honor it. Another way we can set aside time is to connect with others or supporting others who had a similar experience. I know for me that when I work with survivors of sexual violence it helps me to honor my own experience and that of other survivors. I know another woman who works with domestic violence survivors because that's what her mother survived, so it has helped her to honor her mother's experience by working with people. So there's different ways you can honor this experience, but I think setting aside time to allow this experience up and to be with it will be healing and will help you to also let go of some of this guilt. I think guilt can be present with us because guilt arises when we think we're doing something wrong. And sometimes when we're shoving something in the back of our mind, guilt can be present. You're never doing anything wrong.
Amanda Durocher [00:20:15]:
I don't think you're wrong. But I think that by honoring our ancestors' experiences, that guilt begins to dissipate because we're not ignoring it. My third piece of advice is to let go of the burdens of the past one step at a time. Letting go of the burdens and guilt often takes time. I believe that by beginning to set the intention to heal and allowing all our feelings up and allowing yourself to to see this pain of your ancestors. It will help you to let go of the guilt, burdens, and other emotions a little bit at a time. I don't think this process can be rushed. I can't offer you a 30 day process.
Amanda Durocher [00:20:44]:
It's really an individual process. But allowing up what wants to be witnessed and what wants to heal, it will help you to begin to lighten this burden you are carrying. In my own life, I spent the fall of 2023 really healing from some family patterns and ancestral trauma, and I felt extreme guilt. And all I can say is that each time I allowed myself to see the guilt, cry about the guilt, and see that though I felt that way, I didn't have to feel that way forever and that I deserve to live life in a different way, that guilt dissipated. It just wasn't overnight. For me, there was this really deep pattern of how the women have lived in my family, and I'm choosing to go in a different direction. And I felt so much guilt about that, That, like, I even could choose a different direction and what did it mean. And I just found that by honoring myself and my real experience, honoring my ancestors, just allowing those feelings up and those thoughts up, and not making myself wrong for having those feelings or those thoughts, it dissipated over time.
Amanda Durocher [00:21:43]:
And I allowed myself to heal that guilt. And I just wanted to mention that honoring our ancestors takes time. There may be a lot for you to honor, but I truly believe the more you are with yourself and how you have been impacted by this generational trauma, the more your hurt will lead you to the freedom you are seeking. It takes courage to step on this path. So as always, my 4th piece of advice would be to feel a whole lot of compassion for yourself and for others. I think compassion is so important when healing generational trauma because I think that the more compassion we have for ourselves, the more compassion we can have for others, we have for our family, for our ancestors, and other people also healing generational trauma. I think that generational trauma has become kind of a buzzword over the past couple of years, but it wasn't always a buzzword. We weren't always talking about this.
Amanda Durocher [00:22:20]:
And I think it's really important to remember that when healing, that it's beautiful that we can have these conversations, but these conversations weren't always available to everybody throughout our family. And so it's not only important to honor our ancestors, but it's also important to honor ourselves and honor that we choose this path of healing because it's not easy. It takes courage, and you deserve a lot of compassion and and understanding as you navigate this healing you are on. So thank you so much for being here. I hope something in this was helpful. And as always, I am sending you so much love. Thanks again for joining me for another episode of New View Advice. As always, I'm so grateful to have these conversations with you, and thank you for listening to today's episode about honoring our ancestors and freeing ourselves of guilt of the past.
Amanda Durocher [00:23:05]:
If you haven't already, I invite you to leave a 5 star rating for new view advice and to subscribe to the podcast. Ratings and subscribers help to bring more people to the podcast and help me to continue growing and creating more content. Thank you so much for rating the podcast and subscribing to the podcast Because when you subscribe, you'll be notified every time I release an episode, and I release a new episode every Wednesdays. So thank you again for joining me for another episode of New View advice. As always, I hope I was able to offer you a new view on whatever you may be going through. Sending you all my love. See you next time.
