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Juanita Lepage MSW, RSW, BHP

Counselling & Energy Healing (289) 812-8089 Hamilton, Ontario

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grief

Healing The Inter-Generational Trauma Of War

November 10, 2022 by Juanita Lepage Leave a Comment

Book Cover for Bittersweet

When I was 16, my parents decided to take my three sisters and I on a 6 week camping trip throughout Europe one summer. They had just sold their dairy cattle. My Dad found a way to ship a van to Europe and then make his money back by selling it afterwards. My parents borrowed camping gear from extended family in the Netherlands. It was an incredible trip where we saw and stayed in places that left a mark from the northern most part of Scotland to the Coliseum in Rome. We camped in downtown London at Tent City, next to railroad tracks in Rome, in places with views of the Alps and Loch Ness.

The most serious destination we visited was Dachau, a concentration camp in Germany. After smiling for all of those other photos, we did not smile in this place. It was a place of tremendous pain and sadness.

Remembrance Day

With Remembrance Day coming up, I’ve been thinking about how most of our lives have been shaped in some way by family members who’ve experienced War. Certainly many with a connection to the Ukraine, Russia, Hong Kong or Afghanistan are just a few places that are currently living this experience.

Whether it be this generation or previous generations, I think we’d be hard-pressed to find someone without a connection to war. I’ve been reflecting on both the experience of those in wars, their surrounding family and friends, and also the impact of those wars experiences on future generations.

One of my Family Stories

In my family and extended family, the pain of war was too much for them to acknowledge Rememberance Day in a way that acknowledged their own losses. As a kid I don’t remember connecting to any emotion about Rememberance Day, often just another thing like church that left me feeling bored. Like many kids, I didn’t have a lot of interest in asking my parents about their history and connection to war. They didn’t talk about it either. Rememberance Day felt like it was for other people.

Over the past few months, I’ve been doing some learning and reflecting on inter-generational trauma. There are some things in myself that I instinctively have felt that I carry that are not fully my own. This led me to explore some of my own family lineage. I started with my maternal lineage and that led me back to Dachau.

Incredibly, my mother had books about her maternal genealogy, all in Dutch from the 1600s until after WWII. All of them were in Dutch, and google translate made it incredibly easy to translate the parts I wanted to read.

For the first time I really connected to my great-grandfather who was a police chief and war-resistor during WWII and was betrayed and then shot. My great-uncle was also a war-resistor who got caught and spent the bulk of the war in various concentrations camps before dying in Dachau a few months shy of the end of the war in 1945. He was 28 and left behind a family who loved him and a fiancee.

My grandparents and their two young boys moved to Canada shortly after the war and then had my mother here in Canada.

If I actually stop and really connect to those words I’ve written, I can’t help but feel my own sadness about my family’s experience at that time. I can only imagine the ways they all tried to cope with that much sorrow.

And this is just one of my 4 family threads – who all have a connection to war.

Deep Sorrow

The book Bitter-sweet by Susan Cain recently crossed my path. She shares how acknowledging sorrow and longing can make us whole.

I can’t help but imagine what it must have been like for all of my extended-family to have to process that experience in the 1940s. I think of my my great-uncle Marcelis who spent years in concentration camps. I think of their surviving family members and those who stayed in the Netherlands, and those who left everyone behind for another country very far away.

I’ve been noticing more of what parts dripped down into future generations. Indeed Susan Cain talks about science of epi-genetics in her book and that past trauma has been documented in impacting the genes of future generations to carry some of these wounds. Fortunately, epi-genetics has shown that as people heal, they can shift their genes too.

The Process of Healing

In reflecting on my extended family and their experience, I have found that talking about it with my mother and family, and also meeting myself and these ancestors (via meditation) with loving-kindness have been important parts towards for my own healing.

It’s really not rocket-science: Acknowledge past pains. Feel them. Be kind during this process. And then ultimately shift to the present moment and realize that those things don’t need to be carried anymore.

Yet as the saying goes, “What is simple is not necessarily easy”.

One of the challenging parts in this process, is that there can be no agenda or timeline for how fast the process goes. For Susan Cain, she was able to heal from her inter-generational trauma by going through the process above by writing her book Bitter-sweet. That took time.

North American Cultural Values

If you live in North-America, you’re also entrenched with multiple cultural values including self-sufficiency, efficiency, “effortless perfection” and a “tyranny of positivity”.

Self-sufficiency admires the person who does something all by them-self without help from others. Efficiency admires people who heal quickly and on a time-line.

Effortless Perfection is the pressure to appear like a winner without needing to try (a term coined at Duke University in 2003). We can see this demand for effortless perfection in so many places from motherhood to being a student. Susan Cain talks about the Tyranny of Positivity and how this has taught people to suppress their emotions and put on a mask of smiles at all times.

