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Empathy and Intuition to Heal
- Judy Wilkins-Smith
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Welcome to Healing From Within with your host Sheryl Glick RMT Reiki Master Energy Teacher medium and author of the newest book in a trilogy A New Life Awaits: Spirit Guided Insights to Support Global Awakening which shares stories and messages from Spirit that show us our challenges are not merely economic political or societal but often a deep disconnect from our true inner being or soul wisdom. Today I am delighted to welcome Judy Wilkins-Smith author of Decoding Your Emotional Blueprint which is a powerful guide to transformation through disentangling multigenerational patterns every human being grapples with and uncovering these DNA patterns helps to understand both the limitations and gifts that are innately ours.
Judy as listeners of the show over the years have discovered my intuitive and open- hearted guests share intimate and insightful stories of awakening to the deepest aspects of their inner being and in doing so spread new understanding of eternal energy and divine possibilities to be and do all that their dreams lead them to becoming better equipped to employ the energy of soul and physical life to create and become the best version of yourself by learning and loving as spiritual beings having a phyiscal life to self master their emotions and have a happy healthy prosperous life journey.
In today’s episode of Healing From Within Judy who tells us the day you agree to become “Big” is the humblest day of your life. Because, that’s the day you are truly in service of your best life and the lives around you. Being “big” challenges you to expand your consciousness and live as a free spirit.” We will discover that every human being is born to be remarkable. And yet every human being is shaped by patterns handed down by their ancestors—invisible multi-generational patterns of decisions, thoughts feelings, actions, reactions and choices that limit their responses to events and influence every decision of their lives, unconsciously running the show. We will uncover these Emotional DNA patterns embrace them and learn to make new choices and rewire the brain to become like the phoenix the best of who we really are.
When Judy is asked to think back to her childhood and remember a person place or event that may have shown the lifestyle or interests she might embrace as an adult for it seems we are born with a life plan and destiny and the imprint of our ancestors and have merely to remember who we are and what this life is supposed to be about Judy says two things come to mind. She had a teacher who asked for someone to go get medical supplies and Judy jumped up and said I will get them because I’m going to be a doctor and the teacher said that Tracey should do it as she was going to be the doctor and Judy a writer. Judy also remembers when Walt Disney died when she was about eight or nine years old and she felt so bad for she thought who is going to bring magic into the world and she decided she would just have to do it and always open to the “portal of possibility.”
We know people the world over are fascinated with their ancestry. Over 100M family trees have been built on Ancestry.com alone. Judy shows us why it is important to recognize the patterns in your life and also research those family trees for a greater understanding of our Emotional DNA. In her book, we will explore the conscience of systems and understand how “acknowledging what is” is a pivot point to what’s possible for you. You will learn to identify the patterns that want to stop and start for you. You will learn about the wisdom of your heart, brain, and gut and how constellations help to create profound and lasting shifts. We have the incredible ability to evolve into whatever we choose. As you read this book, Decoding Your Emotional Blueprint, you may be shocked to realize the limiting patterns you have unconsciously taken on as your own from past generations. Yet, you will also find yourself inspired by the wisdom of the multigenerational patterns in your family system and their gifts of emotional DNA waiting to be seen, enhanced, or changed through you and for you. Transformation is not for the chosen few. It’s been here waiting for you all along. You are a remarkable being—you just have to know how to see you. Once you learn who you are through the lens of systemic work and constellations, you will see that there is an incredible life just waiting for you to shape and embody it.
