← Decoded | Unlock The Secrets of Human Behavior, Emotion and Motivation
Decoded | Unlock The Secrets of Human Behavior, Emotion and Motivation
Generational Trauma : It Doesn't End With You
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We have to get to a place where we move out of the motivation phase and get into the accountability phase, because accountability is where we actually start to build new systems, do things differently, and we've got more forward thinking. The motivation phase is where we realize that the trauma bonding thing is not working, and we want to get out of it, but we don't maybe know how to do that. The accountability phase is where we're actively designing the what, and we are collaboratively coming up with new systems to stop the bleeding, heal the wound, so that the next generation doesn't have to grow up knowing any of this. Your brain is wired for deception, but here's the truth. Patterns can be broken. The code can be rewritten. Once you hear the truth, you can't go back. So the only question is, are you ready to listen? Generational trauma gets described in many different ways. Some people talk about it as if it's something that's carried through bloodlines. And some point to genetics or epigenetics, while others recognize the spiritual environments that can influence your behavior, your thought patterns, and your emotions. Human beings are actually complex and extremely multidimensional, so I think multiple layers play a role all at once. Genetics can influence your stress responses. Spiritual environments can influence your thinking, your behavior, or how you're relating to one another. When you study how these patterns actually move through families and cultures, one mechanism becomes extremely clear. Generational trauma spreads primarily through behavioral patterns and emotional environments. In other words, your nurture. Children grow up inside emotional climates, and their nervous systems organize themselves around the climate that they're in. Beliefs form, behavior adapts, and behaviors and patterns become automatic. Children do not inherit them in the form of a memory. They inherit patterns as perception, reaction, and belief. Those patterns shape their adult relationships, their responses to conflict, how they respond to stress, and eventually the environment that they set up for their own children. Generational trauma really is generational patterning. Every child grows up learning three things about their world. They learn what emotions feel normal, what behaviors create safety, and what beliefs explain the environment around them. These three elements form the foundation of someone's brain pattern system, which we talk about very often on the show. When a child grows up in an environment where anger is common, anger becomes familiar. And when emotional withdrawal is the dominant response to dealing with conflict, withdrawal becomes very familiar. And when love appears conditional or inconsistent, anxiety begins organizing your behavior around trying to receive love. Children adapt extremely quickly because their brain learns survival patterns early. One child may become hyper responsible. That's just like me. Another child may become extremely Avoidant. Another child might become controlling. Another might become the caretaker for everyone around them also guilty. Each of these responses begins as an adaptation to the emotional environment surrounding the child. As adults, both many people continue recreating these same emotional conditions as they adapted to during childhood. Because, of course, safety equals familiarity. Familiar environments tend to pull people back in. The nervous system organizes itself around what it learned earliest in life. Beliefs form early in life as explanations for the emotional environment that a child is experiencing. These beliefs in turn shape perception and become filters through which your entire reality is interpreted. Once a belief forms, the brain begins collecting evidence that reinforces it. This is what makes it a self fulfilling prophecy or a loop. A child who forms the belief that people can't be trusted begins scanning the world for proof that people can't be trusted. A child who forms the belief that love must be earned begins organizing their behavior around performance and approval and validation seeking. The belief becomes the lens through which they interpret their reality. The lens then shapes their behavior, and the behavior produces outcomes that sometimes you can't run away from. Those outcomes, in turn, reinforce the behavior. Over time, emotional cycles develop around these belief systems. And these cycles repeat again and again. The brain is constantly scanning for cues in your environment. And these cues are going to in turn shape your expectations before your conscious thinking even kicks in. Psychology refers to this mechanism as priming. Priming activates certain associations in the brain before you've even made a decision. Small signals influence behavior in very powerful ways. Research has shown that subtle reminders of your identity can influence your overall performance. In one study, female students completed a calculus exam. One group checked their gender on the test before beginning the test, and another checked their gender afterward. The group reminded of their gender before the exam performed worse overall. A single reminder activated a belief, and that system influenced their overall performance. And when you expand this influence across your entire childhood, the impact becomes incredibly significant. Children grew up hearing messages about what people like them can expect from the world. Messages about relationships, messages about success, messages about safety and belonging. But the messages repeated inside families, communities and cultures become neurological instructions. The brain organizes expectations around those messages. And behavior begins aligning with them. I once worked with a client who grew up hearing a sentence repeated over and over again in their family. And that sentence was, people always leave. It was spoken casually and it was often said without much thought behind it. Over time, it became part of how their world was understood. Relationships were approached cautiously. Emotional distance felt safer than