How intergenerational trauma impacts your sexuality

Four steps to start healing your intergenerational sexual trauma

From my decades of unraveling my trauma and working with others, I've come to a few realizations:

1. Trauma, including sexual, is inherited and lives in your body

2. Sex is a sacred source of power and it can be terrifying to reclaim

3. Ancestral healing and sexual healing must be done together because intergenerational trauma impacts our sexuality

Epigenetics tells us that the expression of our genes is impacted by our inner and outer environment, and this is passed down until someone heals and stops the cycle. Because we are beholden to our DNA's ability to express itself, we can not deny our interconnectivity with our ancestors! What our grandmothers and mothers went through leaves their mark on how we feel in our bodies, show up in the world, and even influence our choices.

At the core of this is...sexuality. Without the sexuality of our ancestors, we would not be here.

In our hyper-individualized paradigm of healing, the imprints of our ancestors are often overlooked. This leaves many people confused about why sex is hard or even perpetuating the cycle.

This intergenerational trauma, the unprocessed sexual violence and wounding of ancestors, takes courage to integrate. For men, this can mean having to contend with the harm in their lineage. For women and gender non-conforming folk, it can mean facing how their ancestors were impacted sexually by the past.

If you're intrigued, begin the healing process with these four suggestions:

1. Touch your body

It's important to identify where there is a broken connection to pleasure. If you, or your ancestors, experienced sexual repression or violence it can leave an imprint in the body that manifests as a lack of sensation or pleasure. Through gentle exploration these numb fear based imprints can be dissolved.

2. Feel your emotions fully

 Emotions are a source of power and energy but because of patriarchal societal conditioning, people are only allowed to express a very narrow emotional range. For women this is usually sadness and for me men, anger. This leaves folks with a backlog of undigested emotions and exhausted by the toll of repression. A healthy expression of unfelt ancestral emotions breaks the cycle of generational pain.

3. Take responsibility

While we are not responsible for what our ancestors did in the past, we are responsible for how it plays out today. If people in your lineage committed sexual harm, take responsibility by healing the any patterns of in yourself. Seek support to ensure you become a beacon of sexual safety.

4. Seek support

The work of healing intergenerational sexual trauma is deep. It can be overwhelming to integrate the parts of your sexuality that feel shameful and scary. The truth is, no one does it alone nor are we meant to. Your ancestors had support through community, elders, and ritual and your deserve the same. Reach out for a complementary connection call - I would LOVE to hear your story. BOOK A CALL.

In conclusion, because our work as humans is also to create a new culture on earth where it is safe for all beings to express their full sexual radiance, we won't be fully free to be in our pleasure until we digest the past and embody a new future.

This is also how we honor our ancestors. Your ancestors want you to break free and thrive.

x nuria