Resolving inherited trauma

We shall use our imagination to redesign our own genetic expression.

My maternal great Grandfather died at age 47, leaving behind a widow and four children — including my grandfather Thomas Payson, who was only 8 years old at the time.

Epigenetic inheritance of unresolved trauma

In previous articles I described how post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can be inherited from ancestors who carry epigenetic adaptations to trauma that alter the expression of their genes. Data from animal studies is most robust, because animals allow controlled conditions for both induction of trauma and physical examination of its biological markers. By contrast, human studies raise objections, partly because the powerful and confounding effects of traumatic experiences in early childhood cannot be denied when attempting to isolate inherited aspects from experienced. Nonetheless, evidence for epigenetic transgenerational transfer of trauma is found in European survivors of the Holocaust and the Dutch hunger winter, partly because accurate birth and health records facilitate scrupulous examination of family lines and outcomes in response to especially strong trauma signals.

For some skeptics, a plausible, material mechanism of trauma transfer is most convincing (e.g., Ghai & Kader 2022). To this end, considerable attention has been directed towards the possible effects of maternal stressors on the developing fetus and the lifelong effects of the biochemical and emotional exchanges between the Mother and Child (e.g., The Maternal Imprint. Richardson 2021). Particularly in women, who are endowed with their entire genetic allotment of eggs in utero at about 20 weeks post-conception, the idea of intergenerational trauma holds powerful intuitive appeal. Thus, the Mother’s epigenetic encoding may be fixed decades prior to the conception and nurturing of her own children. Similar reasoning suggests that men could transfer epigentic adaptations that result from more immediate experiences, because men produce sperm throughout their lifetimes (e.g., Bowers & Yehuda 2018).

Nonetheless, the persistence of developmental and psychiatric risk factors that correlate with epigenetic modifications across multiple generations suggest that intergenerational transfer of trauma may be more even more powerful and long-lasting than these direct, mechanistic hypotheses regarding gamete formation suggest. From an evolutionary biology perspective it would make sense that epigenetic sensitives exceed these direct causal links, if greater adaptive capacity could enhance reproductive fitness under the stressful conditions our ancient ancestors experienced. Despite the presentation of epigenetic PTSD as a maladaptive disorder in modern times, our biochemistry is governed by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, rather than the latest trends.

PTSD is an unresolved stress experience

The critical factor in intergenerational transfer of trauma seems to be the presence of PTSD. That is, it is only unresolved trauma that puts descendants at risk. When a traumatic experience is resolved, PTSD is no longer present, because even though the individual may retain the memory of a trauma, that memory is no longer attached to negative emotions. Thus, the recall of a resolved traumatic experience no longer activates the autonomic “fight or flight” response that used to accompany it.

In unresolved PTSD, this autonomic activation reinforces the trauma, as if re-experiencing it in the imagination — i.e., a trauma flashback — and strengthens it. That may be why so many people seek to avoid thinking about, talking about, or even acknowledging unresolved trauma. For them, the retelling risks the re-experiencing, and consequent deepening of the trauma.

The particularly vexxing problem with trauma inherited from an ancestor is that the descendant will experience the autonomic activation, without the memory. In this way, inherited trauma is similar to the developmental trauma of early childhood. That is, infants and young children can experience trauma during the early years of their life, before the brain is sufficiently developed to carry explicit memories. In this case, the trauma is carried exclusively in what athletes sometimes call muscle memory. That is, the trauma is embodied, rather than recalled.

Inherited trauma is like muscle memory in so far as the body carries the epigenetic adaptation in biochemical expression of the gene, without the brain carrying the conscious memory of the unresolved traumatic experience. In this case, there is no amount of childhood exploration in talk therapy that will bring the trauma to conscious awareness. Only an exploration of unresolved ancestral experiences will allow the subject to identify the source of the somatic memory.

It didn’t start with you

Mark Wolynn has compiled a number of remarkable vignettes from his psychotherapy practice of people who resolved mysterious behavioral or psychiatric disorders by discovering the ancestral trauma they were carrying (It Didn’t Start With You, Wolynn 2016). Unlike genocide survivors, most (not all) of Wolynn’s clients descended from ancestors who suffered less severe, less systemic, trauma.

For example, Wolynn describes his own experiences of alienation from his parents as resulting from a family history of loss. He wrote, “Three of my grandparents had lost their Mothers at an early age, and the fourth had lost a Father as an infant.”