There is scientific evidence of Emotional DNA. That said, we are all human, and many people can’t immediately bring themselves to move out of judgment. Perhaps your father is really toxic, and you struggle with even thinking about him. However, when you learn how to see and understand what lives in his experience, something may shift for you. When you do your own deep work and your heart, head, and gut grasp what the family situation really was and see what your father was experiencing that made him so toxic, you may be able to accept the new context this deeper dimension of information creates. Doing so can prompt a new truth for you that allows you to shift . . . which is the whole point. Otherwise, you, too, may unconsciously follow the pattern and become toxic. It’s not about your mom or dad or whoever. It’s about you. When you shift your thoughts and understanding, you can escape ancient history and begin creating new emotional DNA. In doing this, you are also giving part of your emotional blueprint a different meaning and potential outcome. After that, your relationship with your family system and its members—and with yourself—will no longer be the same
We begin to understand our Relationship Patterns in order to become “Unstuck.” This lack of judgment is not easy to adopt, but it is necessary. Getting unstuck from patterns in the family system means approaching issues as openly as possible, exploring the system and all it contains—abuse, sexual molestation, abandonment, joy, sorrow, love, lack of love—with curiosity, so we can find the information that can help us heal. If we judge and reject people or events that occur within a system, we exclude ourselves from a possible source of wisdom—an answer to an inexplicable limitation or the directions for our dreams to follow. For example, I had a client whose mother left her when she was eight. It broke her heart; she had dreadful fears of abandonment and was totally emotionally stuck around this issue. She didn’t trust relationships yet desperately wanted one and kept looking for someone to stay. At the same time, she searched for their flaws and felt terrified they would leave too. Yet when we looked at how independent she was and how good she was at figuring things out, she could see that her mother’s absence had given her the ability to take care of herself and ignited a fierce desire in her to be available to her own children no matter what. Gifts are often disguised and hidden within the pain and messiness of the family system and its dynamics. But they are always there. We have just not been taught to see them. That said, we are all human, and many people can’t imagine why they feel so bad when they make mistakes…they want to be perfect, but in human form we can never be perfect only learning from our mistakes and loving ourselves even through what we feel are failures.
Sheryl tells us of the false illusion of Perfection and in her new book A New Life Awaits writes, “Many seek to be the best they can be and are encouraged to be perfect. They do not allow less for themselves than what others deem to be perfect for them. But since we are always in a state of change, the ideas and wishes of others are not nearly as important as our welcoming the experiences and challenges that surface and handling them to the best of our ability. We should aim to become a person who doesn’t find fault in others, moving past personal obstacles with courage, hope, and faith to find peace. Be free of any influence of others that take that state of mind-peace away from you. In the imperfection of each life lies the way to understand perfection is in the being not the doing.”
Sheryl goes on to say that there are no failures only opportunities for experiences necessary to refine our soul energy and grow more aware of our true nature and capacity to love.
Judy tells us that several of her clients have said, “My family is cursed.” It seems an extreme declaration until we realize that research shows that patterns of thoughts, feelings, actions, and even events in areas like health, relationships, and leadership can be passed down through the generations. I see it play out in families who struggle with certain issues like lack of education, dysfunctional relationships, addiction, failure in careers, or an inability to create financial success. It is not a curse, it’s an inheritance. I call this inheritance your emotional DNA, and it is based on your interpretation of the events in the emotional blueprint of your family system. Your emotional DNA is expressed very strongly in your thoughts, words, tone, and meaning-making. The language that you speak creates your truth, direction, purpose, sense of self, and sense of others. It creates your future, whether successful, mediocre, or dismal. Your family system’s emotional DNA is also felt very strongly in your body, even when you’re not aware of it. The feelings that arise as part of a system give us a strong internal compass to steer by. We know we’re in alignment with our family or organizational systems because we can feel it. We know we’re in bad conscience with the system because we feel it. We know when we belong or when we’re being excluded because we feel it.
Judy tells us about Systemic Work and Constellations. Even if you feel like you’ve been hitting the same brick wall in the same way over and over again—making then losing money, walking away from relationships, helping others succeed at the cost of your own success or well-being, not feeling good enough to succeed all the way—I’m here to tell you anyone can use systemic work and constellations to change and grow into their potential and their dreams. I’ve seen people restore broken relationships, establish lasting ones, move past their limiting money thoughts and behaviors, lean into stability, and bring wealth to their family. I see people understand origins of chronic multigenerational conditions and release them in favor of a healthier body and mind. Transformation is not for a chosen few. It’s available to all of us. And when you suddenly see and understand patterns in your family system or other systems of influence, when you listen to your heart and the wisdom of your ancestors and climb out from beneath the tangled patterns that you and they have interwoven, you will be amazed and overjoyed to see the possibilities that are waiting for you.
