si dawson

Who cares who's right about Nature vs Nur­ture? The bot­tom line is — our par­ents affect us.

Genet­i­cally, it's pretty obvi­ous. Your par­ents are tall? You play bas­ket­ball. They're black? It's a pretty safe bet (although not 100%, amus­ingly enough) that you are too, and so on.

Emo­tion­ally (or environmentally/sociologically), it's a lit­tle more complex.

And, if you stop to think about it — given that your par­ents also pass on genetic pro­cliv­i­ties to our brains — intel­li­gence, dis­po­si­tion, behav­iours, and so on, it's a com­pli­cated mess we have to try and unravel.

After all, who really is in con­trol of our lives? Us, or them?

But wait, there's more. Where did they get their lives from? Well, their par­ents, of course, and so on back up the tree.

So, in sum­mary: Our lives are (at least ini­tially) a result of our ancestors.

Do we want to take back con­trol? Do we want to make choices, and not just be dri­ven by this his­tory? Do we actu­ally want com­plete free will to lead the life we want to?

Well, if so, we're going to have to take respon­si­bil­ity. A lot of it.

Not just for our­selves, but also for our par­ents. Not for their lives (after all, that's their job), but for the influ­ence they've had, and con­tinue to have, on us.

image by M Bowman

One of the things that has become abun­dantly clear to me is how often issues I'm try­ing to heal in myself really aren't mine. I've learned them, or had them passed on, from one or other (or both) of my par­ents (and back in time to them).

Now, sure, you can heal every­thing that's hap­pened in your life — but a lot of times it ends up like that old tale of hero­ically fish­ing bod­ies out of a river — what you really need to do is go upstream & find who's throw­ing them in.

I'll give you an example.

One thing I've worked on a bit is a def­i­nite need for approval. Par­tic­u­larly from the women in my life. This has been notice­able, and, on occa­sion, actu­ally dri­ven women I've cared about away. *ouch* Now, I took this to be because when I was grow­ing up, I never felt like my mother loved me — the impor­tant point here being, how I felt, not how she actu­ally behaved or whether she did or not. Once I had healed, I was able to see that of course she loved me — or, as she put it when I talked to her about it later "Are you crazy? You're my first born son!!"

How­ever, this need for approval, while less­ened, hadn't com­pletely dis­ap­peared. Hmm, inter­est­ing. What to do, what to do?

Then, this week, I heard a very inter­est­ing story. My grandmother's mother (on my Mum's side), well, her mother was very young when she had her, so she was raised by her grand­mother, not her mother. Keep­ing up? My great-grandmother was raised by my great-great-great-grandmother. Yep, it's a pretty great story alright. Ha ha, I'm here all week, try the veal.

Imag­ine that though. The girl you think is your sis­ter is actu­ally your mother. The woman you think is your mother is actu­ally your grand­mother. Hmm. Would you ever actu­ally truly know a mother's love? Would you feel like some­thing was miss­ing from your life? I tell you, that's crazy.

Of course, I heard this, a big light­bulb went off in my head, and I imme­di­ately went and healed on this. How? As if I was my great-grandmother. Why? Because part of me is. Genet­i­cally, big duh there. But more than that. I believe ener­get­i­cally a lot of stuff is passed down. But whether you believe that or not, it's hard to argue against habits & beliefs being passed down from mother to daugh­ter after a sig­nif­i­cant life event like that.

I've cho­sen to do sim­i­lar things with every sig­nif­i­cant event I've heard about — from my par­ents & back up the tree. I'm not heal­ing them specif­i­cally, what I am doing is heal­ing their effect over me. I'm regain­ing con­trol over my life. I'm remov­ing the echoes from older gen­er­a­tions, and replac­ing them with con­scious choices about exactly the life I choose to live.

If or when I have kids, I'd be pleased if they did exactly the same thing about me — although yes, I'm aware of both the like­li­hood of rebel­lion, and the recur­sive irony of such a desire — I want them to choose to make the same choice I did to make their own choices to.. uhh.. oh for­get it!

Regard­less, the bot­tom line is this: If we truly want 100% free­dom within our lives, it's nec­es­sary to not only con­sider our imme­di­ate his­tory, but that of our par­ents and ances­tors too.