My Mom was a Nazi.

I don’t mean that in some petulantly figurative way. She really was. At 12 years old she stood before her class to lead the morning ‘Heil Hitlers’ in her classroom. All the kids were Nazis. The teacher was a Nazi.They had no choice.

She was born out of wedlock, a practically unforgivable sin then, and was hidden in an attic at the beginning of her life to hide the shame from the neighbors. Her Dad meant the world to her, he was everything to her. Against his will, he was forced to join the German army. She lost him to a Russian concentration camp during the war.

She survived the bombing of Dresden. She survived formative years spent with a mother unable to heal from the emotional wounds of her own life. She survived the eventual estrangement from her family after she had the courage to make a new life for herself. She escaped through the Iron Curtain from East Germany when she was only nineteen. Alone and with a single suitcase, she was lured by the promise of the West. But the past came along for the ride, as it always does.

My Dad was stunned into silence by the rumblings of her mental thunderstorm. My sisters and I lived in a constantly confusing scenario of trying to not cause any waves, not knowing if we were causing waves until it was too late, trying desperately to put a smile on her face, trying anything to make her happy, and ultimately failing.

My sisters and I have a running joke that whenever we hit a difficulty in our lives, we blame it on Hitler. You know what they say…It’s funny ’cause it’s true.

This far removed from WW2 I can see – I can feel – the echoes and patterns laid down then. They live in me. Intergenerational trauma is definitely a thing.  In both physical and emotional ways, I’m descended from, and still connected to, events that occurred long before I was born; even before my Mom or her Mom was born.

I’m the lucky one, though. I live in a time and space where I’m able to face these echoes and patterns and see them for what they are; simply momentum from the past, and I refuse to let it carry on any further. As much as I am able, I will not pass this on to anyone. I decided this decades ago. I saw through the fallacy of blame that wants to scream, ‘why did you do this to me.’ I understood how casting blame kept me forever bound to that from which I wanted to be free. Since that realization, I’ve been dedicated to finding ways to bring me back to me, to finding ways to help me shed the influence of the past. A few things worked fairly well, but they were things that took a lot of effort, and didn’t seem to stick. When I discovered The Realization Process and TRE, I realized that I’d found tools that worked nearly instantaneously and effortlessly to dissolve the influence of the past.  And now I teach these tools to others.

I’ve experienced that it’s possible to stop the destructive waves that are my inheritance. Doing so has helped me create a way of being in the world that is the most beneficial to myself and to those I care for. I don’t blame my Mom for what she passed down, or even hold her responsible. She wasn’t born in a time when she had the tools or support she needed to heal her trauma. But I do. The negativity of the past stops here. I am the end.