In the United States today, about 27% of families are estranged from each other. Adult children are estranged from parents and grandparents and the pain of this arrangement is excruciating on both sides of the line. Decades ago, I completed a master’s degree in family and child psychology to do the only thing I could think of to try to save my relationship with my own family and my parents. Nothing really worked back then. In my master’s degree, textbooks celebrated estrangement as a sign of adulthood.
Later, I got certified in Constellations Therapy to try to bridge the gap between me and my parents. That also didn’t help matters much. I spent a lot of time doing this certification program under people who really didn’t understand Bert Hellinger and what he was able to intuitively understand about family dysfunction and how to resolve it.
There wasn’t anything that I could say or do that would’ve been “right” back in those days when I was in the ranks as the “youngest adult child” in the family. I wasn’t in charge of the relationships back in those days and the people who were in charge, the older ones, had few or no tools to work with to properly navigate the challenges that they faced in the modern world either. In other words, the problems that I had with my parents (and my parents with me) wasn’t my fault, but they also weren’t my parents fault. I blame all of us, as humans, for divorcing ourselves from the natural world because the natural world offers solutions to the problem of estrangement.. I know that sounds strange to the modern ear…what is this person talking about? Estrangement from the natural world and what nature has to offer us is a HUGE problem in today’s world. Without things like Ayahuasca, Sapito, psilocybin, San Pedro, Peyote, Xananga, and Rapeh / Rápe, it is nearly impossible to overcome a problem like familial estrangement or exile.
I was lucky to have been forced into exile from my own family as a young person because this experience motivated me to find solutions to family problems starting at a relatively young age (starting in my late 30s). I didn’t realize as a young person that this estrangement from my parents was going to be played out as a pattern that would emerge with my own children later in my life. If you’re reading this article as an estranged parent, you might think to yourself, “Well that’s what you deserved! If you cut off your parents then you deserve to have your own children cut you off from them!” I know this way of thinking myself, but – what a tragedy to have a family that’s broken into pieces like this. Who wins if the children go into exile and then the grandchildren…and the great-grandchildren after them? Anger is sometimes necessary as a defense, but anger is also a block. And in reality, most of the people who are reading this article are reading it because they know that there’s a block to healing the family and they want to get past it, but they have no idea where to start.
What finally helped our family get out of one of several big estrangement “loops” was a side trip that my nuclear family (my husband, John, and my second daughter, Lydian) took into the jungles of the Amazon River basin to do Ayahuasca after 4 years of estrangement from my parents, but I’ll talk more about that below. For now, I just want to begin this discussion by saying that families, all families, encounter serious challenges in their efforts to protect each other, to take care of each other during illness or after injury, to overcome destitution or oppression by governments and big institutions, and in their efforts to be seen by each other in daily life. Life can be really hard at times. When one or more people in a family experience a trauma (or chronic ongoing stress such as what happens in situations of neglect), other family members suffer. We’re all connected so one family member that’s hurting is a family that’s hurting. And if the family can’t figure out a way to help the hurting family member, a pattern develops. Lydi and I call this pattern a “dance”. Family members dance around the original trauma until there’s a resolution for it.
The dance that people do with each other to avoid setting off extreme behaviors and emotions like anger or sadness can be passed on for generations. When this happens, we call it “ancestral trauma”. All of the material, the trauma, that isn’t properly processed and integrated gets passed down in the family through generation after generation until it can be processed and released / integrated. In other words, if you don’t work on your own personal trauma and pain, and also the ancestral trauma that you carry from the other members of your family tree who came before you, your children will have to do it. Someone will have to do this work and release the trauma. If your children or your grandchildren can’t do it, their children will have to do it. The weight of the trauma will get heavier and heavier. Sometimes whole branches of the tree will break and fall under the strain of it all.
While adult children with young kids and teenagers are nearly powerless to change a familial pattern and overcome the ravages of ancestral trauma (because their lives are hectic and filled with near constant change and uncertainty and because they’re the youngest of the living adults in the family), grandparents wield a lot of power, in contrast, to overcome the sickness of exile and estrangement-related patterns in families. But, as grandparents – as the parents of adult, estranged children – we have the power to do a lot of good in our families if we’re willing to work with the sacred medicines to confront ourselves and our trauma.