closeness. Vulnerability carried inherent risk. The person believed that they were protecting themselves by staying guarded years later, they began noticing a pattern. They pulled away first. They kept people at an arm's length. Emotional closeness of any kind felt uncomfortable and actually dangerous. Eventually, relationships ended. And every ending reinforced the same belief. People always leave. The belief quietly created the outcome that it was actually just predicting. Once the pattern became visible, their behavior started to change. New responses replaced the old ones. Relationships began unfolding quite differently. The belief that once felt like a permanent truth Lost its power entirely. Patterns that once felt inevitable began opening up into new possibilities. Patterns gain strength when emotional responses reinforce them. The brain does not simply repeat behaviors. It begins seeking emotional states that feel familiar. Emotional addiction patterns start to form around those. And the brain becomes accustomed to a certain type of emotional chemistry. And it starts to recreate conditions that trigger those same biochemical responses. Some people become familiar with chaos. Other become familiar with rejection. Maybe others control or even rescuing others. Each emotional pattern produces a very specific and predictable chemical response in the brain. And over time, behavior begins organizing your life circumstances. Circumstances around your emotional expectations. Relationship choices are purely just a reflection of that pattern. Your conflict styles start to repeat. Life begins mirroring the emotional environment that your brain recognizes from the inside. The nervous system is returning to what it learned early in life. In many families, there comes a moment when someone begins to notice the cycle. A parent hears themselves speaking to their child in the same tone. That they may have experienced as they were growing up. A father may recognize anger patterns that he once promised himself he would never repeat. A mother may notice emotional withdrawal during conflict that feels strangely familiar. That moment can feel uncomfortable. In break method, we often refer to this moment as reality vertigo, where you're becoming the very thing that you tried so hard to fight against. And there's nothing you can do except face it head on. This moment requires honesty and responsibility. It also is what marks the beginning of change. Once the pattern becomes visible, it no longer is able to operate quietly in the background. You start to recognize that you have a choice. Maybe your responses start to shift. Children raised in that new emotional environment Experience something brand new. And when that shift occurs, the trajectory of your next generation starts to change. Patterns that once felt stretched across decades can dissolve in one single lifetime. And to be honest with you, I've seen them change with one person taking break method. Healing wounds often follows a progression. In one of my break lectures many years ago, I was teaching about how generationally we seem to get caught in these sort of specific traps, Specifically regarding processing our own trauma and behavior. The first stage that we were stuck in culturally and societally Was A hiding phase. And if you look back at the cues to this, this would be things like mental hospitals and things that kept you separated away from society, where if you had any sort of issue, you were basically deemed subhuman and they just locked you away. It wasn't something to process. It wasn't something to work through. It was something to separate. And I'm glad that we got out of that stage. Absolutely. But then I think we transitioned into the stage where instead of hiding and keeping everything separate, we have gotten ourselves into this sort of trauma bonding phase. I believe for the majority of my lifetime, I'm turning 41 in less than a couple weeks, which is crazy. And for the better part of my life, over the years, it's become more accessible to both acknowledge mental health issues, seek help for mental health issues, and then certainly in the last 20 years of my life, use those mental health issues as a way to either garner attention to be a part of a community, or as a way to build your lifestyle around healing. And for those of you that are listening, I'm putting healing in air quotes here because I think trauma bonding is very antagonistic to healing. And I think that we have been stuck in this sort of support group, retreats, sharing circles, Instagram driven trauma bonding for a really long time. And I think there are many people out there trying to sound the alarm and do something about this. But I think we've been stuck here for the better part of 20 years. There are plenty of people that I know are questioning this and doing what they can on their social media channels or in their programs to try to shift the narrative or turn the tide. And I think I've evaluated that. That third transition point is motivation. Right. Where people realize I can't just talk about my trauma forever and use it as a way to build community around myself or to maybe excuse or justify my poor behavior or negative coping mechanisms. I want to actually do something about it. And, you know, Breakfast started in 2014, but it was only in 2017 that we launched our first online program. And it's grown in leaps and bounds every year. So that's crazy that it's been almost 10 years of doing break method online, but it has. And if I look at those years, our growth and the amount of people that are ready to show up and say, I don't want to keep looping in this forever, I want to get out of it, has increased tenfold. So I know this motivation phase is right there. People are leaning toward it. But I think part of what we're experiencing socially, politically is this trauma bonding, social justice wound. It's got its tentacles throughout our society right now. And I want to just pause here and say I'm not saying this to diminish any bad thing that has happened to any specific cultural group because there are horrendous things that have happened to many cultural groups. But we can accidentally bring our problems with it with us and pass it on to the next generations if we don't do the work to heal from it and separate from