Given the emotions likely experienced by Wolynn’s grandparents in response to those losses, it would make sense if they passed to him an epigenetic predisposition to independence from parent as an emotional protection against the profound grief of loss. Wolynn describes his own Mother’s difficulties bonding with him as an infant when he was born, and his self-protective responses to a period of his childhood when his Mother was hospitalized and he felt neglected. Thus, although Wolynn did not experience the premature death of either of his parents, he hypothesizes that he was born pre-disposed to distance himself from them as if they were dead. That predisposition likely prepared him emotionally with a series of defense mechanisms and rationalizations that allowed him to go months (or even years) without speaking to either of them.

According to Wolynn, the key to resolving inherited trauma is to identify the ancestral experience with which you identify, become conscious of it, and release it in an imaginative dialog with those people from whom you have inherited it. He describes a dozen success stories of ancestral discovery that would otherwise defy explanation. That is, he has noticed in his practice a pattern that suggests trauma is inherited from ancestors with whom the descendants never had contact, and can be resolved by visualizing the contact necessary.

To test Wolynn’s advice, it behooves me to explore my own genealogy — even though I know little more about my family history than the oral history passed down to me by my parents.

In a way, I was fortunate that my Mother made me (and my two sisters) write thank you cards to my distant relatives every New Year’s Eve, expressing my appreciation for the money they’d sent me for Christmas. It acquainted me with their names, if nothing else.

“Dear Aunt Emma and Uncle George,” my Mother would instruct me to write. And so it went thru the more remote branches of my family tree.

I never wrote to my Mother’s uncle Richard — my grandfather’s brother. I found out just today (via ancestry.com) that he died in 1969, when I was only three years old, and long before my grandfather passed. My Mother didn’t talk about him much, referring to him as “Drunk Uncle Dick,” implying that he failed to care for his health.

I remember thinking she regarded Uncle Dick with contempt, and we never heard from his widow — not at Christmas, nor at family reunions — despite the fact that she lived in close proximity to my Grandfather for fifteen more years after Drunk Uncle Dick passed away.

According to census records, Uncle Dick had three children. I never met any of them, either.

Was my namesake also my trauma inheritance?

I was named for my grandfather, Thomas Payson. Although I have two older male cousins, as it was explained to me, my Mother requested of her siblings that they reserve the name “Thomas” for her first son, so my older male cousins were named Andrew and Albion.

My Mother had her wish, and I was named Thomas Payson Seager.

I was proud to carry her Father’s name. Both she and I adored him.

When I was a child, I would have sought a closer relationship with him, if I could. We lived hundreds of miles apart, but the times I did get to see him left me longing for more of his attention.

Later in life, when he was forced to wear a diaper after having his cancerous colon removed, he lost his wit and his charm. He became irascible and impatient.

Thomas Payson was the youngest of four children, his older siblings being Richard (Dick), Emma, and Helen.

Thomas’s Father was Richard Conant Payson, Sr. He was a medical doctor in southern Maine, and evidently well-respected in the community. He died when Thomas was only eight years old, leaving his widow with four children and no pension months before the start of World War I.

I don’t know how Thomas’ family afforded to send him to Bowdoin, but he graduated after five years of trying. My Mother told me that Thomas’s cousin Charles Payson married Joan Whitney, of the New York Whitneys — i.e., descendants of Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin — so I always had the impression that Thomas’s family got help from rich relatives, but I don’t really know. Maybe it was Aunt Emma or Aunt Helen who supported their younger brother Thomas, just like they sent me cash for Christmas.

It was at my grandfather’s memorial service that my Uncle Peter, also a medical doctor, took it upon himself to interpret my great grandfather Richard Conant Payson Sr’s obituary.

Why had Richard Sr. died so young, at what should have been the robust age of 47?

“It looks to me like Richard Sr. died of syphilis,” said my Uncle Peter.

It was a strange announcement.

At the time I was 24 and I expressed zero curiosity. I remember being more concerned about my Mother and her five siblings, all of whom had just lost their Father.

Nonetheless, Uncle Peter’s remote and credible diagnosis stuck with me, and it has become more significant to me 32 years later.

My grandfather lost his Dad when he was still in "short pants”, as it was the custom to dress pre-pubescent boys in breeches, or knickers, back in those days.

Thomas Payson was a fatherless boy of eight, and his older brother Dick, Jr a mere 12. Their older sisters Helen and Emma were 14 and 16, respectively, when Richard Sr. died of disease incurred during infidelity.