Before working with the sacred medicines like Ayahuasca, Sapito, psilocybin mushrooms, San Pedro, and more, I wasn’t able to have this balanced view of things. I felt angry and self-righteous a lot. I felt wronged and passionate about making sure everyone in my family could see my point-of-view at the exclusion of all other points-of-view. This was true when I was the exiled young adult and it was true when I became the estranged parent of adult children later in my life. Essentially, I was a trapped in a very lonely type of “hell-on-earth”, in exile from loved ones and from love. While adults of estranged children are almost always going to have to take an action and go apologize to their adult children, show love, and then attempt to restore communication, many in the older generations who attempt to do an apology and restoration of communication before working with the sacred medicines may ultimately fail because the ancestral patterns of trauma are still intact. Parents and grandparents are more powerful than we realize and though our words may be correct…we may say the right things, we may say them in the wrong way. Though we may arrive at our daughter’s or son’s house to make peace and we may say the right words, the dance that we do with our bodies, gestures, and tone or vocal inflection is all it takes to set off the need for boundaries in the younger adult generation.
How and why did I become estranged from my parents and my entire extended family?
I had reasons. After our daughter, Lydian was born, my husband and I had had a stillborn baby. We were traumatized by this. My husband was divorced and he had a child, my step-daughter, from a previous marriage. My husband and my step-daughter were never fully accepted into my side of the family by my parents. My husband’s divorce before he and I married was something that my parents couldn’t fully accept. Our stillborn baby was invisible to them while for us it was at the center of everything we were feeling and experiencing. There were financial problems, or rather financial patterns in our family and both sides of our family, both sets of parents, felt like we owed them something financially. Meanwhile, we were so poor, we often couldn’t buy food for our kids. Our exile began when I suddenly became conscious of how our parents were damaging us financially. Being financially unable to support ourselves was a constant source of trauma, but having the older generation stealing from us, usually in a covert way, led to all kinds of issues in our family. Exile felt good, at first. Exile was a way for us to feel “safe”.
My parents were also traumatized by things that had happened in their past that had never been resolved, but we all attended the same Christian church for a while and the rules weren’t flexible in the church at all. Our baby was burning in hell (per the pastor who shared this information with us when he came to our house with the cemetery map so that we could pick out a grave). Our parents wanted us to just “get over it”. My mother wanted for me to “turn to God”, but I was angry with God for the loss of my baby. My parents weren’t as bothered by the pastor’s assessment of our baby’s eternal agony as my husband and I were. As a young adult, my parent’s response and their inability to understand our response to the death of our child or provide a container for any of our pain was the beginning of our attempts at going into exile. We were young and we didn’t have the tools or the power in the family to just “get over it” in regard to the baby or in regard to our parent’s response to it. Our lives hurt.
My parents and John’s parents wanted for us to parent them. This was one of the most powerful negative patterns in our family that we had to overcome. In Constellations vocabulary, we were too big and our parents tried to become small. It was a big-small issue. After working with a number of people who have had this big-small issue, my experience is that people can literally lose their minds and develop severe mental illness when the big parents act like the small children. Parents are always big in Constellations terminology. Children are always small. The children can never be more powerful, bigger, than the parents. Yet many families today require that children try to be big. In my experience, this happens as a result of unresolved trauma. Trauma, after all, causes a person to dissociate into sub-personalities and those sub-personalities are usually younger than our biological age. Sometimes those sub-personalities are really young, often babies or teenagers. When the adult children are cast into the role of “big parent” at a young age, a lot of confusion results and adult children, at some point, may feel compelled to cut off their parents, who are acting like “small children”, so as to manage their own families.
My own parents wanted our money and they would steal from us. When they stole money from us, they felt justified. After all, we had cost them a lot of money growing up as kids. But when parents have these types of behaviors, the family tree is literally turned upside down. Young adults don’t have the resources, financial or otherwise, to be able to be “big” and to be able to support parents or grandparents or older siblings and relatives. If the older adults in a family require the younger adults to provide the material resources, the family tree will eventually die because there won’t be enough resources reaching the roots of the tree – the actual children.