it. And I think there's been this major shift in the last 10 years in particular where we're really bent on trying to bring all of our issues from the past and bring them very much into this moment today. And in fact, if you look at a lot of what's happening in kind of the liberal political side of the spectrum, there's very much this introducing yourself with all of your disabilities or injustices before you even say your name. And I'm not saying this to poke fun at it. I'm purely saying we're talking about the psychological aspects of this and we're talking about priming. If you quite literally start off with, you know, all of the. And I maybe, maybe I'm not speaking to the right group here, but I think I am. You've probably seen some social media clips where people will introduce themselves with all of their disabilities and their like, racial injustices and then give their name. But I'm not going to go out of my way to, you know, push into this too much further. But you can kind of fill in the blanks there before you even have a chance to pull someone's energy in or think about their name or I wonder who this person is. You've already primed them to think of yourself in all of these very specific, trauma laced ways that has an impact long term. And people like that are now raising children. And I'm very fearful that what is happening with this current generation will set us back even further than we already are because now mental health issues, social justice issues of the past are. They're not coming through maybe story or more implicit ways of just observing behavior anymore. Now they're very much put on a pedestal and they are intentionally led into, in both parenting and social interactions, et cetera. So the idea that it was already hard for us to move beyond and break the generational chains of trauma and traumatic stories and things that have happened in the past, that was already hard. The way that many people on the left side, liberal spectrum are doing it now makes it impossible like actually impossible. If you look at behavior in psychology like a math problem, the way that they are choosing to engage with it right now all but ensures we will never get out of it, but actually augment it because we're leading with the trauma. And this is true of many groups that view themselves to be distinct and different. You train through groupthink people to put this sort of trauma story on a pedestal, and you train them to think this is always true without question. So then they're gonna go out in the world and they're going to see the entire world around them from that lens. I'm going to tell a story that I've told on one of their podcasts before and actually got their podcast episode pulled. So I don't know why, when I tell this story, you're going to be like, hu, uh. But the sponsor of my episode happened to be a very liberal tampon company. So I think it was actually the sponsor that asked for my episode to get pulled. But this was many years ago, and I digress. So I was in Atlanta once for a training, and I was standing in a. A line where you're going up to the counter to order your food. You put in your order, and then they give you like a little number and then you go back and sit down. And I was standing behind in line. Someone from the training that was honestly still is. I love her dearly. A wonderful, beautiful, bubbly black woman from the South. She was standing in front of me and we're kind of like chit chatting in the line. We're getting closer, closer, closer. And she gets up to the person at the front. And I'm an observant person. So I've kind of been, you know, taken in the sights, watching this person, how they've interacted with many people before them. And this person was having a really bad day. Were they having a bad life? Possibly. Were they nice? Absolutely not. They were rude, they were short. They clearly hated their job. They worked at a burger joint. I may not like my job either at a burger joint, but I watched many people, tons of diversity before this person come through to this particular person at the cashier counter. And they all, in my opinion, had equally crappy experiences because this person was not a nice person. This person goes up, they order their food. When we go to sit down. The entire conversation was about how racist that person was. If you've been anywhere near the health and longevity space lately, you've probably heard the word peptides thrown around everywhere. Some people are calling them the future of medicine. Others are warning you that the space is going to get messy fast. The reality is that both things are probably accurate to some extent. Peptides are rapidly moving into mainstream healthcare. Clinics are prescribing them, biohackers are experimenting with them, and regulatory conversations are evolving quickly. 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It's about truly understanding the mechanisms, the physiology, and how to use these peptides responsible in an industry that is evolving quickly. So whether you're a clinician, a serious health professional, or a biohacker who just wants to understand what you're really experimenting with, or maybe you just wanna understand where the healthcare system is about to transition. This is one of the most grounded educational courses I've seen yet. Enrollment is open now and if you use the code busy300, you're gonna get $300 off the program. Just head to the show notes and enroll. And it was, did you see what they said to me? Did you see what they did to me? And I took a beat and I thought, do I say something? Do I not say something? And I was like, you know what? This is one of those great learning opportunities where I'm just going to say something because I know would bet any amount of money on it in Vegas. That person was not rude to her because of the color of her skin. That person was rude to her because that person was rude. That person was rude to a white person, to an Asian person. It doesn't matter what their skin color was. That person was just rude. But if you've been trained to think of somebody, somebody based on what their skin color is going to do to me, you're going to filter their rudeness through a lens of racism. And that doesn't make it objectively true because that person was just as rude to me as they were to her. And