If Uncle Pete is correct, and Richard Sr. died of a sexually transmitted disease, that must’ve humiliated my great Grandmother, who lived another 17 years and (as far as I can tell) never remarried.

What sort of trauma might Thomas Payson have left unresolved after such a loss?

Goddammit.

Fear of Abandonment.

Trauma is the organizing principle of my relationships

It is exactly this Fear of Abandonment that has been the driving force behind my relationship choices since I was a child.

Some of my most powerful early memories were of feeling alone, despite growing up in a family of five. Peter Gabriel’s Solsbury Hill reached the United States in 1977, when I was 11 years old. In it, Gabriel sang:

Climbing up on Solsbury Hill
I could see the city light
Wind was blowing, time stood still
Eagle flew out of the night

He was something to observe
Came in close, I heard a voice
Standing, stretching every nerve
I had to listen, had no choice

I did not believe the information
Just had to trust imagination
My heart going "Boom-boom-boom"
"Son", he said
"Grab your things, I've come to take you home"

I remember thinking if I could avoid killing myself until my eagle arrived, I would be OK — that some day my real family would come back from Outer Space and realize that they’d left me behind.

My 11 year old brain told me that if I could hang on, my people would eventually turn their spaceship around, return to retrieve me, and I would forgive them for leaving me behind and be OK.

How I used my child to assuage my loneliness

I got married when I was 29.

In retrospect, I ignored the warning signs.

In several respects, she worked for me. She was beautiful and sexy and incompetent to run her own life.

She was an alcoholic, and it meant she would never leave me.

We were married because she was pregnant, and I wanted to be a Dad. I found comfort in the birth of my Son, because he was so dependent upon me, he could never leave, either.

My new wife and child weren’t exactly a ship from outer space, but it was a family that could never abandon me, so it gave me some comfort.

So my Son served to further assuage the feelings of loneliness and isolation that were the residue of my childhood, while binding his Mother all the closer to me.

This is a painful admission, although I wonder if Thomas Payson’s six children didn’t sometimes do the same for him.

I do not consider myself a bad Father and my parenting must be understood in the context of compensating for a Mother who was debilitated by alcoholism. Nonetheless, I remember that time in my life well enough to confess that I felt a great deal of satisfaction in the fact that my Son was always at my disposal.

It was a comfort to realize that my Son was centered on me and it helped that when I arrived home at the end of my work day, my wife would hand him off to me so she could “have a break.” I was delighted to walk him up and down the hallways in a vain attempt to sooth his inconsolable crying. I was gratified by the quieter times when he was curled up on my chest or we were crawling around together on the floor.

As he grew, we became increasingly inseparable. This helped us both, in a way, by assuaging his social anxiety and mine.

When my Son was six years old, he was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. His doctor told me he was hours from a diabetic coma when we arrived at the hospital.

My wife took it hard, but I sped through the grief. I told myself it was because my job as his Father required me to master the insulin syringe and his dosing, so I had not the luxury of grief.

In retrospect, I can see the truth in that reasoning.

Nonetheless, his diabetes diagnosis deepened his dependency on me. What had previously been psychological or emotional was now hormonal, because he relied on me to calculate and administer his insulin doses.

Adolescence is the age of burgeoning independence

It wasn’t until my children were teenagers that my daughter (who came two-and-a-half years after my son) pointed out that her Mother was an alcoholic.

That was my wake up call.

I resolved to get my act together, make myself a better Man and present my wife with the following ultimatum: “Either get yourself sober and get into a program, or get divorced. I am no longer willing to be married to a drunk.”

She quit drinking.
She started a 12-step program.
She sobered up.

She divorced me, anyway.

I left my marriage willingly, and set back out into the dating world. I read everything I could find about dating, about alcoholism, about co-dependence, and about self-improvement.

I papered over my loneliness by dating several women at once. In that way, I wasn’t dependent on any particular woman’s commitment to me. I reasoned that I could get my companionship needs met by maintaining a portfolio of “girlfriends” that ensured I would always have the company I wanted, when I wanted it.

Abandoned, nonetheless

My son got married as I was mastering dating. He now has a daughter of his own, whom I’ve never met.

Had you asked me, I never would have admitted that my own behavior was unconsciously designed to maintain a lifetime co-dependent relationship with him. I would have protested that I wanted nothing more than for him to become his own person, and that I was proud of the successes he achieved independent of me and that I supported his interests.