My parents wanted for us to take care of them emotionally. They wanted for us to take care of them physically and financially as though we were the older generation of parents. But they also wanted us to function as the Wise Ones. Yet, if we tried to be wise, or to speak with wise words, my parents would easily, effortlessly crush me with just a pursing of their lips. That’s because my parents are big and I’m small. A pursing of the lips is all that’s needed, by them, to control me and to make me feel a very powerful and compelling urge to do what they want. I can’t be wise to my parents because they’ve lived longer on the earth than I have. So, if they require wisdom, but won’t accept it from me, I’m caught in an eddy and it’s really unpleasant. I’ll do anything that I have to do to get myself out of that eddy in order to save my own daughter.
I began to repeat this same patterns of my parents later in my life when my own daughter got married, but I was lucky to have access to Ayahuasca as a sacred medicine and within just a few days of starting this pattern and realizing it, John and I were able to break it, or at least notice that it existed. In truth, one Ayahuasca trip is enough to stop bullshitting yourself, but for those of us who have been born and raised for our entire lives in industrialized society, we need a lot more than just one dose of the sacred medicines.
I’m grateful for the brief period of time that I had to repeat the negative patterns of my parents. During this window of time, I got to experience what it felt like to not be able to find the right words to communicate with my daughter. I got to feel that loop where I was angry and then where I felt sad and unable to stand the estrangement…and then angry again (why was she doing this to me?), and on and on. I got to really feel what it was like to be angry and righteous – like my daughter had somehow wronged me (even though she hadn’t) and what it was like to get caught in that loop and be unable to find my way out of it using just my left-brain, my mind. I got to experience all of the rage and disillusionment of my own parents toward a daughter who was estranged (though only for a few days at that time) and then cross a line and experience what it’s like when rage and disillusionment is replaced by understanding and solutions to the problem.
John has a daughter from a previous marriage, my step-daughter. Though I’ve felt, at times in the past, like my lot in life was difficult, my step-daughter has lived her entire life in exile since birth. Her mom had addiction issues and this woman, my husband’s ex-wife was a traumatized woman. She’s a single mom of 4 kids and my step-daughter was the oldest of these kids by a number of years. So my step-daughter became the mother of her siblings, in a sense. She had to be big to her own mother from a young age. John and I tried a lot of things with my step-daughter and her mother when my step-daughter was still a kid but there was a lot of static in the line. John and I didn’t have anything inspiring to contribute to the mess. The communication was garbled, in large part by John’s mom, who still works hard to disconnect John and me from his daughter and make sure that my step-daughter is under my mother-in-law’s thumb. John’s ex-wife’s parents were angry with John for leaving their daughter (though his ex was the one who wanted the divorce). In other words, everyone felt this excruciating pain as a result of that split between John and his ex. I know that pain because I felt it myself when my own son-in-law left my daughter before their first baby was born. It’s excruciating and I was willing to do anything, anything to heal the family so as to relieve that pain. In any case, my step-daughter’s grandparents would throw things at John sometimes when he’d come to pick up his daughter because they were angry and in pain. John was so mortally wounded by losing his first child to this ugly, dark-hole-of-a-situation that he became inert and unable to fight against it. Resolution wasn’t even comprehensible when we were young. If we brought up this messy situation, people generally just tossed fuel on the fire rather than offering any kind of option for help to resolve it and find a peaceful, balanced arrangement. We lost contact for the first time with my step-daughter when she was 5 years old and a month later, we had a stillborn child. At times, the pain of our daily lives was so much that, at that time, I didn’t know how to survive it. John’s and my daughter, Lydian, then just 6 months old, kept us from dying.
Sub-Personalities, and Dissociation
You may not believe in soul loss yet. That’s okay, but understanding soul loss as a concept, whether you ascribe to any religious / spiritual connotation of such a thing is mandatory if you want to understand why a beloved adult child would choose to live in exile from the (potential) support of a family and be unable to reunite. Often, instead of talking about soul loss in the shamanic sense with clients, we use the psychologically-derived model of this same concept instead and we call parts of the soul “sub-personalities” or even just “parts”. The basic idea of a “part” or “sub-personality” has been around and in use for decades in hypnotherapy and in models of psychology that look closely at the unconscious mind as opposed to always trying to talk things out using the conscious mind. If we use psychology to talk about how John and I sent “parts” of ourselves away in order to survive a major trauma, we might say that the traumatic experience “broke us into parts”. We might also use the word “dissociation” or even “depersonalization” to describe how our psyche is designed to break off from itself in order to gain perspective or in order to survive extreme pain. In the psychology model, trauma usually results in a chasm that produces 3 or more parts that have been categorized roughly as follows:
- The Core Self – This is the part of us that’s wise and that has a divine connection to the Light. The Core Self is present-tense focused and one of the ways to pull this part of ourselves forward is to do mindfulness exercises.