my skin color was the same skin color as the person that was the cashier. So I say this as an example, because if you are trained through your generational trauma and now just the entire social justice movement as a whole to see the world that way, you will be operating in confirmation bias, and everything that you do will reconfirm what you thought you were seeing. But that doesn't mean that it's objectively true and happening. So I encourage each of you to be thoughtful about what you are allowing yourself to believe, because what we believe we will start to see pop up in our world. Another example of this would be, and this happens all the time, when you get a new car. Maybe you thought that you were, like, the only one that had your car. You never see them. All of a sudden you get your new car and you're like, oh, my God, everyone has my car now. It's just because it became part of your awareness. So you were primed to now start to see it in more places. That is how priming works. Another great, easy example of priming would be if I show you in my hand that I'm holding up the color yellow right now, and I ask you to think of a fruit. Most of you are going to say a banana. Like, it just. It's how it goes. Some of you might have thought lemon. But most of you, if I was holding up the color yellow and I asked you to think of a fruit, and the yellow, or even just hearing the word yellow was either in your ear or you could see it with your eyes, you were very likely to pick a yellow fruit, because that is how priming works. So if you teach a child, either explicitly or implicitly, that men are all dogs and men always leave and men can't be trusted, or white people are inherently racist, or black people are inherently racist, you will all but ensure that is what they see in their world, and it will not mean that it is objectively true. So when we think about where we're stuck in these phases, where we see this intersection of kind of social justice, and then us already being stuck in the trauma bonding phase in our healing trajectory as a human collective, the blend of these two is extremely toxic because they feed each other. Right? I would love to see us get to a place where we can have some real and nuanced conversations about injustices that were done to people in the past and trauma and poverty and other sorts of systemic injustices, but have a conversation about truly how to solve them. Because my Belief is that the way it's being done today does, does not only not solve them, it actually augments them and makes them worse. I know I've talked in previous episodes and obviously all my other podcast content from my old podcast the Modern Good, about some ideas on how to solve some of these problems, but I think at very least we need to be able to have nuanced conversations. Yes, these things happen to you and they are terrible and they should have never happened. But leading with all those things now and making sure that your next generations put that up on a pedestal and only see the world through those hurts and pains is not only perpetuating the problem, it's augmenting the problem and you're handicapping your future generation. So we have to do something differently here. And I think this is where we, I hope, are going to shift out of this sort of motivation phase. Because I do think there's some people that are trying to motivate their way out of the trauma bonding. I think there are some people, especially in some of these communities, that have been wildly mistreated historically, have been disenfranchised. There are many people inside of these groups. They're just, they're not as loud as the organized group think groups on the left. But there are absolutely some people who've been trying to sound the alarm on this. And for those of you, I, I commend you because we shouldn't have to choose between one or the other. We can't just pretend those things didn't happen. But we also shouldn't only think about the things that have happened and not do anything to help those groups heal. Because I do believe that healing, of course, is a choice. But there is a. There is an actual destination where you have effectively been able to release your past trauma, separate yourself from it, and not see any use or value in holding on to that trauma story anymore. And I don't think that we have ever seen that happen en masse with the groups that need to have that happen. We've never gotten any of these groups that have experienced really significant pain and trauma to be cared for in a way that allows them as a collective to see value in releasing that identity and starting fresh. So I would like to see us get there. I know that I've worked with many people that were once operating inside of these groups. And in going through my work with Break Method and some of my other lecturing that I've done in kind of more the socio political sphere, there have been a lot of people that have woken up and realized, oh my God, you're right, this is exactly what I'm doing and I don't wanna participate in that anymore. But I think there needs to be a bigger conversation about what we build in parallel. Because you can't just deny it and be like, oh, just get over it. And then you also can't do what I think has been happening on kind of more that sort of left leaning social justice side, which is surely going to make it worse. So I would love to have more conversations on how we can build this sort of parallel track because I think we need to do something drastically differently that hasn't been done before. And I have always felt called to help solve this problem. So we'll certainly after this episode we'll, we'll keep pulling this thread. But I think big picture, we have to get to a place where we move out of even the motivation phase and get into the accountability phase. Because accountability is where we actually start to build new systems, do things differently, and we've got more forward thinking. The motivation phase is where we realize that the trauma bonding thing is not working and we want to get out of it, but we don't maybe know how to do that. We just have that motivation piece. We know something has to change, but we don't know the what. To me, the accountability phase is where we're actively designing the what. We know how we're going to do it. We're pouring