Healing the Woman Wound: Understanding Ancestral Trauma, Embracing Empowerment, and Breaking the Cycle for Future Generations

Can the experiences of our ancestors influence our emotional well-being today? We unpack this provocative question by shedding light on the "woman wound" — an inherited trauma that impacts women's self-perception, relationships, and societal roles. Through personal stories and a deep dive into the science of epigenetics, we explore how the collective trauma of women throughout history manifests in our lives, often as feelings of shame, fear, and unworthiness. This episode invites you on a journey to understand these wounds not just as personal burdens but as shared experiences that have been passed down through generations, reinforced by patriarchal societal structures.

We delve into the powerful methods of healing and empowerment, offering guidance on therapeutic practices, support groups, and somatic exercises like yoga and breathwork. You'll also find a guided body scan exercise to help release ancestral burdens, making way for healing and growth for ourselves and future generations. The transformative potential of acknowledging our lineage's strength and hardships is emphasized, with an invitation to connect and continue the conversation on Instagram. As we honor our ancestors, the episode serves as a call to action to break the cycle of pain and embrace a path to empowerment and peace.

Chapters

• 0:00 Healing the Woman Wound
• 12:07 Healing Ancestral Trauma and Empowerment
• 20:45 Energetic Healing Through Instagram

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

God that girl. She's such a bitch. Hello, welcome back to this week's podcast. I am going to be talking about the woman wound and just obviously felt my very spicy stuff as I kicked off that. But I want to talk about the women wound, woman wound, women wound whatever you want to call it. Let's talk about it.

Speaker 1: 0:18

Start us off with your lineage. Obviously, we're going to be talking about ancestral trauma. We're going to be talking about this and you lineage oh, we're going to be talking about ancestral trauma, we're going to be talking about this and you know, today it's just, it's just one of those things that we need to talk about, because nobody literally ever talks about this. But basically, this is something that can be passed down through generations, something that might be deeply ingrained in the way that we view ourselves, our relationships or even the world. It's called the woman wound for a reason. It's about how we interact with other women. Okay, and this is why we need to consider this when we're looking at inner child healing and ancestral healing. Okay, so you want to get comfy for this one, that's for sure. So this term often refers to like an unconscious emotional pain or trauma that many women carry. Okay, I would like. You know, people say many people. Like I just said, many people, but I believe it's fucking everyone. Okay, I believe it's fucking everyone. The wounds are passed down, like generational, and reinforced by societal structures. Right, we're talking about the oppression that's been passed down through generations. We're talking about the fact that women lived through a war but they were still never considered equal, like I can go on and on and on about the different things that have caused oppression, and the witch wound really links in with this quite nicely as well. I might talk to that a bit, but I really want to focus on the woman wound for this, for this episode, and as we live in a patriarchal society where men are the dominant, the dominant thing, like it's yeah, it really does reinforce the societal structure around the woman wound, right? So it's a complex emotional inheritance that encompasses feelings of shame, suppression, fear, unworthiness and disempowerment. That's all tied to being a woman. Okay, but before you were even born, this was dictated for you, right? When? The minute that you decided to grow up, a vagina. Okay, that's it.

Speaker 1: 2:15

The woman wound can manifest in many forms. So you might think, oh, there's no trauma in my family, and I hear this. I'm like, oh, there's no trauma in my family. I'm like, babe, calm yourself down. There's trauma in everyone's family, trauma in my family. And I hear this. I'm like, oh, there's no trauma in my family. I'm like, babe, calm yourself down. There's trauma in everyone's family, especially in the maternal line, especially.

Speaker 1: 2:31

You know, when you think about what women have lived through, how, like women used to get married and it would be their duty to have sex with their husbands, why, like, there's just so many different things that women had to go through, like how rape was never really um spoken about, how it was just your duty, like if you were raped, that's just part of being married. You were probably. You know you're a property of men and you know you had no voice, you couldn't even vote a period of time, okay, and it wasn't actually that long ago. When you think about generationally, it literally wasn't that long ago, okay. So then, if you're like saying to me, kirsty, I don't have any trauma in my family line, but you struggle with self-doubt, you struggle with feelings of self-worth and internalized pressure to conform, never speaking out, always feeling like you're too much or not enough, this is just shaped by our personal experiences and the collective trauma of women who come before us. This is what we do when we take on ancestral trauma, when we think of generations of women who are silenced, oppressed, denied their rights, are made to feel less, learned. Their pain, their struggles and the way that they survived left leaves imprints in us. Okay, and this isn't some woo-woo bullshit as well, this is epigeneticsetics. Okay, it's a scientific study of genes and DNA that gets passed down through generations.