- The Protector – This is the part of us that feels angry and wronged. It’s the part of us that’s most likely to “step forward” to speak when we feel threatened or hurt by someone else.
- The Firefighter – This is a part that will go to great lengths to make sure that we don’t have to feel the emotions of the more wounded parts of ourselves. The Firefighter is the part of a person that’s operational when a person engages in risk-taking behaviors like sexual promiscuity, cheating, gambling, doing drugs, and more in order to numb the body and engage the conscious mind in anything that will keep the unconscious material suppressed.
- Exiles – Exiles might be sad, grieving, terrified, or they may have a combination of feelings that are extremely unpleasant. When an Exile steps forward to embody the body…to literally take control of the body, people are technically having what’s referred to as a “flashback”, to borrow terminology from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). But the word “flashback” is a misnomer. This word suggests that people can see something in their conscious mind and that they know the source of their turmoil, as a result. In real life though, a flashback is actually experienced as a horrible, awful feeling…an emotion that’s felt in the body as something that’s eternal and “unmoving”. A flashback feels like an immovable force and after a person experiences a flashback just one time, they often try to avoid it with every fiber of their being. This leads to rigid and inflexible behaviors that may seem extremely frustrating to other family members. No matter how pleasant and okay the world and relationships and every aspect of a person’s life may be according to material fact, Exiles and their emotional content is so unpleasant that it makes it seem like the paint is peeling off the walls and monsters are coming to life out the walls and the floorboards for the person embodying one of these “parts”.
When a formal and semi-permanent type of dissociation occurs and a part of us is sent into the unconscious, this part of us is often still connected to the body through the autonomic nervous system. This part that’s been sent away can still “step forward” and reconnect at certain times to take control of the physical body. This is similar, if not identical to multiple personality disorder / dissociative identity disorder. In the model that Lydian and I use when working with clients, multiple personality disorder is the standard structure for the human mind. In other words, everyone has multiple personalities. Everyone needs multiple personalities to function in daily life, in fact. The presence of multiple personalities or “parts” helps us function in a work environment and community one second and in a family context the next. We “switch selves” and embody different personalities to manage the tasks that we have to do each day with different groups of people.
The issue with having multiple personalities becomes an problematic only when some of these personalities are locked up or sent into exile. When a personality is sent into exile, the rest of the psyche, the other personalities, have to expend a great deal of energy to keep that exile behind bars. When the exile escapes, it can reveal our secrets to ourselves, so the psyche then has to do damage control using Firefighters.
Protectors step forward to help us manage triggers that we might encounter in the environment around us. Protectors tend to seem and feel like a facade to other people because that’s exactly what they are. When the social environment around us involves people who are, by and large, not connected with the natural environment or the present tense (which would pull forward the Core Self), we end up interacting all day with other people’s Protector parts. When one person pulls forward a Protector part, it’s hard to not also pull forward one of your own Protector parts. We sense this kind of “armoring” in other people. We feel it when a person is embodying a Protector and not their Core Self. Reflexively, the right-brain / body manages which part of us steps forward to manage the social environment.
In relationships, we do something like a square dance with the people we love when we’re traumatized. This square-dance is a square-dance of mostly Protector parts. Much of this “dancing” happens to avoid the Exile parts in ourselves and in other people. In families, children learn at a young age how to trigger their parents and how NOT to trigger their parents. A part of me, for example, (a Protector) will step forward to do-si-do with a part of you (also a Protector). My Protector parts developed and are specialized to either trigger another person and weaken them or to NOT trigger another person in order to “smooth” a social interaction. In families, we tend to “dance” our Protector parts almost exclusively with others when we deal with the people we’re closest to. And those people (our parents, our children) “dance” their Protector parts through the steps of a family code that may date back through as far as 10 generations of ancestral trauma.