into those systems, we're having these really nuanced, hard conversations with people who have been mistreated and disenfranchised. And we are collaboratively coming up with new systems to stop the bleeding, heal the wound, so that the next generation doesn't have to grow up knowing any of this. Because I think that's the, the biggest deficit that we give to our children is to prime them to see the world in a certain fear based or shame based way. I've said this before that I really think fear is as contagious as a virus. If you think about little kids, like little kids are so fearless that you basically have to spend your entire parenting life for the first two years trying to help them not die because they just, they don't understand fear yet, they don't have it. But what ends up happening from a parental perspective is you accidentally influence your fears into your children with how you are parenting them, right? If you're a helicopter parent, you're like, don't do this, right? You're always taking the deep breath. You're likely to put your kids on edge. And then they're going to grow up wanting to keep everything safe and being very hyper vigilant because you pass that on to them, you augment that out to deeper socio political historical wounds. And you've caused a massive problem because that child can't outgrow that. You've, you've actually put that fear into your child. And they're going to have to come to me as a 40 year old to try to get out of it or some other program. And it's not easy work, you guys. So if we can, which I believe we can, we can take the responsibility right now and say, hey, on behalf of my people, right, Whoever your people are, I do not want to participate anymore in perpetuating this generational wound. It has to stop with me. I don't want my future generations to think like this, to see the world this way. And I want them to be unrestricted to imagine what could be. Because I think big picture, that is what gets handicapped the most, is you handicap your child from being able to see all the possibilities in the world. And how can we get the people that are in these sort of disenfranchised, impoverished, you know, horrible condition groups to envision new solutions to save their own people or to change the trajectory of their people. If we're already handicapping what they think their opportunities are in the world, how they can do those things? We are, we're blocking innovation and problem solving with how we're raising children. And I am so passionate about finding a way to help people in these groups not just deny their pain and hurt. That's not productive. Right. We're not trying to gaslight people into thinking that didn't happen to you, of course that happened to you. But we have to move beyond this sort of dichotomy where we're either gaslighting and being like, just get over it or that's the only thing that we focus on. We have to help people in these groups acknowledge the pain and the hurt, work through that pain and the hurt in a way that is systematized so that we can help their next generations and the people that are running in more of the lateral generation. So like sisters, brothers, cousins. So instead of the youngers, we have to kind of broad sweeping, go lateral so that those groups can let go of these stories of pain and hurt and actually start fresh. And obviously this conversation is about generational trauma. And to me that is the accountability phase where we're saying this happened to my people, but it can stop with me. I Do not want to participate in passing this on to my children anymore. And that interrupting of the generational pattern, it does require an intentional action and does require you to stand in place and say no more ends with me. But that means that the first step has to be learning to observe your own behavior and take drastic ownership for it, right? Because you have probably been taught to put all that pain and suffering and all these fear shame messages up on a pedestal and you pass them on to your kids, either through them observing your own behavior, your own pain, your own suffering, or even through things like telling cultural stories or literally programming your kids verbally to say XYZ people always do XYZ thing. So we have to be aware of how we are both explicitly, right? So verbally, directly and implicitly. So under the radar through observation, teaching our next generations what the world means, what people are going to think about them, and how this unfortunately reinforces all these patterns of generational trauma. We also have to be able to identify the behaviors that we're using that reinforce these cycles and very much keep them alive. And then, of course, we have to disrupt those patterns. We have to be able to do things differently. Just like in the human body. Fire together, Wire together. Fire apart, wire apart. We have to figure out in these communities in which generational trauma has been perpetuated, what behaviors or cultural ways of living life are continuing to fire these things together and augmenting the pattern. And where do we have to start to create some pattern opposition and change? Let me ask you a question. Have you ever noticed how you can know something is unhealthy and still do it anyways? You know you shouldn't react that way in an argument. You know that habit isn't good for you. You know that that thought pattern is irrational. And yet somehow your brain runs the same loop again. This is where a lot of personal development goes wrong. Awareness alone doesn't change the brain. Repeated behavioral input does. Your brain changes through neuroplasticity, through the pathways you strengthen with action, not just awareness. And that is exactly why I created Renew youw Mind. This program sits at the intersection of neuroscience, behavioral rewiring, and biblical teaching around the command to renew your mind. Inside this program, I walk through what's actually happening in the brain when pattern why your prefrontal cortex shuts down under emotional pressure and how specific behaviors activate areas like the anterior mid cingulate cortex, which is responsible for resilience, discipline, and the ability to push through discomfort. But the most important thing we talk about is pattern opposition. Because if you want a new life, you can't