By Daniel J. Benor, MD

Family therapists are keenly aware of inter-generational issues that create problems within families. When intense emotions are bottled up and buried outside of conscious awareness, their effects can be visited upon future generations.

One of the more common examples is that of a grief reaction that is either too painful to process around the time of a death, or that feels overwhelming because of other pressing issues at that time. Grief carries a heavy mixture of feelings, including sadness, hurt, longing for the person who is no longer with us, depression, anger and guilt. When a person buries such feelings at the time of grief, the tendency is to leave them buried.

It may be difficult to repress these emotions because we are constantly opening the internal file drawers where they are stored – in order to insert our ongoing undesired feelings. So if we suffer disappointments at any time following the grief, when we open the sadness/grief file drawer to insert a new item, the old items call for our attention and it may require serious efforts by our unconscious mind to keep them from rising into our awareness and upsetting us.

The next defensive maneuver is to put a mental ‘KEEP AWAY’ sign on the file drawer. We might devise messages such as:

“DO NOT DISTURB!
THESE FEELINGS ARE GOING TO UPSET YOU
IF YOU OPEN THIS MEMORY STORAGE BIN.”
or
“WE’RE DOING FINE SINCE WE BURIED THOSE UNHAPPY FEELINGS
IN THIS FILE DRAWER.
LET’S LEAVE WELL ENOUGH ALONE.”

Two serious problems result from these tactics. First, it is draining on our energies to have to constantly avoid the drawers on the one hand, and to keep the materials inside the drawers from building up pressure and bursting out of their hiding place on the other hand – as more and more similar issues and feelings get buried in the same drawer.

Second, as detailed further below, when we bury our feelings in these ways, it often influences others in our family to do the same. We may discourage others from letting out their feelings, or they may hold in their feelings on their own in order to avoid upsetting us. In either case, the repression of feelings spreads like a virus to other family members

TWR is excellent for dealing with unresolved issues from grief reactions. People report regularly that they are able to release the hurt, pain and sadness of missing the person or animal or life circumstances that are there no more; the anger; the guilt and other emotions. People are much improved even when they have been carrying their grief for many years.

Bert Hellinger developed another innovative transpersonal approach for clearing aspects of these issues, which he calls Transgenerational Healing. More on this in Part 2 of this article.
This article was slightly modified February 19, 2013.

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