When we meet people who struggle to heal from great trauma – they can be left behind and judged for not putting in enough effort to heal. I read a thoughtful critique on Viktor Frankl, a holocaust survivor and psychiatrist who wrote the book “Man’s Search for Meaning”. He brought the duality of both inspiring many people to heal but also not giving room for those who couldn’t heal from their trauma. This excerpt is from an online Jewish Magazine called Tablet.

“Frankl avoided the many painful cases of Holocaust survivors who were unable to reconcile themselves to their past torment. He focused only on those who achieved an optimistic, forward-looking life, people like himself, who could be inspirational examples for the rest of humanity. But Frankl’s ‘tragic optimism,’ as he called it, turned away from the true pain of the Holocaust, which is the fact that it cannot be made into a source of moral inspiration…Such a reality can never be a source of satisfying life lessons.”

David Mikics

What would it be like to start freeing ourselves from timelines and cultural demands to “get over things”?

Freeing myself from a timeline to acknowledge, feel the impact, and heal from of the inter-generational trauma of war in my family has been tough. I generally have that nagging voice of “Damn, you’ve got a great life with so much goodness, how can you be stuck in old pain?”

Susan Cain gives a beautiful story in her book about her time in a grief group. What do we do with our own story after hearing someone’s story that seems much worse than our own? This is a dialogue between her grief group leader, Simcha, and her own internal thoughts.

“Simcha: ‘Are you thinking that ‘she had a four-tissue story and I only have a two-tissue story’?

Susan: Yes … I’m relieved to see others laughing with relief at Simcha’s question. I wish that I didn’t have to tell my story at all; it feels so thin compared to Maureen’s. But refusing to speak feels wrong, ungenerous.” Cain (p. 255-56)

Support From Others

North-American culture really values it when you can do things all by yourself. Healing Inter-generational trauma is not one of those things best done by yourself.

The process often requires some support from others – whether that be therapy, close friends or family who can be fully present with this pain, body-work, psycho-somatic release, energy work, exercise or many combinations of these things.

If you’re open to sound-healing, here’s a link for Unwinding Ancestral Tangles by Laurie Thorp, one of my former teachers at Barbara Brennan School of Healing.

Ultimately, healing requires a process of being met with softness and kindness and a holding of the duality of both the joys in one’s life and the pain too.

This Remembrance day, I hope you get to spend that moment at 11:11 to reconnect to your own family lineage connected to war. It is a beautiful way to connect to your ancestors and also acknowledge yourself.

References

Cain, S. (2022). Bitter-sweet: How sorrow and longing make us whole. Random House

Mikics, D. (2020, Sept 10). The Lie of Viktor Frankl. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/viktor-frankl

Filed Under: Psychotherapy and Counselling Articles Tagged With: grief, Remembrance Day, Sadness, Susan Cain, War

To Meditate Or Not To Meditate: Easy Ways To Get Started Or Restarted

November 1, 2018 by Juanita Lepage Leave a Comment

woman meditating near water

I have been an on again-off again meditator for years.  I have always envied those individuals that have made meditation a regular habit in their lives.  When I met my husband, he would meditate daily for 30-minutes to an hour every morning and evening. He would invite me to join him, but at the time I thought it looked pretty boring to sit silently for that long. He too goes through periods of meditating and not meditating.

Over the years I would read about people such as Ram Dass, Yogananda, or Michael Singer who had mystical and transformative experiences meditating, and I thought, “Well of course if you’re having that type of “wow/life-changing” experience, you would continue to meditate”. Or I would think, “Of course if you’ve chosen the spiritual vocation as your life path, these transformative experiences would happen”. And then at the same time I would read about stories of people who meditated for years and never had that “wow” experience while meditating.

So, if I can’t get a Guarantee of that “Wow Factor”, Why Meditate?

So, without having the “wow” factor goal in mind, I wondered why meditation would be so highly recommended for individuals.

  1. Physical, mental, and emotional benefits

Calmness, focus, centeredness, happiness, better health, and self-love are all benefits of meditation.  It seems that as each year goes by, more and more research demonstrates the healing benefits of mindfulness[1]  or meditation for more and more things. Pain, mental illness, stress, and burnout is just a few of the things it can help with.  Just google “research meditation” or “research mindfulness” and you’ll notice a plethora of information at your fingertips.

When I taught Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) to teens and adults, mindfulness was a key component to this therapy. The main benefit of mindfulness in DBT is to help a person pause and connect with their thoughts & emotions and how they are using this information to interact with the world. Many other types of psychotherapy involving mindfulness have been created too, with the most famous probably being Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) created by Jon-Kabat Zinn. In other psychotherapies, the word mindfulness is never mentioned, but it is used in practice to help a person connect to their emotions and bring awareness to thoughts.

  1. Spiritual benefits

If you’re on a spiritual path, meditation seems a key part in going deeper into one’s spiritual journey whether it be with a religion or a more general spiritual path.  Meditation allows a person to connect beyond themselves to something on a much grander scale – God, the universe, specific religious individuals such as Jesus or Buddha, and more.

Where Do I Start (or restart)?

