When a child takes on a parent’s burden—whether consciously or unconsciously—he or she misses out on the experience of being given to, and can have difficulty receiving from relationships later in life. A child who takes care of a parent often forges a lifelong pattern of overextension and creates a blueprint for habitually feeling overwhelmed.

Sometimes, the heart must break in order to open.

When we pit one parent against the other, we go against the source of our own existence, and unconsciously create a rift inside ourselves. We forget that half of us comes from our mother and half from our father.

work Canadian neuropsychologist Donald Hebb presented in 1949: “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” In essence, when brain cells activate together, the connection between them strengthens.

Sleeping inside each of them were fragments of traumas too great to be resolved in one generation.

blood,

As with many stories of healing and transformation, what started out looking like adversity was actually grace in disguise.

Although the exact mechanism for how a parent’s traumatic experience gets stored in the DNA is still under investigation, Dias says, “It behooves ancestors to inform their offspring that a particular environment was a negative environment for them.”[7]

Still, all is not silent: words, images, and impulses that fragment following a traumatic event reemerge to form a secret language of suffering we carry with us. Nothing is lost. The pieces have just been rerouted.