Family Secrets Can Block Your Life
The key to psychological discomfort often lies in family secrets, which hide shame and guilt. These are transmitted unconsciously and end up conditioning the emotional well-being of people.
Family secrets are an invisible weight. They are felt but, precisely because they are secret, they cannot be grasped let alone approached and elaborated. If these are serious or perverse events, the result could be severe depression with no explanation, or mania, or any type of neurosis or psychosis.
The world press has reviewed, for example, the case of Jennifer Teege. Jennifer only knew that she had grown up in an orphanage and that at the age of 3 she had been adopted by a family. Something inside her was preventing her from feeling totally good. This is why she sought out and contacted her birth mother to find out about her past, which also did not satisfy her inner turmoil. She felt that somehow dark family secrets haunted her. In addition, she perceived the presence of something “bad” in her life.
She later learned that her mother had kept important information from her. For example, that his grandfather had been an SS commander and was called the Butcher of Plaszow . It should be noted that she only learned it in a book and through a few documents. Then, she began to conduct her own investigation until she succeeded in unraveling the family secrets. In his own words: “I could not begin to live my authentic life, to have an identity, until my family stories surfaced.”
The importance of family secrets
Family secrets also exist because of family embarrassment. This is precisely what becomes the object of the cover-up: what causes shame. And if this feeling arises, it is because the secrecy is unacceptable, objectively or subjectively. Otherwise, we wouldn’t need to hide it.
Psychoanalysis asserts that all repression is a failure. Family secrets are a form of collective repression. What happened is sent to a dark area with the idea that this cover-up will make it go away. However, hiding it is precisely the opposite that occurs. This content, obviously, will stay more alive than ever, even if no one can see it.
Anything that is repressed will sooner or later come back and stay more alive than ever. So in terms of repressed content, the same thing happens as with matter: it is not destroyed, but is transformed. In what ? In neurosis or psychosis.
The feelings and emotions that are inherited
This shame in family secrets always comes with guilt. Such guilt is one of the most toxic and harmful feelings that a human being can face. She makes the person who saw her unworthy, and pushes them to seek ways to punish themselves unconsciously. She projects or confesses this guilt constantly, even if she never talks about it directly.
From birth, we receive from our environment a set of implicit and explicit messages. For example, we may sense and sense that our mother is overly nervous and gloomy. At the heart of these behaviors, which are strange to us, there is surely a repressed content that is transmitted to us.
Everything that is neither said nor known is filtered out in life in an imprecise but strong way. Family secrets, when they are very serious or covered with great guilt, make their owners sick. They are also implicitly passed on to subsequent generations, who do not inherit knowledge of what happened, but of its effects on the psyche.
Transgenerational memory
Each of us is the child of a story and of a position in relation to life. When we are born, we are a new chapter in this story and in this perspective. We are not starting from scratch, but we are preceded by a set of facts that define a good part of who we are.
This is why it is very important to know this transgenerational memory in order to better understand ourselves and to discover an important part of who we are. All this information is fundamental for our development and our well-being. Knowing and understanding our ancestors is one way of interpreting our feelings, emotions and attitudes.
If we do not know the details of the lives of our ancestors, they will continue to condition our experiences. In each of us lives the echo of those who have gone before us. A lot of unconscious conditioning comes from family secrets or information that we don’t know. For many people, this is where the key to emotional discomfort lies, as well as how to overcome it.
Our thoughts If you are ashamed of your family, you are ashamed of yourself. How do you get rid of this feeling?
