There is a force that will always guide me to the light: my resilience.

Intergenerational trauma. Wow. The words even look intimidating.

It’s easy to feel down when you think about  wounds getting passed from one generation to another. 

But what if I told you this isn’t the only thing that gets passed down? 

Resilience gets passed down, too. Pretty great news, right?

And, it’s not just a learned ability, it’s actually inherent to our bodies. 

When you think about your own body’s ability to heal from a wound, how your cells regenerate, your brain forms new connections … that’s all resilience. 

And you don’t even have to kickstart the process. It’s automatic.

Just like how you respond to difficulties in your life. 

Some of it might be learned behavior, sure.  But mostly, it’s something you own, that you inherited: the ability to go through something challenging and make it through to the other side.

Maybe you can stay grounded and settled, make sense of events and hang on to possibility.

When you look back at those hard times and you’re not sure how you made it through. That’s your resilience.

Without it, you probably wouldn’t have made it through as well as you did, or at all. 

You didn’t have to do anything to put it in place. It’s yours. You got it from your ancestors. 

I share this because we need to counter the hopelessness and powerlessness that can accompany the work of healing our wounds. 

I don’t know about you but sometimes it feels like wounds and trauma are running my life. It helps to know that no matter what, my resilience will guide me to the light. 

It’s mine. No one can take it away from me. Ever.