Speaker 1: 3:48

And also, we have to contend with the family story as well. Right, your family story is the narrative that your family tell you about their experiences growing up. For me, well, your dad left and he was crap, right, okay, great, nothing ever really good happens to us. Great, we always struggle for money. Thanks, it's all of these things that get passed down through generations. Right, and when I think about my generational story, looking at my mum's side, my mum, like, had financial difficulties. My nan had financial difficulties. My great nan had financial difficulties. So, of course, I was always going to be born into a poverty line. I was always going to be born into a poverty line. I was always going to be born into a situation where finances were always going to be a difficult issue.

Speaker 1: 4:31

Right, I was born into a family where there was domestic violence through generations. You know there's always been pain and suffering and struggling there and that is, you know, when my grandmother was pregnant on my mother, she went through horrendous abuse. She went through horrendous abuse from her husband and guess what that impacted the mother my mother. That was in her womb and I was an egg inside the fetus. That was inside my grandmother right. So this minute you get your head around that. You're like okay. So whatever my nan went through and experienced, I experienced. Whatever my mum went through when she was pregnant, I experienced as well.

Speaker 1: 5:08

You know you go through this trauma, this traumatic experience with with your mum when on this journey, especially gestational. So trauma when you're in the womb is fucking huge. It's huge. It's how, like you come into the world condition, like if your mum was in a constant fight or flight when she was pregnant. On you guess what? Your cortisol levels are going to be high and you're going to constantly seek out that adrenaline, that cortisol, because that's where you feel comfortable.

Speaker 1: 5:33

What does cortisol do? It pushes us into fight or flight. So if you've got that, you know that tummy which you just can't seem to move. Guess what it probably is cortisol belly. Okay. So this is how it impacts us and I'm like nobody ever tells us about this. It's like it's like a really badly kept secret, okay. And then there's people like me who just spout off about it all the time as soon as they get a chance to.

Speaker 1: 5:56

But yeah, we're talking about the imprints that it leaves on us. Okay, we're talking about the spiritual, the emotional, the physical, because it's passed down through DNA. Trauma is passed down through DNA. How do we know this? Because we have had studies of Holocaust and slavery survivors and how. There is research, medical research, that shows that their grandchildren were experiencing similar symptoms to the grandparent that survived the Holocaust or slavery. So you know, it's a real big thing. It's a real big topic. It's really important that we understand it, because when you understand like it didn't start with you which is, by the way, is an amazing book it didn't start with you you can know that it can end with you and you can change the direct, the trajectory, not just for yourself but future generations, even if you have children or not.

Speaker 1: 6:44

Right, because I always talk about the healing ripple effect, because when you are healing, you're saying, right, I'm going to heal this line. I'm going to change. I'm going to live a life of liberation, freedom. I'm going to live a life of happiness, because guess what you fucking can doesn't mean that you're happy. 24 seven just means that you're really happy and you're just really content with your life. And this is entirely possible. But society tells you you know, you have to be miserable, work a lot, work, a job till you're bloody, half dead and then you enjoy your life. That's also bullshit. So anyway, that's beside the point. I don't even know where I was going with that one. But what I just want to say is that when we're healing, when we're making the decision to heal, you might say something that may inspire somebody else. You may say something you may say I did this healing, I did that or whatever. You may have a new perception on something and guess what? You inspire that person to take a look at themselves. They start to heal. Guess what. They say something to somebody else and this ripple effect goes out through your community and then their community and you start to really heal the conscious collective.

Speaker 1: 7:47

Because, as women, we're holding this oppression, we're holding this woman wound right and this means that we find it really, really hard to connect with one another, now more than ever. Right when we lived all in tribes together, we would love to be around one another. We would, you know, breastfeed one another, one another's children, like it was just. You know, we would all be child rearing. You know they'd all be in each other's huts or places where they lived or whatever like. And as we've gone out in modern society, we've broken further, further away, and this whole boss bitch, independent woman vibe has meant that not only do we hate men, but we hate other women because we don't want to be in competition with them. We don't want them to be a threat to us, us.

Speaker 1: 8:27

So then it's hard for us to deeply connect into a to a trusting, beautiful relationship with a woman who can be like our best friend. Because it doesn't feel safe, why it mirrors the relationship with our mother, why that didn't feel safe? Because she was also oppressed and said stuff and had her own trauma, right it's. It's so multi, multi-layered. The woman wound okay, this is why we're doing a podcast on it, because it is so multi-layered. So the so we're talking I don't even know where to go with this now but how does it affect? Like into inner child healing.