In fact, I was so interested in his success, that when he became a young adult, I introduced him to the woman whom he would eventually marry and coached him on how to successfully woo her.

She was my doctoral advisee.

What I can see now is that by coaching him into a relationship with her, I was keeping him close — i.e., within my sphere of influence — at a time during which he might have benefited more by dating outside my own social and professional circle.

But how could he have roamed beyond my sphere, given his introverted nature and the way that I embedded him in all of my personal and professional affairs?

I haven’t seen or talked with my Son since December 2018, which only reinforces that the harder we work to avoid the Greek Tragedy of our fate, the more we manifest it. The fact that he is a Father of his own does not make me feel like a Grandfather, because I have no relationship with his little daughter.

He and I are estranged, and my sense is that his departure from my life is partly because he wants to protect his own marriage from what he (and his wife) perceive as my philandering ways.

In this way, my worst fears of abandonment have been realized.

New relationships shoehorned into old patterns

Nonetheless, along the way I met a beautiful, smart, sexy woman who, for reasons of her own trauma, fit well into my schema of non-exclusivity. She was a writer, an athlete, and a former runway model with a genius-level IQ.

In other words, she was the woman I’d fantasized about since I first knew what women were.

We dated on and off for almost five years, increasingly narrowing our relationship focus onto one another.

She reorganized her life, and those of her four daughters, around me. I vacillated between feigning nonchalance and expressing a desperate longing for constant and increasingly convincing affirmations of her loyalty.

Our relationship broke down… often.

The fact is that, whatever her limitations, there was no expression of her fealty that could have filled up the black hole in my that was my Fear of Abandonment.

One experience stands out in particular.

My Lover was traveling, without me. Two back-to-back trips in two weeks meant I wasn’t going to see her but for one night in between.

The nature of my Lover’s trips bore some resemblance to my Mother’s decision to take a job in another city that required her move out of our family home when I was 13 years old.

That got me thinking.

When my Mother left, our family dynamics relaxed. There was less fighting, less manipulation, less pressure, and in some ways my life and relationships improved.

It also likely framed my expectations for all the future women in my life.

So I explained to my Lover, “Because of what happened between me and my Mother me when I was a boy, it is important to me that you text me several times a day while you’re traveling.

“I’m going to want to know when your plane lands, and when you check into the hotel.

“I’m going to want to know when you’re on your way to your meetings, and when you’re going to be offline.

“That’s not a reflection of you. That’s a deep-rooted Fear of Abandonment in me that I haven’t resolved.

“I’m working on it.

“In the meantime, for us to have a committed, exclusive relationship, I’m going to need to know that you’re there for me even when we’re apart. And (this is most important) I’m going to need to know that you are coming back.”

My confession was a classic example of an insecure attachment relationship style.

In a way, my request of her was admirable in its self-awareness. In another way, it fell short. Either way, it didn’t work out well for that trip.

She texted me for a little bit, but she couldn’t keep up a pace that would satisfy my insecurities and when I criticized her for it, she fell silient.

Although you could argue that my insecurity was rooted in my own childhood experiences , I now believe it went deeper than that. After all, my first suicidal thoughts long pre-dated my Mother’s career ambitions.

Now, I think my Fear of Abandonment was passed down to me from my Grandfather, Thomas Payson.

Confronting my fears

It wasn’t until last Fall that I was finally confronted with the fact that managing my existential Fear of Abandonment by seeking attention and affirmation from other women was the principal obstacle to my personal development.

Moreover, it had long since become untenable for my Lover.

I resolved to fix my brain, banish my automatic negative thoughts, and decode my fears without placing the burden on my Lover to assuage them.

At this point, it didn’t matter whether she wanted to be with me or resolved to to cut me out of my life. My only developmental path was to confront my Fear head-on, and that required me to cut myself off from any sort of affirmation-seeking behaviors from dating sites, or from any other women.

I began a regimen of brain-supporting supplements like GABA, magnesium, and Omega-3. I started psychotherapy with a specialist expert in treating complex PTSD. And I began documenting coping strategies I could practice for when I felt overwhelmed.

My life improved, and so did my relationship skills.

Nonetheless, I didn’t yet have the benefit of strategies Wolynn describes in It Didn’t Start With You. It possible that resolution of inherited trauma happens much faster when you discover the trauma burden that you’ve inherited.