keep feeding the same neural pathways that created the old one. Scripture says, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. But most people were never taught how to actually do that. Renew youw Mind gives you the framework to begin interrupting destructive patterns, strengthen your ability to regulate emotion and build the emotional resilience that is required to become a new creation. If you've ever felt like your reactions, habits or emotional patterns are running your life instead of the other way around, this program was built for you. Renew your Mind can be accessed at Stan store busygold. And when we're talking about generational trauma outside of just your family line, which certainly matters, and I don't mean to minimize it, but we're now thinking about generational trauma as it pertains to more of a cultural or racial identity that perceives themselves to have been either othered or harmed in some way. The intensity of the generational trauma certainly ratchets up. And again, like I said, I don't mean to minimize what's happened to anybody because everyone's trauma is traumatic to them. And I think the pathway is clear. When an individual who is clearly participating in and passing on all of their previous bloodlines, traumas and behaviors, be it addiction or anger over emotionality or mental health issues, you can be the chain breaker, right? I've seen that time and time again in break method. Somebody comes in, they wake up, they have that reality vertigo moment and they realize, oh my God, I'm doing all the things that I was fighting so hard to not do. And now I can see this showing up in my kids. I have to be the one to stop this cycle right here. And you can be one person with one choice to do the work, can protect the rest of that bloodline forevermore. Because the reality is, as much as we can, I think, have been tricked into genetics being this all powerful entity, especially over the last five years. Genetics are not actually that powerful. Genetics can be overridden by your environment every time. The, the balance there is, it's not equal. If you were to put them on a scale, the nurture, nature, conversation, it's not a balanced scale. Nurture absolutely outweighs your nature every time. I've heard other doctors describe genetics as a loaded gun. But something has to pull the trigger of the loaded gun, otherwise it, it won't shoot, it won't fire. The bullet could stay there forever completely dormant. Nothing would happen. So when we think about it in this context, I think a lot of the last few years we've really been kind of programmed subconsciously to be like, oh, it's just genetic, it's just genetic. There's nothing we can do about it. That's absolutely unequivocally not true. You as a person listening to this today could break the generational chains of everything coming after you by making one choice to do the work, one choice to do break method will prevent that from being spilled over into your children. And if your children aren't raised in that, they won't raise their children in that, etc. Etc. So that is true when we're just thinking about us being able to break our own generational trauma. Now let's split back into generational trauma that is tied into some sort of cultural identity or racial identity in which you perceive as a group you have been harmed over the course of time, which in one of my lectures, a long time ago. And maybe I'll find the visual and I'll link it to the show notes. There's this really cool. It's like a long scrolling map that just shows the change of power and slavery over like thousands and thousands of years. And it's all color coded. It's a pretty cool thing. And I think often groups that are the loudest and most recent can kind of manipulate the mass psyche into forgetting that actually it's much more complex than it might sound based on today's sociopolitical climate. Right? So in today's sociopolitical climate, and again, this is not to minimize it at all, but a lot of what we hear about is kind of the, the bipoc, people of color, you know, slavery being kind of the most recent in our history line, things that gets brought up a lot. And then also of course, First Nations Native American traumas that have happened. And again, I'm very well versed in all these things. I am not here trying to say that these things weren't horrific and traumatic because they were, they were systematized, they were awful. I know way too much, even firsthand from clients about what happened with first nations and Native American groups and boarding schools, et cetera. So I am telling you right now, these things really happened. They're horrific. And of course there is trauma in the generations from these things occurring. But what I am saying is that some of the ways we take on this story and take on this identity and we don't actually take the position I can be the one. This can stop with me. This can stop with my family, this can maybe stop with my tribe. Right? We as a people need to heal from this so that we do not perpetuate these things. I don't think that has happened. An interesting piece and I will try to do some digging and find the name of the book. I read this book back in 2018, looking at the African American community in the United States, for example. Actually, as a group, the African American community in the United States very much did this in the early 1900s and leading up into kind of the 40s, 50s. This is not something, by the way, that you get taught in school. And when I first started digging into this history, I was like, I'm sorry, what? This would have been great to know. Actually. African American communities were largely very conservative, very religious compared to the general average. And they had actually amassed a lot of wealth for themselves. They had built all these parallel economies. And yes, of course there was segregation, all those things which are of course absolutely wrong and disgusting. But as a group, they had built all these parallel economies, hospitals, entrepreneurship. Right. They had. Basically they were like, well, we can't participate in your system. We're going to build our own systems. And they'd actually amassed wealth and were living like in the large average. They were living well. And this is where, of course, the conversation takes a turn. Because