In my own family, t has been many generations since families used the sacred medicines to solve problems in their relationships. A lot of children have been lost. Children have died, families have emigrated, they’ve been oppressed, and had to convert to different ideologies and act in specific ways or die. They’ve been wounded or they’ve fallen ill. What happens to the children is the biggest weight of the burden when it comes to ancestral trauma. It’s natural for parents to look at their kids and feel a huge burden of responsibility because the children are the roots of the family tree. When something happens to a child, the entire tree trembles and leans a little. But the parents of the children ( he youngest adult generation as the older adults can’t have children as a general rule) are the trunk of the tree. Occupying that space on a tree as the youngest adult generation is the most difficult thing that we do in our lives. But unfortunately, one of the symptoms of trauma is amnesia. When we send a part of ourselves into exile because of a strong, unprocessed, negative emotion, we also can’t remember the full scope of our traumatic experiences as young adults (or as children if we experience birth trauma or other types of trauma when we’re very young). What happens when parents are traumatized is truly tragic because when these parents become grandparents, they can’t remember what it was really like to be young adults who are trying to protect and rear the roots of the tree.
Dissociation
“Dissociation” is a word that’s used to describe parts of us that have not been formally sent away, but that can come and go from our energy field. This isn’t as far-out as it sounds! Most of us have been trained from a young age to “plan ahead” which is a type of dissociation that involves going into the future to build or to organize a path for ourselves. We might also be calibrated with parts that return to the past in order to try to solve a problem, a trauma, that hasn’t been properly processed and integrated. Usually, there’s a trigger. At this link, I talk about the U.S.-Mexico border as one of the things that ended up becoming a trigger for me. Triggers are usually really hard to identify consciously and they’re even harder to avoid, yet we do avoid them unconsciously. Attempts to avoid triggers unconsciously looks like rigid behavior and inflexible thinking. Though women can be rigid and inflexible, men are more likely to become very rigid and inflexible because their brain does not go through monthly cycles of plasticity. Women’s brains become plastic (or changeable – where our neural connections are pruned and reorganized) during ovulation and also during menstruation. This difference between men and women explains, at least to some extent, why men tend to be much more “linear” in their thinking and less flexible emotionally to alterations in a step-wise plan.
Triggers cause parts of us to take flight and go into the past or into the future. As such, they cause us to stop being in the present-tense and to be unable to tune into conversations with people who are standing right in front of us; they cause us to have mental chatter and an inability to focus on what we’re doing in the moment; they cause us to have a far-away look in our eyes that makes it possible for other people to see or sense that we aren’t fully tuned in or “embodied”; they cause us to say things that we don’t mean and to react over and over again in the same way without flexibility, compassion, or curiosity with the people we love even if we’ve rehearsed and really practiced other ways to be.
Of course, I didn’t really have words back in my young adult years, to explain why I felt like cutting my own parents out of my life. This is also a symptom of trauma. The sense that you don’t have the words to really capture what you’re trying to say or do is a sign that you’re dissociated and traumatized. As an adult child, dissociation was experienced, by me, as the sense that I could rehearse a certain set of words or a particular message that I wanted to convey to my parents when I was alone at home, but when I’d see my parents, I’d always end up saying the same things to them or I’d be unable to say anything despite those intense rehearsal periods. The words wouldn’t come forward. Later, I’d hate myself…or rather hate on myself. One part of me (The Protector) would chide the part of me that carries the burden of those strong, negative feelings (The Exile) and the trauma. Sometimes, my Inner Firefighter would come out to send me out to do something unhealthy like jogging 20 miles (which wasn’t good for me even though the culture around me celebrated this type of dissociation) or drinking a whole pot of coffee.
