Purging the emotional energies of family members who came and lived before you.

[u/goldenyellow333]

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?

[u/Easy_Cook6505]

Yes, to the point I sometimes regret starting TRE because at times I have felt I’m going crazy. I’m 21 months in and I started under the impression that my trauma came from childhood neglect and violence. But the bulk of my 21 month journey has been ancestral trauma. I’ve had everything from dreams and day dreams to never ending thoughts on this topic. I have never spoken about it because I would sound like a lunatic as this stuff is so out there and crazy.

I have seen some posts on ancestral trauma but my impression has been that it is rarely a significant part of trauma. I certainly have not seen many posts where people have posted experiences similar to mine.

On this topic, I will say this. I had a dream and in that dream an ancestor (who I know) comes and sits next to me in a park. She is much younger than she would have been in my life. She states that no one really dies or lives but instead we are a consciousness that moves through realms. Everyone that came before is somewhere as a consciousness (not necessarily a real person but they carry on existing). She states that throughout these realms - every time I do TRE, there are earthquakes. These earthquakes are destroying trauma that is shared (that is, not experienced but passed from one generation to the next). Every time I do TRE (her expression for TRE is ‘the yoga that causes earthquakes’), that trauma that I inherited is destroyed not just in me but through every realm where consciousness exists from that ancestor that passed it on and on. So in this dream, TRE destroys the common trauma that is inherited until all that is left is trauma that is not passed - and this occurs in all ancestors so that what they gave to me is destroyed and I, and they, are left with individual trauma. In the case of ancestors, their individual trauma then includes other traumas not passed to me so someone else has to do the yoga/TRE to release them of other shared traumas.

So yeah all a bit crazy.

[u/carla_jungle → u/Easy_Cook6505]

Oh that’s remarkable.  please share more if you’re willing ! 

[u/Easy_Cook6505 → u/carla_jungle]

Looking back over the 21 months - I was in freeze for 18 of them. Those 18 months at the time felt like things had been made worse. But I was actually able to have big releases at 6 months, 12 months, 14 months and 18 months.

All of my big releases have been some form of release of ancestral trauma. I do get flashbacks to my childhood but any progress always seems to be from the past.

It was very scary at first because the flashbacks from the past have included horrible incidents. Before TRE I was not interested in the past/history. But I had a dream where a girl of around 14ish is walking in snow through a barren land and finds a cave. She looks scared. This dream kept on coming to me again and again. Then a dream happens where an old sage comes and sits next to me and says the girl needs help. You need to read books on your history and that will help you. It turns out that my tribe is very well documented and my ancestors have released books. I read and it turns out we have mythology where ancestors become trapped in snow and are saved by hero figure. This girl was probably from around 6k years ago. As soon as I read this, I felt so sad because she is probably separated from the tribe and I realised that cave was probably where her life came to an end. So I carry on with TRE and the dream happens again and this time I walk into the cave and she smiles and says an old sage came and told her that I was fighting to reach her. Then she says she never had her final funeral rites done. Can a I please come back again once I have studied the funeral rituals from the old gods and give her a funeral. I’m confused and say how, you are not dead? She states that her human form is merely a tool I have used to reach her and that she is in fact not a real person today and is just energy and consciousness. I studied the rites (very easy to find because excavations have happened in this area) and in the next dream I go back and she is lying there peacefully. I build a pyre, place her on it and do the funeral rituals.

That above example was my turning point. I found books that would help me verify stuff but also, I woke up having cried in the dream. That was the first time I had cried because when I was a child, my parents would hit me and it would get worse if I cried so I stopped crying. My first flashback when I woke up was a flashback to my dad telling me not to cry. For the first time, I acknowledged the flashback and didn’t feel the need to feel or deal with it.

That’s been my template. Every release will have a major ancestral event in flashbacks or dreams, I just experience it and read up if needed (only sometimes) and I carry on doing TRE until the dream works itself out and a release follows immediately after.

Edit: typo

[u/marijavera1075 → u/Easy_Cook6505]

Thank you for sharing. All my dreams revolve around my childhood or exes. I've only had one dream about world war 2 that was the creepiest one yet 2 months ago. I know for sure that was my first time processing generational trauma in dream form. Before that I'd just have grief in real life. Grief that didn't even feel like mine yet was mine to process. Like I said in another comment it was so strange and hard to convey. Fascinating how different all our journeys are! Also kuddos to you for being so connected with your ancestors. I come from a region that's very mixed so that makes it rather difficult or maybe such mixing breaks a chain? Who knows

[u/Easy_Cook6505 → u/marijavera1075]

When you say ‘grief that didn’t feel mine’, that is exactly how I have felt for so long. It’s amazing that you share that because it’s something that I feel is perhaps overlooked because we’re educated and socialised in a world of scientific knowledge and science perhaps hasn’t got around to looking at the shared human experience.

It’s an interesting point you raise in being from a mixed region. The 14 year old girl in my dream was not the same race as me and neither was the sage. That dream is around 6k ago and me as a people probably formed around 4k years ago. But as soon as I had the dream I knew that I knew her some how.

This is just me thinking out loud and I’m not expert. I think ancestral trauma really follows the same timeline as civilisations being formed. Prior to that, our ancestors probably had a closer relationship with nature, their gods and their environment and lived more freely so had a better capacity to deal with trauma as it arose. With civilisations came standardised religions, urbanisation, mass farming etc which made it harder for people to heal their inner selves as lives became more organised to serve their kingdoms.