05/16/2025
The freeze, flee, fawn, or fight responses can echo through lifetimes (personally & collectively). If your soul experienced or witnessed a shocking loss or violent act, you may be living out the reverberations. This can look like: chronic anxiety or depression (flee/freeze), living out of integrity to your own values (fawn), being non-committal in your relationships, work, or location (flee), abusing others or committing acts of violence (fight). There’s an initial shock to trauma in which there is not as much choice, as the automatic responses take over. Over time, there is more choice. You may understand within yourself or in the actions of others, whether they are in a reaction state, perhaps a reaction state that lasts a whole lifetime. Shifting back into loving, safe, creative engagement with life is possible.
In My Grandmother’s Hands: racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies, Author and therapist Resmaa Menakem says “Unhealed trauma acts like a rock thrown into a pond; it causes ripples that move outward, affecting many other bodies over time. After months or years, unhealed trauma can appear to become part of someone’s personality. Over even longer periods of time, as it is passed on and gets compounded through other bodies in a household, it can become a family norm. And if it gets transmitted and compounded through multiple families and generations, it can start to look like culture. But it isn’t culture. It’s a traumatic retention that has lost its context over time. Though without context, it has not lost its power. Traumatic retentions can have profound effect on what we do, think, feel, believe, experience, and find meaningful.”
Here are some practices from Resmaa’s book for supporting the release of old trauma.