My parents continue to this day to face me with their Protector parts and they confuse me with their own parents on a regular basis. They aren’t able to be present with me and they aren’t interested in making an effort to be present anymore even though they know what they could do to be present. The lack of resolution that they experienced as young adults under the hammer of my grandparent’s trauma isn’t their fault and I don’t blame them, but I also can’t look backward at them. I need to face forward, as a parent myself, as a grandparent, to do what I can for the younger generations. I have honor and respect what my parents have done and what my grandparents tried to do for me. I’m here because of them. Life is hard. I’ve only lived my own story. For example, my grandmother on my father’s side lost twin baby girls early in her marriage to my grandfather. My grandfather became an alcoholic and an asshole to try to deal with this trauma. My grandmother checked out completely and dragged herself through the rest of her life. She faced all of her daughters-in-law with anger and Protector parts. The daughters-in-law felt unsafe with her and argued with their husbands to go into exile from her. My grandmother sent a massive part of herself away and became dead and cold on the inside. My dad, in turn, spent a great deal of his life trying to bring his mother back, even just for a moment, to notice that he, her son, was still alive. My mother was a trigger for my grandma and so were all of the daughters-in-law. What a mess, right? But this mess got passed on to me because it wasn’t processed and it wasn’t ever resolved. There is no technique and no culturally prescribed way to deal with this kind of heavy load at the current moment in the history of our world. There are techniques and culturally prescribed ways from the past that we can use in a modern way though…namely the sacred medicines. Otherwise, estrangement becomes the only tool that young people can use to manage the damage.
Religion vs. Spirituality
If the youngest adults with children are not supported by the grandparents and if they aren’t given some path to follow in order to resolve relationship issues, then you eventually end up where we are right now in our society: 27% of all American families include estranged adult children and a huge proportion of young people have no interest in ever having a romantic partner. Men are completely at a loss to understand what women want from them. And women have given up on men. Is it really such a stretch to think that there are plants and animal-venoms that can be used to specifically address this issue? Religion has demonized nature including plants and animals. All of the major religions make the claim that humans are naturally evil…yet they also acknowledge that God created everything.
On one mushroom trip, a rather painful one at that, I sat in a meadow-y area contemplating the idea of “rules” versus the “felt experience” of being human. I went back through time and considered “rules”, some of them religious, some of them national (we call them “laws”), others familial, or based in an institution like a school, and I thought or was guided through a series of thoughts about how these rules are necessary. The rules, for example, of my religion-of-origin, Christianity, says that I shouldn’t cheat on my spouse, for example. This rule was certainly created out of a milieu of pain and it was developed to try to help us avoid pain. But cheating still happens. And when it happens, we have to have a way to release the pain or else, more pain ensues. On that trip, I got to experience my own dual nature in a really powerful way that helped me appreciate the part of me that naturally tries to follow rules. But I also went back in time to re-experience times in my life when intuition guided me through loopholes and around obstacles that were placed in the road by The Rules. Without this ability that I have and that every human being has, to navigate around The Basic Guidelines for Living, in order to find a better way to do things or in order to find solutions to serious issues that threaten my survival, none of us would be here now. Our earliest ancestors did not have rules. They didn’t have any information and they didn’t have any rules. So they had to feel their way through their lives and use their intuition. Intuition is what helps us survive on this planet. Earth can be cruel. Other people can be cruel and conniving. But we all have this thing – intuition – that represents the most primal, basic element that we’re all born with. Babies have intuition before they have words and rules, for example. If they don’t have intuition, they can’t bond to their mothers and they won’t survive.
Even as I write this, an “introject” of my mother pops up in my mind. I imagine her reading this post and how I’ll get an email from one of her Protector parts that’s fanatically religious. It’s the part of her that told me, years ago, when she and I were discussing homosexuality. I knew, at that time, that my brother was gay, but my mom didn’t know yet because she has this scary Protector part. I was trying to soften my mom in a way that would maybe make it possible for my brother to tell her that he’s gay, but instead of softening, at one point (probably after being triggered), she produced very angry facial expression and said, “All of the homosexuals should be lined up against a wall and shot.”
I said, “It would serve you right if your own son was in that line.”
And that was the end of our conversation on this topic.
Religion is divisive, which is why it produces wars. Religion is something that humans developed to try to solve problems by producing rules that generally make us happier:
Be nice to each other.
Don’t steal each other’s things.
Don’t cheat on your spouse.
Don’t be greedy.
Don’t say shitty things behind each other’s backs.
Etc.
But people don’t and can’t always follow rules. Life, at times, demands that we find loopholes and be more creative in our solution-seeking or else we, or our loved ones, won’t survive.
