As adults, this can be incredibly confusing. You might wonder what is wrong with you. You know that you haven’t experienced maltreatment as a child (not that you can remember). Okay, it wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t that bad either.
So, you wonder why you are experiencing difficulties in relationships. You wonder why you are feeling anxious or avoidant in relationships.
Attachment styles are passed on intergenerationally. This means the trauma of your great-great-great-great grandmother or grandfather might have caused an attachment rupture so strong that all future generations have passed it along the line.
An attachment style is about HOW we are close to other people. How safe we feel to be close to them and how secure we feel to be apart from them. It is about the space between two people. We feel most comfortable with the pattern we learn at home in the formative years, usually from the primary caregiver.
If an ancestor experienced a relational trauma that was so wounding, it prevented them from having a secure relationship with their children; this can be passed down.
This can be the answer for many people when they wonder about the origins of their attachment style.
Know that all of our ancestors would have experienced some trauma, the trauma of death and disease or abuse of some kind. So, these patterns can be healed naturally through the family line as individuals start to break the unhelpful intergenerational patterns.
This is the role of the Cycle Breaker. The cycle breaker will take what they were given and try something different. There will be something about how they were raised that they don’t want to repeat. They will connect with their partners and children differently. It won’t always be easy, but they will do it.
Let me know if you are the cycle-breaker in your family.
I see you
Love, Jen
