Ancestry

Have you ever considered whether the mental and emotional problems you’re struggling with are actually yours?

Many disciplines recognise the power of the up-line in a family to influence the incoming children, in the spiritual field we tend to call it the ancestral line, and it is possible to become an ancestral line breaker.

My Upline

Anxiety and hurt came down both sides of my family. My grandmother felt like the less loved child, my mother felt the same way, and I had it confirmed that it certainly appeared that I was far less loved than my brother. I realise now that was an over-simplification.

My maternal grandparents lost two boys in the 1930’s, they must have been late losses for them to know in those days. In 1938 they finally had a boy who lived. In 1942 he died for want of one injection of penicillin. During the war all the available drugs went to the soldiers at the front, and there was a huge hidden cost of the war in the unnecessary deaths of the general public. My little uncle was one of them.

This led to a twisted attitude towards boys in my branch of the family. I was an only child with 6 adoring adults until I was 6, grandad died, 6 became 5, my brother was born, 5 became 0. As an adult I can well understand, especially as he had asthma, that they were all petrified he would die, but as a child I couldn’t understand not just being pushed into second place, but virtually pushed out.

I don’t want to go any further into the grot, but that point about what you can understand as an adult but not a child is often extremely important.

It can be very useful in the ordinary run of things (not with abuse etc.) to look back at your life as an adult and consider what your elders went through. Sometimes it really helps you to release hurt.

My father was adopted, something he discovered when he was 35, a year before my maternal grandfather died (who was like a father to him), which was three months before his adopted mother died. Imagine those three blows coming so close together. In Dad’s day and age you weren’t told you were adopted, and it was often because the baby had been illegitimate and the whole point of adoption was for an innocent child not to be tainted by that fact. Seems very weird now doesn’t it.

My father married and had a son. Unfortunately he and his first wife couldn’t make it work, I don’t know why. She remarried and again, for the look of the thing, he was instructed by a court that it would be better for the child if he were believed to be the son of her husband. Dad fought back but in the end realised he was doing the boy no good. That hurt him until the day he died. My half brother never looked him up, he did other members of the family but not dad. Imagine that!

Can you see now why boys became an unnaturally important part of our family life? And also where the depression and anxiety that I inherited came from? Because I was able to understand this as an adult, I have been able to put it to one side and view them with compassion. That was four shockingly sad lives right there. Bearing in mind I was never, in any way, subject to abuse.

However…

Where I was similar to my father was in being prone to anxiety. Was that because I was often told that I was like him and would have loved his approval? I honestly don’t know. What I do know was that from the age of 6 my life was all wrong, it wasn’t a place that I could have thrived, within the family or during my first marriage. I had real problems.

This is another important point: Is your anxiety and illness or do you have real problems? Sometimes we’re treated as ill, or not quite sane, when in fact we have excellent reasons for the way we feel.

What I did avoid, thanks to my grandmother, was the avoidance of taking on all my father’s perceived medical issues, all our family medical issues, and bringing them down into my body. I do not believe that anything that runs in my family can’t run past me and keep going. But I feel so much for friends and clients who come from sick families and gradually get pulled into that idea. Remember…

Being ‘just like…’ has to be a good thing, and you can cherry pick!

Pause for Thought

Rather than make this a long blog, or go into my even longer story, why not have a rummage around your ancestry, your memories, and see how affected you are by them. They can actually be the easiest thing to deal with (excluding abuse of course).

You can still love your mum whilst deciding that you choose to be nothing like her, and worship your dad whilst doing the same. One thing I’m certain of is that any loving parent who has suffered would not want you to do the same. Mine don’t, okay they’re in the spirit world but we’re still in good contact and I really appreciate their presence in my life.

So…

After a quick dip into my weirdness, more on that later and no doubt that blog will be called ‘Unexpected!!!’, the takeaways here are:

• Reflect on the ancestral line
• Think about what they went through
• If it’s illness we have so much information nowadays that you can access to maybe avoid
• Decide what you’ll keep and what you will eradicate from your personality (there was so much good in my nan and parents I can’t tell you, nan is literally my saving grace)
• But above all, don’t live anything that doesn’t make you feel good inside.

To your happiness

Deb xx