For example, many men inherit an unresolved trauma from their biological Fathers that, although they swear to themselves and the whole world they will be nothing like their no-good Dads, they find themselves repeating. According to Wolynn, the compulsion to resolve an inherited trauma by repeating it from a position of control becomes a psychological inevitability.

How do we escape the inherited fate of our ancestral trauma?

The key to our epigenetic adaptations is emotional experience. That is, only the most salient, strongly-felt emotions are capable of rewriting the epigenetic encoding of our DNA.

Experience without emotion is insufficient to result in epigenetic adaptation.

That’s why something that happened when we were very young might make an enormous impact on our psyche, while the same experience when we’re older would mean nothing to us. The younger we are, the less equipped we are to make sense of our feelings. Our relative powerlessness leaves us vulnerable to feelings of being trapped, alone, and helpless — all emotions that will leave an indelible mark on our psyche and our epigenome.

The fortunate thing about emotions is that our DNA doesn’t know the difference between real and virtual catalysts for epigentic adaptation.

We can experience vicarious emotions while watching movies, or reading stories, thru identification with the actors. In fact, Wolynn encourages his readers to think of a scene from a book or a movie that resonates, as a way of discovering the core trauma that may be handed down to us from ancestors who are no longer available to explain it.

The movie that was critical to my personal development

I had a revealing experience when I was a young boy of maybe four, watching the Wizard of Oz on television. It frightened me to such an extent that I had a recurring nightmare for years afterwards.

My nightmare was nothing but a thin black, flowing vertical line, and it scared the hell out of me, night after night.

I’m thankful for the nightmare now, because that nightmare was how I became a lucid dreamer. I learned back then, in the civil twilight of my nightmare, that I could control my fear by disrupting the thin black line.

As long as I kept shaking that line, I was OK.

For the longest time, I never understood why something as simple as a thin, flowing black line should make me so frightened.

Nevertheless, I was confronted with this problem of nightmares as it manifested one evening while I was traveling without my Lover. I was not enjoying the separation from her, I was experiencing a pain in my big toe I found out later was pseudo-gout, and I was generally feeling miserable, wretched, and alone.

Travel anxiety is a problem I’ve confronted before. The loss of control, the uncertainty, the need to rely on the courtesy of strangers, it all used to give me acute anxiety, and yet I have to travel to do my job as a university professor.

One of the things that I do now, before I go to bed, is make a request of my unconscious mind. I give my brain problems to solve in my sleep, and you might be amazed to how well this works.

Because I’m a research engineer, I often give my brain problems in thermodynamics, mathematics, or complex systems engineering. For example, sleep has improved my understanding of entropy considerably.

But my separation from my Lover while traveling caused me to make a different request of my unconscious mind the night I put myself to sleep in a hotel room in California, on the eve of another traveling lecture.

Until that night, I had managed my travel anxiety by reminding myself that my mission was more important than my feelings. In another context, we might call that emotional repression, and we might describe it as unhealthy, but I call it sublimation — i.e., channeling my negative emotions into my work. For me, it was a vast improvement over not being able to travel at all.

On this night, I asked my brain to work on a very specific problem.

“Brain,” I said, “I want you figure out what trauma causes me to have these obsessive thoughts about other women that puts distance between me and my Lover. In the morning, please tell me what problem is so important to me that I might risk my current romantic relationship, my productivity, and emotional well-being in my attempt to position other women as the resolution of my childhood wounds.”

My brain answered me in a lucid dream, and this is what we found.

My childhood trauma was this scene from the famous 1939 movie, The Wizard of Oz. The character of Dorothy, played by a young Judy Garland, is an orphan child living with her Aunt and Uncle. She experiences the whole movie as a dream after she finds herself unable to protect her dog Toto from being taken away and destroyed. In this scene, Dorothy is willing to sacrifice her own well-being for that of her dog, who dutifully runs away at her command.

There’s so much to unpack for me in this scene, and it explains so many of the motivations and intuitions of my life that I can’t describe them all in a single article. Instead, it is sufficient to understand that a 4 year old boy watching The Wizard of Oz on television in 1970 might be traumatized by The Wicked Witch and her flying monkeys.

The dog Toto is central to the plot in ways that I never fully appreciated before. It is Toto that is threatened by the neighbor in Kansas, Ms. Gulch. And it is Toto who is first scooped up by the flying monkeys, and it is for Toto that Dorothy is willing to sacrifice her only source of power in Oz, her ruby slippers.

