Depression Inherited From A Great-grandmother. For Whom Are You Shedding Tears?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-12 20:57

Can you inherit depression? Someone inherits family silver and a house near St. Petersburg, and someone inherits grief. It is this that becomes the causal depression.

Inheritance is something that originally did not belong to me, that was someone else's, belonged to someone before me, my relative, ancestor. And grief is the same. Only not everything is inherited grief, that has ever happened in your family, but only unburned, not lived, when the person who was supposed to grieve and cry did not do it, could not, did not have time, did not begin. And then the grief is "buried" in the family system, stored in it, being passed on like a mole on the cheek or a birthmark on the belly, to the next and next generation. As if the older generation would unconsciously delegate the younger generation to experience this grief instead of them. Nogore for that and buried that the younger generation is not very aware of what happened, they don't really talk about it … And by the way, about what?

Grief, which can be hereditary and cause depression in the current generation, is associated with the most serious losses for the family. it is loss, death of children. more often not one, but several. the loss of their children when they were still children

PHOTO: Russia in the 1930s.

War, genocide, and famine did little to improve child survival. Whole families died out. It so happened that there was no one to cry. And the survivors had no time for tears. And they wanted to forget all this as soon as possible, to erase it from their memory. Those who went through the war preferred not to talk about it again. And the fact that your brothers and sisters died of hunger in your arms, if they say, then not with everyone.

So, we are 30-45 year olds.

Our grandparents went through famine, war and genocide. Someone was hurt less, someone more. In someone's family, the losses were significant. In the Kuban, for example, during the Holodomor in 1930-33, entire villages died out. Women-mothers who could mourn the loss rarely survived. And the children who survived a terrible famine and survived all this, had no time for tears. So they froze with horror and buried this horror deep within themselves.

PHOTO: “Victims of dispossession”. Former "kulak" and his family.

Children born in remote villages on the basis of the principle “God gave children, will give to children” and who have not even survived the period of infancy; children born during the war and died one after another; children in concentration camps; children left without parental care and perished in the vastness of our vast Motherland - who wept for them? Was there anyone? What happened to the survivors? If not the entire genus has died out, but only two out of 5-6 children remain, or one out of ten children remains.

What about him? How does he feel?

PHOTO: Pioneer of the 30s.

PHOTO: Son of the regiment. 40s

He will struggle to live. And he will try to forget, hide, bury all the horrors that he saw, as deeply as he can. To never remember, not to tell anyone, to erase from memory everything that he experienced, everyone he buried, and how it was. He will hide all this experience of horror deep inside and leave it intact. In this form, and will pass on to your children "Core of melancholy" or Buried grief - untouched, unmourned, grief frozen in a silent cry of horror.

First generation

But he will also have children. Children born immediately after the war. Children who live on their own like grass, children of no value. Very independent children. Those who can do everything themselves - cook dinner and manage in the house and work in the garden on a par with adults. They can be sent by train alone several thousand kilometers away or at four in the morning on foot across the city to a dairy kitchen, or anywhere. It's not scary for them. And not because the time was different - "quiet and calm" - immediately after the war, yeah … But because the children were of no value. "They will die and will die, how many died then … and no one cried." To appreciate these, you need to remember those. And howl in horror and pain. And admit that such a grief happened, that God forbid. And cry, and remember, and repent … Come on with the guilt of the survivor to meet … “They died, but I'm alive, God forbid … It's better to never remember. And children are so … "my shit", and who counts them …"

PHOTO: 50s

Anxious, cherished, invaluable, but very strong and independent children will give birth to their children. And they will be very worried about them, afraid to lose and heal from everything. Their depression will manifest itself not in the form of apathy, but in the form of total anxiety.… Somewhere in the subcortex, they feel, they know that a child can be lost at any moment. On the one hand, they are driven by fear for their children, on the other hand, the “melancholic core” demands to burn out, cry, bury the children … In the end, bury and cry the children! And a woman lives with this grief inside, with this total fear, anxiety for the life of her children. With grief, which was not in her life, she did not lose children. And her feelings are such that she abandoned them somewhere, left them somewhere, lost them somewhere, buried them, but did not cry. Lives with inherited grief and projects this grief onto his children. Which, responding to the mother's need, will be intensely ill.