Even a baby will notice when his or her mother is not paying attention to them even if that mother is holding the baby in her arms at that moment. Babies will do whatever they have to do, before they have words, to try to get their mothers to come back (on a soul level) to the present tense, to gaze into their eyes, and tune into the baby’s emotions and needs. If the baby can’t accomplish this basic task, and their mother is always in the Far Away Place, that baby’s survival is threatened. The baby knows. And that baby is likely to “act out” and cry a lot. The mother who is in the Far Away Place a lot will inevitably feel irritated by the crying and fussing. This creates a pattern, from a very young age in a family, that’s based on trauma.
As we grow into adults, we lose this faculty of being able to sense whether the person we’re speaking to is in the present-tense with us – or rather, we’re taught to stop using this faculty. We’re taught that being in the future to plan and organize a path ahead of ourselves is more important. We’re taught to only think about the world and reality in terms of logic and rules. Our “felt sense” about the world remains intact, but covered up by rules. And when this problem reaches critical mass, people go into exile from each other in order to reconnect with themselves.
Many parents who are estranged permanently from their adult children try to “give it to God” and find that this effort is unsuccessful in producing desirable results in part because “giving the problem to God” implies judgment from a high place. And religious judgment and righteousness is a root cause and not a root solution to the problem. You can use “giving it to God” as an Intention when working with the sacred medicines and humble yourself to the natural world (which was, in fact, created by God), but if you feel like you’re above doing such a thing, this is likely a big part of the issue.
Until your pain gets greater than your fear of working with something, a sacred medicine, that can break down your own walls inside of yourself, until you feel humbled by the emotional crucifixion that you’re experiencing as a result of the rules, you’re stuck. If you prefer the rules and the straight and narrow, then you can continue to exist in that experience for as long as you like. It’s hard to intersect with other people for any length of time if your mind works on a gridded-street system. Your religion may have taught you to stay away from things that might open your mind and to make neural pathways that can flow downhill like water, or neural pathways that can fly like the wind, but all humans can be like water or be like wind if properly motivated. There’s a time and a season for everything, after all. There’s a time to be like water. There’s a time to be like wind. And there are times to build gridded streets into the earth. What time is it for you? You’re human, so your physical body may be pained and bent by the weight of some seemingly immovable force. What can you become in order to surmount it? Or you can follow the rules and stick to the grid or live in the prisons of your own creation. If you want to solve dire problems in your family and remember how to be wind, water, fire, or earth, Nature has the tools that you need.
What You Can Do Now to Reconnect with an Adult Child
If your pain is greater than your fear at this moment and you’re ready to make a change in yourself to open up space in your relationships with your adult kids, there are so many things that you can do. Below are places to start:
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing / EMDR – Many of our clients start with EMDR because this trauma-informed therapy allows people to gently confront trauma and release it. Most people have hundreds of trauma-stones that they carry on their backs and EMDR is like putting one of those stones down. EMDR works very well for “surface trauma” that’s ready for release now, but can be less effective for trauma that resists surfacing in a normal day.
- DreamLight.app – This is a guided meditation and brain entrainment tool that takes your brainwave state into theta (surface unconscious), through alpha as a “bridge”, and into beta (consciousness). We recommend it for people who are unwilling or unable to use the sacred medicines to access and then release their trauma. The DreamLight.app is usually used in combination with EMDR.
- Craniosacral Therapy – If you’re an older adult with health problems that limit your access to the sacred medicines, craniosacral therapy can help you release trauma that is making it hard for you to have positive interactions with your family members.
- Constellations Therapy plus Psilocybin – Lydian and I offer Constellations Therapy in combination with psilocybin. We sometimes gather a group together to do this therapy. Lydian and I and all group members take a low, threshold dose of psilocybin. Clients are encouraged to take psilocybin as well in order to reduce resistance to the “felt sense” of the Knowing Field. Constellations Therapy with psilocybin is something that we do in person and also online. Contact us at info@medicinassagradas.com for more information or to schedule a session.
Psilocybin Therapy – In some countries, we have relationships with companies that produce and distribute psilocybin legally. In countries where psilocybin is not available, we can sometimes find and recommend other sacred medicines and advise clients on how to administer and use these medicines to overcome estrangement and other familial dysfunctions. Contact us at info@medicinassagradas.com to schedule online psilocybin therapy with us or go through our sister website, AlivenHealthy.com, to schedule a “health coaching” session to do an introductory session. Or, if you’d like to work with us in-person in Mexico at our facility, contact us at info@medicinassagradas.com to discuss options and packages.