Speaker 1: 9:00

Okay, our inner child is part of us. That holds our earliest experiences. It's the innocent, the joy, but also the pain of unmet needs from our childhood. So it doesn't matter if you had a great mom. You know what in modern society like. I'm sorry, but one person cannot meet the needs of another 100 of the time. So if you were left with unmet needs, that's absolutely fine. It's not a bad thing, it's not a criticism of your parent, it's just a fucking fact. Sorry, I'm very feisty this evening. I don't know why I am, but here we are. So for many women, the seeds of the woman mood are planted in these early years. Okay, maybe you're told to be a good girl, to stay quiet, don't take up too much space. Or maybe you witness your mother or other women in your family struggle with their own sense of power and worth and so, unconsciously or consciously, you absorb those patterns.

Speaker 1: 9:48

So when we are talking about inner child healing, it's about, you know, connecting to that little girl inside who may need more love and more safety and more freedom to be able to be who she wants, to be right. So some of us will also, you know, form beliefs like I don't know, for example, our belief and our value comes from being of service to others. You know that's people pleasing, right, there's people pleasing all over. We're only valuable when we're serving, serving others. But what happens then is we end up completely, um, destroying ourselves. We end up completely going into a state of burnout because we end up having everybody else before us and then guess what? We're resentful, we're sad, we're a whole type of emotion because we can no longer give. You know, we may feel like our bodies, our emotions or our desires are shameful okay, maybe our voice doesn't matter.

Speaker 1: 10:43

And healing through the woman mood, through the inner child, involves looking at that little girl inside of you, reminding her that she is worthy just as she is, she's loved and she's powerful exactly as she is. And this is where, like, the reparenting comes in, where you can care and, you know, offer care, support and validation to yourself, which you didn't receive as a child. You know that's a whole other thing. And if you're like in my one-to-one mentorship, you know that this is something that we hit really, really hard when the time is right, after we've cleared all the stuff around the inner child, the mother and the father and other significant relationships that are really important to address as we move forward into a state of liberation and empowerment. So take a moment, just take a moment like, just have a little think. What messages did you receive as a young girl about being a woman? What did it mean to be a woman for you growing up? How do those messages still affect you today? The first thing that you can do, and the first step of any healing, is recognition. Okay, it's just like, yeah, it's just taking it into your awareness. Understanding, becoming self-aware, is one of the best things that you can do in understanding your inner child, in understanding where you are and where you need to heal. Okay, so we're gonna go like, deeper again and just talk about the woman.

Speaker 1: 12:07

Wound isn't just personal, it's ancestral. Okay, we talked about this. Scientific research shows that trauma literally changes our DNA. I've said this before in the podcast. Just now I'm gonna say it again. So this means our wounds, our fears, our experiences of our ancestors, the women in our lineage, can all be inherited on a biological and emotional level. Okay, our DNA is 98% personality traits, behaviors and I love God behavior traits, emotions and pit. So it's behavior traits, emotional traits and personality traits. Right, so all those three, my brain just completely died then.

Speaker 1: 12:45

So you know, when I think about the women in my family, like there was definitely hardship, poverty, violence, oppression, there was definitely that any Welsh girl in a family would have had them, you know. And when we look at the women, how did they, how did they cope with these experiences? Did they suppress their emotions? Do they go? Oh no, I'm not going to express my anger because it's not okay. So we just get on with it, pull your socks up, get on with it.

Speaker 1: 13:10

That type of stuff not recognizing mental health. And remember our generations before us weren't allowed to express their pain, anger or even their joy fully, you know, because this was taking up too much space. Right, women? Women should never be angry. This is still a narrative that we see in our society today. We often see women who are angry and, yeah, we, we often look down upon them because that's the way that we've been conditioned. So, instead of like being able to express these emotions, to understand their mental health, all of this type of stuff, they had to bury it deep within them and that unprocessed trauma gets passed down time and time again until somebody is ready to feel all the fucking pain and go right, I'm gonna. I'm gonna change this, I'm gonna make things different. For me, you know, it's like carrying an invisible weight. The weight shows up in our modern lives as feelings of unworthiness, people pleasing or even an unexplained anxiety like why are you anxious? There's no need to be anxious. Why is your body conditioned to that anxiety from the generations, from the dna?

