Anonymous
Breaking the Chain: A Generational Legacy of Aggression
A patient once came to me seeking treatment for his issues with women. He felt there was something deeply aggressive in his relationships with women—that he couldn’t enjoy warm and loving contact, and that all his relationships were built under the shadow of his search for an aggressive and painful connection, both during intimacy and in daily life.
He was frustrated that he could not build a relationship that suited him and reflected his deepest desires: a connection based on love, warmth, listening, and heart-to-heart presence. Yet he was only drawn to relationships he experienced as destructive, and he felt that he himself was a source of destruction and harm for the women he met.
Being a very kind, spiritual, sensitive, and pleasant person, he felt a huge polarity within himself and suffered deeply.
During our sessions, he brought up childhood memories in which his father abused him and his mother. After a few sessions of ventilation and emotional release, I decided to take the situation a step further. I asked him to close his eyes, connect to his heart, and, through his heart, look at his father as a small child and ask what caused his father to act as he did.
He saw that his father, too, suffered from childhood abuse at the hands of his grandfather. I asked him to imagine his grandfather as a child as well, and there too, he saw childhood abuse. The pattern was clear—this was a “tradition” being passed down from generation to generation, and it was extremely difficult to stop.
I proposed that we enter a process of releasing this family tradition. Suddenly, I felt resistance on his side:
“If I disconnect from my lineage, what will I have? Will I simply be alone in the world? Will I stop being connected to my family? I want this very much—to stop the abuse cycle. I hate it. But I don’t want to lose my connection to them.”
I asked him to take a few breaths and decide what felt right for him. I reminded him that we were not disconnecting him from his family, but only from one damaging family traditionI could understand him. It is frightening to disconnect from what is known and familiar. I asked him to take a few breaths and decide what felt right for him. I reminded him that we were not disconnecting him from his family, but only from one damaging family tradition.
He agreed
I asked him to imagine a thread linking all the generations, and on that thread were inscribed endless genetic, emotional, and environmental impressions passed down through time. Then, I asked him to connect to the light in his heart and allow that light to erase everything that had led to sexual and physical abuse throughout the generations—clearing it all the way back to its very first origin.
Thanks to the patient's self-awareness, he had the opportunity to end this pattern—to break the chain—and to create something new.
I was curious about the result. A week later, he returned and brought up completely new topics—issues related to work, money, housing, and so on. Several weeks later, I finally asked him what had happened with the original issue.
Haim started to cry—crying mixed with a smile and love.
“Oh, that's completely gone,” he said. “I was with someone since then, and I didn’t feel like before at all. I felt good, happy, calm, connected to myself and to her. I wasn’t looking for pain.”
He said it with such ease and simplicity that I was surprised.
The exercise worked. When he decided—through his own inner work—to disconnect from the family story, it stopped influencing him. So simple, yet deeply transformative.
What do we carry with us from generation to generation? What pain do we unconsciously preserve and pass on?
Our imagination holds the power to change our experience—and what we choose to carry in our consciousness.