I think big picture, I think everyone knows, listening to this podcast that kind of naturally, always have been conspiracy oriented. And I think many of the conspiracies that I have believed in and followed at this point, kind of the joke is like, I'm not a conspiracy theorist anymore because I'm kind of like batting 100 here. A lot of the things that I have suspected over the course of my adult life have, of course, come to pass. This one makes sense to me. I didn't know it at the time, but it does make sense. And maybe this is something that we'll dig into on a future episode too, because there's. There's a lot here. And I also need to get the name of that book for you so you guys can look into it as well. But it does seem that around this time, and I'm. I think I'm correct about dates. But again, let's. We'll get the name of this book and I will verify because I don't. It's been probably six years since I read this book. So I think what was happening is like going into kind of late 50s, early 60s, it became very clear that actually a lot of the sort of political figures that were being established in black America at this time were actually more conservative leaning. And there was definitely a CIA operation to both infiltrate them and take them out. And then what we see is I think a very intentional attack on black America with drugs. Right. There was an intentional, I think very well constructed play to disrupt and dismantle all of the progress that had been made in that community and disseminate drugs and completely collapse all the progress that had been made. And, and I encourage you to look into this a little bit more. And again, I feel like these days I shouldn't have to give this reminder, but because of the way tech works, you can't just go on Google and expect that you're going to type in something and you're not going to get a very curated, very politically already skewed perspective. So you're going to have to go deep dive here and I will get you the name of this book because it was amazing and had so many citations. So you can really dig in and kind of look for real information sources as well instead of just, just try to rely on Google. Right. Which is very biased. So as you start to dig into this, you realize that there was very much this sort of like subversive political movement that was aimed at actually dismantling all the progress that black America had made. And I bring this up as this example because I think a lot of what you hear today in this conversation around black American systemic racism, which again, I'm not saying doesn't exist, to some extent it, it does. But I think that what has happened, especially in the last, let's say 20 years, has made it worse, not better. It doesn't take into consideration that once before, a long time ago, even though slavery preceded this other kind of, I think positive uprising culturally of black America, it doesn't take into consideration that once before black America did mobilize and pull themselves out of it. It. And I think that needs to be more a part of the conversation because right now the conversation very much is, well, because that happened to us then, this is where we are now. And if you were to look at it plotted on a chart, this wouldn't actually be true. It would be like, yes, trauma happened, we rised up. It took a long time to rise up out of it. But we were here then something took us out and we went back to assert again and then now we're trying to build ourselves up again. But a lot of the conversation narrative of doesn't take into consideration that they've as a group, they have very much pulled out of it before and risen into success, amassing wealth and largely being more per capita religious in the Christian orientation than the average of America at that time. So this is important to think about because if you're perpetuated this narrative, we, we can't do this because of this, you're not considering the data that shows you actually can. And I'll give this example, and I know this is obviously a extremely heated topic right now just because of everything that's happening in the world. And maybe we'll go into this more. But a good example of this would be, obviously I was raised Jewish and I had grandparents that fled Europe during the Holocaust, so my dad's first generation. So when you think about something like that. And again, I say this because I know that there's a big wave of anti Semitism right now and people are blaming everything on the Jews. And if you have watched any of my woke psych stuff during COVID times, you know how I feel about that. And I think it's a much more nuanced conversation than that. But we're not going to touch that one at this current juncture. But I will say, if you look at what happened to Jews in Europe during Hitler times, that was horrific, right? Very, very horrific. And nowadays, interestingly enough, you're hearing a lot of people, I think they're more Holocaust deniers lately than I've ever seen in my generation. So again, that's why I say, I know this is a somewhat contested topic, but if you think about something like that having happened, Jews as a, as a whole bounced back relatively quickly. And I bring this up because I believe more than anything else, Jews bounced back from that relatively quickly because of what they believe about themselves. And this goes back to the influence of belief and the stories we tell ourselves is going to determine our trajectory. So this is kind of that whole victim victor sort of dichotomy. Having been raised Jewish and very culturally Jewish, Jewish people, they see themselves as victors even when they're like. And you know, I think to some extent it can maybe make them come off as egotistical or boastful or whatever. But as a, as a general rule in Judaism, there are very specific belief hierarchies that are pushed on you about, you know, obviously like being a good steward of wealth, which I think often gets twisted and into to greed and things like that, being focused academically and, you know, always doing better, protecting your family by making good decisions right now, these sorts of things. But I think more than that, there's never this belief in Judaism because we're talking about right now generational trauma and cultural stories so if you think about Jews even going back