Speaker 1: 14:11

When we talk about healing the woman wound, we're not talking about our personal stories. We're adding, like deep-seated ancestral wounds. It's a really sacred thing and a really freaking powerful thing to do. Okay, and and there's this whole empowerment piece as well by doing the work now, by looking at these wounds, by healing them, you stop the cycle with you. Do you realize what breaking the chain is? It's it's incredible. It's absolutely incredible like we can release not only ourselves but our ancestors and future generations from this pain. We can help the collective heal. You know it's a powerful practice to honor the women who came before us, acknowledge their suffering but also their heal. You know it's a powerful practice to honor the women who came before us, acknowledge their suffering but also their strength. You know our ancestors come with a bunch of wisdom as well. You know you can recognize that they survived and paved the way for you. You wouldn't be here without them and through your healing, you honor them, and I think that's just a beautiful, beautiful concept.

Speaker 1: 15:07

So how do we even start to heal the woman wound and the layers of the inner child and the healing of the ancestral trauma? Right, there is just so many stuff, so many things you can do. So there's rituals of ancestral healing, which I will have something new, or maybe I have it, I don't know when this is coming out. Actually I might have already done it, but there will be something called womb whispers. So keep an eye out for that, because that will be a ritual of ancestral healing and clearing the womb, because the womb is the ancestral portal in order to create space for you to bring in positivity.

Speaker 1: 15:41

Okay, so you may go to therapy or support groups, you may do affirmation mantras, you might do some somatic healing which is engaging the body in like yoga, breathwork or dance to help soar emotions, because, don't forget, the emotions sit within your body. Um, actually, we should probably like do a body scan. Now I'm gonna. I'd never do this on a podcast, because this is only what I do when I went to my clients. But here we go, we'll do a body. So I want you to take a nice deep breath in and then exhale when you're ready. I want you to take another deep breath in and exhale when you're ready and finally take that deep breath in all the way to the belly and chest and then a big exhale through the mouth, that beautiful cleansing breath.

Speaker 1: 16:43

Now I want you to think about your ancestors and I want you to think about your inner child and I want you to work through your body to see where things feel heavy. So I want you to start scanning from the top of your head, moving down, sinking deeper into the surface. You're on Just having a think, like having a feel in your body. What feels heavy as you travel down through your shoulders. Is there any pain or uncomfortable feelings anywhere Travelling down your chest and your tummy, your back, your hips, tummy, your back, your hips, your legs, your knees. And a moment to feel into your body. Is there any tightness or heaviness in your body? This is where your wounds live and this is a great source of information, of healing.

Speaker 1: 18:11

When you feel complete, I want you to come back. Come back just by wiggling your fingers and toes and just moving your body in a way that feels good to you. You may want to open your eyes, take a nice deep breath in through the nose and out through the mouth, and now I want you to think about where there was heaviness or tightness in your body, and this is where I invite you to do like a breathwork practice or yoga practice or some dance or just any sort of movement. I want you to think about the heaviness in your body. I want you to think about where it feels heavy, where it felt tight, and I want you to imagine breathing beautiful white light into that space and you may want to imagine whatever negativity is there is breathing out. So, for example, if you felt negativity or heaviness in your heart space or in your chest, imagine breathing in that beautiful white light, that golden light, into your chest and when you breathe out, breathe out any negativity and allow that to be any color that it feels like. So just take a moment to just spend it with yourself, tapping in and releasing those emotions.

Speaker 1: 19:38

When you're ready, come back to the podcast and I'm going to carry on talking about the woman wound, but this is just something very simple that you can do to highlight that this energy does live within you. So carry on doing what you're doing and I just think, like, as we go into the woman wound as we understand it can be painful, but it can be incredibly powerful. By healing yourself, you're not only freeing your own spirit, you'll be in the beacon of light for others, including future generations, including your friends or family. This isn't a journey you have to work a to walk alone. There's a lineage of strong women behind you and a community of healers and sisters ready to support you. Hello, like, I'm sat right here ready to support you and to hold you in this experience. So I want to say thank you for joining me and I hope that this was a good experience for you.

Speaker 1: 20:30

I didn't have any idea I was going to go into like a quick body scan then, so let me know how you got on in the body scan, if anything came up for you, if there's heaviness there that you feel like you can't shift, come talk to me, because I I love to to talk about this and to help people.

Speaker 1: 20:45

So, yeah, you can find me on Instagram mainly, but you can send me an email or whatever, but Instagram is my jam and I just feel like I'm just going to leave you here now in just peace, after that body scan, just to process what happened. Don't, don't forget to move your body afterwards. You may want to breathe, or you may want to think about the place of like where you're holding it, you're dancing and the energy is moving from that space like. This energetic work is absolutely incredible for you. Like, do not underestimate the power of it. So I'm gonna leave it there for today and I hope that you enjoyed this episode. If you did, let me know. I always like to know, and that is the woman wound. Guys, I will see you next week.