 

Books

  1. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book Wherever You Go, There You Are, was one of the books that inspired me to start meditation. It’s an easy read with short chapters. This book is especially helpful if you’re interested in the Physical, Mental, & Emotional benefits. If you’re a person who is interested in being mindful but doesn’t want to sit quietly in meditation, this book provides many other options.  You can do anything mindfully. Really.
  2. Want a book that also captures the spiritual benefits? Michael A. Singer’s The Untethered Soul  is succinct and you can tell from the depth and simplicity of this book that he is a seasoned meditator.

YouTube Meditations

There are a lot of guided meditations available on YouTube, it can be a matter of trying a few to find your favourites.

  1. Tara Brach is my favourite person to listen to for a guided meditation. I love her voice and her variety of meditations. You can find many selections on her website or on YouTube.

Apps

There are many apps related to mindfulness and meditation. After not meditating for many months, I tried the 14-day trial with Headspace.  This was a great way to hear if I liked the person’s voice for guided meditation and try out some of their meditations.  When flying on Air Canada earlier this year I found some of their meditations available on the online entertainment system.

After the 14-day trial I decided to buy a subscription for a year (They offer a great discount after you’ve completed the trial).  I really appreciate the options to have a 1 minute or a 30-minute meditation.  Also my screen can be dark and it can keep playing (unlike YouTube). Some days I’m happy if I meditated for 1 minute. Other days I want to meditate for a longer time.  They also have great packages for different topics such as sleep, restlessness, worry and more.

Summary

If you notice in your life that it feels busy, even a few minutes of meditation a day can provide benefits of restoration and calm.  Often between sessions with clients a take a few minutes to connect to myself and shift my energy from the past client to the next one.

I don’t use the word mindfulness in most of my sessions, but often I’m helping clients to connect with themselves in a deeper way to find the solutions that they seek. Many of us like to spend time in our minds, and while we would benefit from connecting with our bodies or our emotions, we are often not practiced at doing so. We are often on the move.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you found something to inspire you to start or restart your journey with meditation!

 

[1] Meditation is a form of mindfulness. There are many ways to be mindful without meditating, but meditation is a popular method of mindfulness.

Filed Under: Energy Healing Articles, Life Skills, Psychotherapy and Counselling Articles Tagged With: anxiety, Depression, Distraction, grief, jon kabat-zinn, meditation, Mental Health, resources, tara brach

Keep Calm And Talk About Death

January 11, 2018 by Juanita Lepage Leave a Comment

I recently saw a photo of someone wearing a t-shirt that said, “Keep calm and talk about death”.  Cheeky. I liked it.  In many parts of North-America, death is a delicate topic.  People don’t know how to talk about it.  So, every once in awhile I read a book about death.  Here are three of my favourites.

Books:

  1. Caitlin Doughty’s From Here to Eternity Travelling the World to Find the Good Death (perspective from a mortician)

If you like a book with a bit of humor, this is an excellent book.  Caitlin explores how a few different cultures deal with death including the United States, Japan, Spain, and Indonesia.  This is a great book to help reflect on what you want to happen to you body when you die.  Personally, I had always thought cremation, but a natural burial with the idea of giving your body to the earth seemed like a better fit for me after reading this book.  This book also reflects on the culture of grief in different countries.  In North-America we have lost ritual and ceremony and conversation about grief.

  1. Paul Kalanithi – When Breath Becomes Air (perspective from someone diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer in his 30s)

I remember listening to an interview with Paul’s wife after he had passed away. She talked about how her husband didn’t feel like a victim when he was diagnosed with cancer, just minutes prior to becoming a neurosurgeon.  She is a doctor too and reflected that bad things happen to good people all the time, so why couldn’t something like this happen to them too? This book is wise, poetic, reflective, and moving.

  1. Atul Awande – Being Mortal (a surgeon and son’s perspective on death)

This book is about what happens when a person is elderly and needs more care than can be provided in their current environment.  Atul explores the complexity of choosing nursing homes or keeping elderly parents at home.  He wisely compares the pros and cons of both from his own experience.  People can feel guilty about choosing one option over the other, and he helps minimize the stigma of your choice.

Hamilton and Burlington Area Resources

A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of attending a workshop with Rachelle McGuire, Director of Bob Kemp Hospice.  If you are currently struggling with grief it can feel very isolating, and you are not alone in this feeling.  In Rachelle’s workshop she talked about shifting the culture and conversation around death in north America.  She talked about shifting grief from a clinical problem to a natural response to circumstance.  Individual therapy can be helpful, but community involvement with others who have been through something similar can help normalize your response to grief and connect with others who have been there too.

The Bob Kemp Hospice has a great list of other resources on their website for those in Ontario or the Hamilton area. Sometimes being with others who have had a similar experience as you can be very healing and sometimes a group can be too intimidating.  You know yourself best – choose the best fit for you.

Filed Under: Life Skills, Psychotherapy and Counselling Articles Tagged With: grief, resources

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