Babe, You're a Haunted House Part Five

Our attics are full of old stuff. Boxes. Furniture. Holiday decorations. It all belongs to the past. It’s the stuff we inherit from our ancestors and previous generations of society. Some of it is useful. Some of it is not. But we continue to carry it all with us. It’s in our DNA.

We carry the things we learned from relatives that survived The Great Depression, ones that lived in violent homes, ones that experienced racism, ones that were indoctrinated into hateful beliefs as if they were facts. We carry with us their lessons from falling in love, rebellion, failing, hating and success.

We inherit the societal norms of their lives and the things that helped them survive or thrive These can be good things or bad things.

These things will look a little different for everyone. A person from a family with generational wealth will inherit different things that someone whose family experienced generations of struggle.

As humans we all carry the survival instincts that helped our ancestors survive. That survival can look like intuitively knowing someone is an abuser at first sight or being the abuser. (We aren’t here to make excuses for harmful behavior just look at where we came from)

Your attic could be filled with negative things. There could be treasures in there. Most of us rarely think about the habits, beliefs or biases we inherit from our families and the culture/society they lived in.

We don’t have to keep storing this stuff. We don’t have to keep carrying moving from place to place, situation to situation, relationship to relationship as we live our lives. We can toss things out. Put them in a trash heap and set it on fire. Just because something is traditional, always been that way, so normalized it feels natural, doesn’t mean we have to keep doing it.