The trauma of the movie explains why, for as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted a dog my parents wouldn’t let me have.

“Do you see that? That’s how much longer you’ve got to be alive! And it isn’t long, my Pretty. It isn’t long!” — The Wicked Witch, in 1939 movie, The Wizard of Oz.

My nightmare was the damn hourglass from the Wizard of Oz. It was only by disrupting the flow of sand that my brain could relieve the anxiety of impending death.

“He got away! He got away!” Dorothy exclaims, as Toto dashes off, following Dorothy’s instructions to abandon her to save his own life.

“Which is more than you will!” sneers the Wicked Witch, “Do you see that? That’s how long you’ve got to be alive, and it isn’t long!”

The castle scene in Oz is Dorothy replaying in her dream the traumatic experience of the loss of her dog earlier in the day. Uncle Henry is revealed as weak and submissive — an impotent old man requiring direction from his wife. And Auntie Em can’t even stammer out an objection, explaining that she “can’t go against the law,” and risk losing the farm.

Auntie Em prioritizes compliance with the law over commitment to family.

She rejects Dorothy’s appeals, betrays her trust, and gives Toto away to Ms. Gulch so she can “take him to the Sheriff and make sure he’s destroyed.” Dorothy realizes that without the protection of her surrogate parents, she is alone in this world and exclusively responsible for both her own safety and that of her surrogate child, Toto.

Only in a dream does Dorothy the orphan find the friends that will never abandon her.

The plot of the movie — replaying trauma in our unconscious mind — is true to the workings of our brains. In the movie, Dorothy resolves her trauma by finding true friends willing to fight by her side against the Wicked Witch. In the end (spoiler alert) it is Dorothy’s commission of manslaughter that kills the Witch and rescues her dog and her newfound loved ones.

When I woke up on that Hotel California morning, I was dreaming about this scene from the movie. It was an epiphany into the unconscious workings of my brain, and this new understanding gave me the key to unlocking resolution of my trauma, without depending upon my Lover to figure it out for me.

This is me, circa 1969.

Recovery and resolution

According Dr. Besser van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score, there are three things we, as human beings, need to ensure that traumatic experiences do not result in psychological disorder:

1. Food,

2. Sleep,

3. And the feeling that a power greater than ourselves is watching over us.

To resolve the trauma of The Wizard of Oz, I re-imagined the night of the movie.

Little 4 year old Tommy would have benefited from a snuggle, a hot cocoa, and an evening co-sleeping with a parent after the experience of the movie.

I don’t remember, but my guess is that didn’t happen. My Mother had her own issues, and what traumatizes a preschooler wasn’t at the top of her list of larger political and socio-environmental causes. After all, she didn’t see the classic movie until she was older than I, and what traumatizes you when you’re young is probably something you shrug off when you’re older.

To resolve my trauma during my trip to California, I performed some reparenting by taking control of my lucid dream.

When I do this, I appear in my new dream as Little Tommy’s Father, and I do the things for my inner child that my parents never did.

I carried Little Tommy up to his room. I tucked him in under the Noah’s Ark bedspread his Mother had almost finished sewing for him. I gave him his hot cocoa and one of those windmill gingerbread cookies that were his favorite.

We snuggled and talked about the movie.
We talked about why Dorothy ran away.
We talked about why Ms. Gulch was so mean.
We talked about what might have happened if maybe Dorothy had brought the lonely Ms. Gulch some flowers on Easter Sunday, or invited her over for Thanksgiving dinner so she wouldn’t have to spend the holidays alone, and wondered if Ms. Gulch could have been an ally instead of an enemy, if only we could have recognized the problems she was trying to solve, and helped her find a solution.

We talked about what was so important about Toto to Dorothy, and what might have happened to Dorothy’s parents.

I curled up in his bed and I wrapped Little Tommy in my arms and I told him that I would never give him up to the Sheriff, ever. I told him I would fight for him like the Scarecrow, and the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion fought for Dorothy, and I would never let anyone take him away from me, and that he would always find his way home.

And I let Little Tommy sleep in my arms.

Resolution of inherited PTSD

Wolynn recommends a similar re-imagining exercise for healing ancestral trauma. In his descriptions of healing, he encourages his clients to imagine themselves in a dialog with their traumatized ancestors. In some cases, his clients imagine the ancestors atoning for a wrong they committed, such as a harm they perpetrated on others for which they were never punished. In cases such as these, according to Wolynn, the identification with a guilty ancestor can be so strong that the descendant is carrying the shame of the ancestor’s sin, and may be unconsciously seeking the punishment the ancestor deserved. Imagining the ancestor atoning for their sins can alleviate the descendants unconscious guilt.

