Psychogenealogy: Our Present Lives Connect Us to our Ancestors
“If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must man be of learning from experience.” (George Bernard Shaw)
Psychogenealogy is a new branch in the field of psychology that helps us to understand our family history and discover our connections to the past with our present lives.
Genealogy refers to the gathering of names, places, and dates and their classification in chronological order. This process can give us a glimpse of some past links in order to understand the meaning of some events in our lives. Has it ever occurred to you in situations when at looking at our family tree, we realize that some dates repeat more than once? Somebody in our family might have died on the 3rd day of May, and in another year somebody in the family was born on the same day. Genealogists will interpret the situation as such that somebody who was born on the same date that somebody died is commissioned to fulfill what his or her ancestor was not able to achieve due to an early death.
Looking and understanding our family tree can free us from repeating actions and situations from the past. You can start by making inquiries into your family and gathering data and information about your parents and their siblings and grandparents, as well as your maternal and paternal great-grandparents, their birthdates, weddings, deaths, and places visited. It will be good if you can also collect some handwritings, signatures and pictures. Then you can create your genealogical tree, put together the pieces of the puzzle, and make sense of it.
Psychogenealogy gives us the concept that we have somehow inherited from our ancestors’ specific legacies, which are biological and place some emotional marks on us. They work as a spider web everyday on our lives, and we are unconscious about it. We seem trapped within the obvious repetition of events in the family, causing stress, fears and conflicts.
Going back five generations will mean going through 100 years of our family’s history, but it is the only way to discover and understand the past, and if there is a wound to be healed, we can do something about it to prevent ourselves from living it again. We may discover some time cycles and anniversaries that may revive unresolved conflicts. Once we determine the problem and the cause from the past, we will be able to free ourselves from repeating it. By doing this, we are also saving future generations from experiencing the same pain and stress.
Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of the experts in this field who has developed the “psycho magic” approach. It refers to a type of art and interpretation that allows people to recover from a “poetic deed” and accurately act in such a way that brings freedom. It operates directly within us to generate real changes and transformation, because something has happened within.
If we realize we are in the same situation, trapped with issues from the past, we can begin the process of going back and awakening by first collecting data and information to make our family trees. We also have to note names (family and otherwise), dates of birth and death, miscarriages or abortions, and jobs and societal status. We note the details and signs because we have inherited them, no matter how small they can be, and their coincidences are multiplied.