PHOTO: 70s

Second generation

"When I feel bad, my mom immediately feels better." "Since childhood, my mother loves me, pays attention to me when I am sick." "In our family, to love is to worry about someone else."

Why not get sick if only a sick person loves you?

PHOTO: 80s

Getting sick means getting love, care and making your mother happy, no matter how absurd it may sound. Well, who doesn't want to make mom happy?

The Melancholic Core continues its journey. In this generation, depression manifests itself in the form of somatization. People are looking for a reason for grief, equal to the great horror that lives inside them.

But they find nothing. If only … illness. Serious, terrible, solid, so that between life and death, so that she would keep the whole family in suspense. Then the horror that dwells within is balanced with the horror that occurs outside. If people get rid of the disease (remove the whitened organ) or the disease goes into remission, then depression begins to cover, the "melancholic core" wakes up.

Third generation

And these children have children. If they dare to start them, of course. But these children are born with depression in the form of melancholy. This is the most severe form of depression. These children have to deal with it all the time. Sadness, which is constantly for some reason inside.

Fourth generation

This generation is trying to reproduce a picture of grief in the family. Or children die one by one. Or a woman makes a number of abortions equal to the number of lost children lost in the birth. On the one hand, she can unconsciously try to restore the loss, how much the clan has lost, so much and give birth. On the other hand, the clan has a need to bury and mourn. She unconsciously tries to satisfy both of these needs in order to discharge the “melancholic core”.

The fifth generation follows the path of the first … Depression is experienced in the form of a total anxiety for the life and safety of children.

Sixth generation - the way of the second. Depression is expressed somatically in the form of systemic diseases.

And the seventh generation - the way of the third. Depression - in the form of melancholy.

Up to the seventh generation, there is a loss within the clan. Traces of it stretch to the seventh generation.

This path of the "melancholic core" along the vertical of the Great Depression was presented by Svetlana Migacheva (trainer of MGI) at the Gestalt conference in March 2017 in Krasnodar. In May 2017, Migacheva Svetlana begins a program for psychologists dedicated to working with depression, which has deep ancestral roots.

By researching this topic in therapy and encountering its echoes in client stories, I come to the conclusion that there are variations in the melancholic core pathway and its inheritance. This path can take place within a generation, and forms of depression can spread among children of the same generation.

Each of us wants to know what is happening to us. If the causes of situational depression can be easily identified - is it a loss, a breakup, an unresolved grief, a crisis experience, and these reasons can be effectively dealt with in therapy, which leads to the disappearance of depression - then how to deal with inherited depression? After all, in order to survive grief, it must be turned to the one for whom you are grieving. And you can't go through not your own grief, burn out, mourn instead of someone. You can only experience your own. It is good when in the family there are at least fragments of stories, memories of what happened "then." In this case, in therapy, you can experience the whole gamut of feelings for the situation, for people, for everyone who was there, and especially for those who died without waiting for you, not rejoicing at your birth, not meeting you in this world. Who didn’t become your grandmother or grandfather, aunt or uncle, who didn’t smile at you, but left, leaving you shrieking lonely in this hostile world. You can get angry. And envy your children that they have it.

The experience of mourning is filled with a mass of conflicting feelings - it contains burning resentment, anger, pity, love, longing, compassion and guilt and despair, devastation, loneliness. Experiencing a loss in the horizontal of our life, we go through all these feelings, and if we do not block them, then the grief subsides, the wound heals, and after a while it responds not with pain, but with quiet sadness and gratitude, hope and faith in life.

The grief that happened in our family became an unbearable burden for those who survived. It climbed the tree of life to the next generation, remained an unhealed wound in the heart of every newly born. Having experienced our part of the grief about what happened, we can discharge part of the core. And to make the tragedy accessible to mourning, to make it a part of the history of our family, something for which one can grieve and grieve, which one can know and remember, but not necessarily drag with oneself.

Every story ends at some point. But some drag on for too long.

We are not born a blank slate in a sterile environment with ideal parents. The history of generations, one way or another, resounds in us. It affects the quality of our life, the way we live our own life. And for the lives of our children and grandchildren.

What it will be, what they will take with them, partly depends on us.