In other scenes, Wollyn describes his client handing the trauma back to the ancestors in dialog. Here, they imagine themselves saying something like, “This is not my burden. I will carry it no longer, because it is meant for you.” In many of his examples, his clients experience an almost immediate relief from having identified and released the ancestral trauma.

In one example, a young boy was acting out in violence. His parents had escaped from the killing fields of Cambodia and come to America resolved to shield their child from the horror of their experiences by never talking about it. The boy experienced obsessive, violent, and murderous impulsive play, although he knew nothing about the killing fields.

Remaining silent about the past does little to immunize the next generation. What’s hidden from sight and mind seldom disappears. Conversely, it often reappears in the behaviors and symptoms of our children.

- Mark Wolynn, ‘It Didn’t Start With You’ (2016)

Wolynn advised the child’s parents to tell their young son about his Grandfather, who was murdered during the genocide. “Tell him how much you loved him, and how much you miss him. Place a photo of his Grandfather over his bed and tell him that your Dad protects him and blesses his head at night,” Wolynn instructed.

Three weeks later, the child gave up his violent play and explained to his Mother that he didn’t need it anymore.

All of Wolynn’s examples rely on a realization. That is, until his the specifics of the inherited trauma are revealed to his clients, they labor under the misconception that there is something fundamentally wrong with them. Without a reason for their automatic negative thoughts, they have no other recourse but to believe that they are defective at their core and there is nothing that can be done about it.

In a way, their intuitions about themselves are correct. Unbeknownst to them, they carried a wound that had been inflicted on them by an ancestor, and passed down to them in the nucleus of their cells. However, their despair about not being able to do anything about it is misplaced.

Upon realizing that the source of the trauma is outside their own experiences, Wolynn is able to give his clients the prompts they need to rewrite their epigenome by imaging a resolution. In their imagination, like my lucid dream, Wolynn’s clients are in control.

From that position of imaginative control, the trauma can be re-experienced to a more satisfying outcome, and no longer haunt the client’s thoughts.

Somatic expression of trauma resolution

In at least two cases, Wolynn describes scenes in which the imaginative resolution of the trauma is accompanied by a trembling “as if shaking off what had belonged to the past.”

According to Peter Levine in Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (1997) that trembling is characteristic of a healthy response to trauma that resets the autonomic nervous system and prevents onset of PTSD. In An Unspoken Voice (2010) he describes his own experience of being hit by a car, and the trembling that protected him.

Evidently, the folk expression “shake it off” is rooted in biological wisdom, as Levine maintains that immobilization is one of the worst things that can happen to someone in the middle of a stressful event.

What’s next for me?

I’m not certain that I’ve resolved my own Fear of Abandonment, although I know I’m much better. I have yet to imagine a dialog with my grandfather, or my great grandfather, that would resolve whatever trauma has been passed down to me. And I’m still suspicious of the role that Drunk Uncle Dick may have played in my ancient family history.

While one dimension of the Fear of Abandonment is Richard Conant Payson, Sr.’s untimely death, there is another aspect that has yet to be explored, and that is the sexual betrayal that accompanied his demise. I wonder about the impact that had on Thomas Payson’s Mother, his brother Richard Jr., and how that aspect might have been carried down through my Mother to me.

What I do know is that I’m farther down my own journey of self-discovery and healing for having recognized that the origins of my own automatic negative thoughts may lie far beyond my own experiences. While they likely have been amplified by my childhood, or even by my parent’s childhood, what Wolynn calls “the core trauma” probably originated in experiences that I no longer have access to except in my imagination.

Fortunately for me, my imagination is probably good enough. I’m confident that I’ll eventually work this out for myself. Somewhere in a lucid dream, I will be in dialog with Thomas Payson, with his brother Richard Jr., and with his Father Richard Sr., and I’ll lead a conversation that makes clear to us all that none of their experiences or unresolved trauma are my burden to bear. I will ask for their blessing of my relationship with my Lover, and know that what they really want for me is a kind of peace and love they may never have enjoyed.

Where I have less confidence in is my ability to aid my own children, in resolution of whatever familial trauma they were unfortunate enough to have inherited from me.