Do you worry your children are inheriting trauma from their other parent?
- Shelley Harrison
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
A concern women share with me all the time.
Are you a parent?
If you are a parent, once you start to suspect that generational trauma could be showing up in the behaviours and struggles of your children, you may feel eager to get as much from your past cleaned up as quickly as you can, in order to protect your children from inadvertently carrying burdens that are not theirs.
Here is the big concern parents share with me all the time.
“What do I do about what could be flowing down from their other parent’s side?”
You know you can do the work to unearth and clear what YOU may carry through from your own lineages…but what about the other side of your children’s inheritance?
It’s a very good question and a very valid concern.
We are each half our mom and half our dad, genetically, biologically.
The science of epigenetics has started to prove, definitively, that the genes we carry from mom and dad carry the epigenetic modifications of stress and resilience from them, and those who came before them.
This inheritance also echoes through our energy field or aura, which is part of what I work with and observe as a professionally trained energy healer, when we work together.
It’s part of the ‘secret sauce’ that helps me take you deeper than you may have gone before, healing the layers of personal and generational trauma held within you.
We all have ‘relational cords’ of energy and consciousness connected from each of our 7 main energy centres up the front and back of our spine (chakras) to our biological mom and dad.
With our biological parents, we have 2 kinds of Relational Cords:
🧬 genetic relational cords (formed at conception)
🌱 parental relational cords
Parental relational cords form on a soul level before our conception, actually, and develop through our time of growing up with our parents.
So parents…
🔹 if your kids have genetic and parental relational cord connections to their other parent
🔹 and they take half of their epigenetic inheritance from them
🔹 and you feel concern for burdens your children may carry through from his side…
…what is a mom or dad to do?
There are many ways you can help your children to face, handle, and not carry trauma from the other parent’s family lineages.
Here is the most important one:
Focus on what they carry from their other parent that is good.
💛 Kids need to know that the half of them inside that is from the other parent is GOOD.
💛 Children love their parents, even if those parents have a lot of trauma and are difficult and abusive.
💛 Kids need to be able to “take” their parent and have a connection with them.
🛑 Even if it is not safe for them to spend time with that parent, DO NOT DISPARAGE THE PARENT IN FRONT OF THEM.
🌀 If you have difficult feelings, rage, resentment, or hurt toward the other parent, bring it into some sessions with me so I can help you process it quickly.
🚫 Do not confide in your kids, no matter what age they are.
🗣️ Do not speak poorly of that parent in front of your kids. It’s ok to have ‘real talk’ that is factual and directive around how to handle things, but not emotionally charged with YOUR feelings.
✨ Tell your kids stories of how you first fell in love with that parent. Tell them the talents, abilities, fun stories about the other parent and share how you see that inside of them.
A Beautiful Example (From Bridgerton)
There is a beautiful scene in the TV series Bridgerton, Season 2, Episode 3, where Anthony, now acting as the family’s father figure, tells his younger brother Gregory warm stories about their dad.
Gregory was an infant when his father died and had no explicit memories of him.But in this scene, you can feel how hungry he is to know him—and to know what of his father lives inside him.
Watch a clip here (it’s at the end of the clips).
A Real Story from My Practice
In one of my monthly HEALING WITH OUR ANCESTORS classes, I supported a mom who had to separate her kids from their dad due to his decline into mental illness. Her son, now entering adolescence, was struggling.
It would have been easy to think there wasn’t much positive to say about the father.
But I guided her to find small, true things she remembered:
aptitudes
gifts
flashes of strength that she could also see inside her son.
This gives her son an inner image of his father he can return to again and again.
That inner image creates:
positive feelings
positive neural wiring
a sense of belonging
self-esteem
It helps the child “take” the life force in them that comes from that parent—
and mobilize it for health, growth, and success.
If this is a struggle you relate to and would like more help to:
🌿 ease your own generational burdens
🔍 uncover the ones that are still hidden from you, but could be the reason you still feel blocked after years of therapy
🤍 have guidance and support that is specific to your situation and family system
Reach out to me to work together in 1:1 healing sessions, or attend my monthly online classes HEALING WITH THE ANCESTORS to begin your journey of understanding and healing generational trauma.
We will personalize your journey to exactly what you are still holding within from your own childhood and life experiences, and your own family now.
🏳️🌈 I want to add that I know and honour that not all families are conventional binary families with a mom and a dad. However, generational trauma is epigenetic, so we look first at biological parents, even if dad was a sperm donor, absent, or even unknown.
Other parents carry weight and have their place, but it is not the same as a biological inheritance. If you have concerns for your children, I will work with you case by case according to your family system. 🏳️⚧️
Is any of this true for you?
Do you sense your kids could be carrying burdens that didn’t start with them?
Send me a note and let me know what makes you hesitate or what drives you to heal generational trauma.
I’d also love to hear what you are seeing in your children that you sense could be connected to your lineages.
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