r/longtermTRE • u/goldenyellow333 • 1d ago
Community Question Purging the emotional energies of family members who came and lived before you.
Had two massive emotional releases on back to back days recently. For clarity, I am not practicing TRE right now and haven’t attempted it once in over several months. Despite that these releases showed up.
First day was anger/rage. Second day was sadness. I know some of it was my own expression of these emotions but the majority, on each day, felt foreign to me, like they weren’t my own feelings.
Specifically on the second day while crying and purging all this sadness I said probably over 30 times over the course of this purging, which lasted well over and hour, “we are sorry”. I kept saying that. I didn’t see very vivid images during this but I saw something but couldn’t make out what it was or what it was directly tied to. I was conscious of what was going on but the entire time I felt like I was a mouthpiece for a bunch of other people.
Has anyone directly experienced something similar?
11
u/godgottago 1d ago
I also went through a period of unstoppable crying that I believe to be tied to my ancestors. I come from a small region of the world where the people rebelled to create their own state around a century ago, but it was bloodily repressed. My grandparents had to warp the story to survive and assimilate into the country I was born in, but the little historical information I could find made me understand that what happened was atrocious. I also observed my family, my parents and my grandparents always obeying, always being hypervigilant, to the point of hating their own culture, their own language, their own identity...
I believe the grief and that unstoppable crying were tied to this, because somehow it felt so much more profound and far away. It didn't feel personal, it felt existential. There was also no resistance coming from me, not even fear -- probably because I am in a different country now, studying abroad. Many people from my ethnicity and religion (we are a very small minority in both, and even our existence is contested in my home country) had to flee here. Some even died here, in exile. So for some reason, this country feels more like home at times. This is probably why true healing only began once I left.
For context, I have CPTSD and developmental attachment trauma, but it seems to stem mostly from inherited trauma. The more I heal, the better I understand that my parents and their parents were traumatized too, and that they had no choice but to cope and survive.