to the time of the Bible, there's very much this survivor narrative, right? Like, you can try to keep us down, but we're gonna keep coming back up, right? So in a way, you know, maybe like a sort of cockroach sort of thing, like, you can try to do what you can, but, like, you're never gonna get rid of this. So I think that story and that belief culturally, that's what gets passed down through Judaism. Even stories, for example, like Hanukkah, right? There are very specific things that get passed down culturally in Judaism. One of them is the story of Hanukkah, where basically there's this battle that breaks out with the Maccabees. And it's winter and it's cold, and there's really only enough oil for one night. But through prayer, it lasts for eight nights, and they, you know, they're fine. So there's. Jews have this cultural belief that they are survivors. And when you believe that, you act accordingly. When you are passing on a different story, it will affect the people that are raised with that different story. So I hope that you're picking up what I'm putting down here. We have to start healing, and we have to start telling our next generations a different story about who they are. And I think that is where we are fundamentally stuck right now. Because I understand people not wanting to let go and release their old trauma stories because it feels like, no, no, no. But you have to understand that this happened to my people. I hear you. I see you. I agree. But at what point in our lifetime are we going to draw a line in the sand and say, these things happen to me, but I am not these things. I have the ability to be different. I have the ability to be renewed. And I have the ability to make a choice right now to prevent my children from having to carry that burden for the rest of their lives. Lives. So I would like us get to a place where we're. We're more intentional about what stories we tell ourselves, what we believe, and we make sure that we are only passing on to our kids that which will serve them in their lifetime and the lifetimes after them. Because our stories and our belief systems will influence future generations. Right. I know with Native American cultures, there's this idea of always being thoughtful about the seven generations after you. I think that's a really beautiful concept. I think largely that is embodied in specific ways. For example, in the Native American or First nations cultures, right. With how they're stewarding the Land and caretaking nature. I would love to see groups that have been harmed in some way over the last, let's say, 200 years, not just take that position or concept and apply it to things like the land, but to your own mind, your own emotional state, your own trauma. Because we can change the trajectory of future generations by changing ourselves. And there has to be a moment where we're willing to shed our trauma story. And it's a scary place to be. And I think much of what happens with groupthink causes you to be afraid to ask questions or say, hey, why do we do this? Is this really serving us anymore? Because then you risk getting ostracized from the group. And when you have trauma that's tied to identity or race or religion, et cetera, you are primed to believe that you need your group to survive without us. It's even worse when the reality is, I think people are going to have to be bold and ask some really hard questions and maybe take a couple steps outside of the comfort of their group think or group identity right now in order to create the space for others to eventually do the same. And I would love to be more a part of that conversation. I'd love to continue having conversations about this, because I think we are in a time and place politically where we have to start doing this. Because if we keep bringing our trauma with us forever, history will repeat itself. And it won't repeat itself because it was our destiny. It will repeat itself because we have been primed to do so. And instead of remembering that we can rewire and have agency and change the future, we'll just keep recreating the past. And I don't want to do that with my kids. Do you want to do that with your kids? That sounds awful. What does that look like when you augment that out a hundred years? Somebody has to be willing to draw a line in the sand and say, no more. It has to end with me. So is that going to be you? Are you willing to do the work to release yourself from the trauma story and the narrative and start fresh with your kids? Are you willing to do what it takes to not accidentally vomit all of your worst dysregulated behaviors and coping mechanisms onto your children? Because if you can stop now and say, I need help. I need to do this work. I don't want to do this to my kids. You will change the future. Because history doesn't just repeat itself passively. We are doing it to ourselves. And I hope that this episode helped wake some people up and remind you that you have the ability to take responsibility. And I think that's something that sociopolitically we've lost touch with right now. Many people are operating in this victim mindset of like this happened to me and I have no power. And the only way to get my power back is kind of a radical self advocacy where you're kind of now yelling about your trauma. Both, both sides are missing the solution. And I'm always naturally oriented toward being a solutions based thinker. I have a lot of ideas here, but I hope that if you listen to this podcast and you were in one of those groups, it caused you to stop and think for a second. Do I want to participate in perpetuating this or do I want to renew my mind, change myself so that I can literally change the future? Because that's, that's the choice that you have in front of you. And if you want to be the person that breaks the generational chains of trauma in your family line, you know where to find me. Share this episode with somebody that needs it and I'll see you guys next week. Your brain isn't broken, it's running. An old code break method is a system that maps your neurological logical patterns, decodes your emotional distortions and rewires your behavior fast. No talk therapy spiral, no getting stuck in your feelings, just logic based rewiring. In 20 weeks or less. Head to breakmethod.com and see what your brain is really up to.