We easily navigate complex systems every day, adapting to fit each one’s rules. If you are a child of divorced parents, you learn very quickly that there are different rules in Mom’s system than in Dad’s. You can watch TV for as long as you want at Dad’s house. In Mom’s house, everything is done by the book, and you cannot watch TV until you’ve done your homework. When you go to school, you don’t take the family dog. When you drive to work, you follow the rules of the road. You don’t go into a bar and pray, and you don’t go to a church and start cussing. It’s that simple. We are surrounded by systems.
We live in a planetary system situated in a relatively unpopulated area of our galaxy. On our planet we have created highway and telephone systems, computer systems, political systems, business systems, clubs, and social and economic systems like capitalism. Any collection of people coming together within a common framework that contains rules and regulations for its members to follow to ensure belonging and survival of the group is a system.
Our primary pattern maker is our family system consisting of our parents, siblings, and other relatives. It is our most influential system and the origin of much of our success and failure. A large part of systemic work centers around the patterns created in the family—their origins, content, and impact. Systems teach us how we can and cannot behave and how to succeed or fail within them, and they define our parameters for belonging with respect to relationships, money, emotions, leadership, spirituality, success, and purpose by impressing behavioral patterns upon us. For example, a family might have strict rules for children of dating age and follow certain rituals, such as always eating Sunday dinner together or not eating with cell phones at the table. Clubs have rules pertaining to membership, and corporations have rules bringing people together for a particular mission with shared work ethics, goals, inter-office rules, etc.
In organizations we call the system’s thoughts, feelings, and patterns its culture.
It was German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger, the “father” of systemic work and constellations, who recognized that every individual family is a system in its own right. At age twenty, Hellinger entered the religious order of the Jesuits. In the early 1950s, the order sent him to South Africa to bring Christianity and “civilized” thinking to the Zulu tribe. However, living within the tribe, he soon realized that it was the Zulus who were teaching him. As he learned their language and participated in their rituals and daily routines, he observed that individually and as a tribe, they didn’t have many neuroses, and he couldn’t understand why. Gradually he noticed that the strength of their connections to their ancestors, whom they frequently consulted to find out what might have happened in the past, was influencing what was going on in the present. He realized that their respect for the family system and their desire to understand what might be unresolved within prior generations had led them to a healthy approach for tackling issues within the family and the tribe as a whole. Essentially, they knew that an unresolved past was in the way of a dynamic future.
After living with the Zulus, he left the priesthood and South Africa, eventually becoming a certified psychoanalyst. Over the next few decades, he developed Family Constellations and Systemic Constellations. He explored all manner of systems, travelling, lecturing, and teaching all over the world. By the time he died, he’d founded the Hellinger School and written over ninety books explaining his insights, mostly into family systems and what was happening within them.
There are what Hellinger calls “orders” of the soul in systems. Orders are overarching, deep truths that are present in all systems. Hellinger names three.1 I have extrapolated and created a fourth order because I see it a lot in systemic work. First order: Everybody has a right to belong. Every single event, every member, every decision belongs because each one shapes the system that shapes you.
Judy goes on to tell us, “One of the basic tenets of all systemic work is that evolution lies in observation, acknowledgment, and giving each member in a system their place. There is no judgment of people or events. Whatever is there is there. Whatever happened, happened. It might not be pleasant or kind or healthy. It may well be horrific. But every event serves a purpose and gives information. It all belongs, and when we can acknowledge what has happened as it is without wishing for it to be different, then we can learn from it, choose something different, and evolve
We can identify inherited Relationship Patterns. We are deeply connected. From the time we’re conceived until long after we die, we’re part of a multigenerational family system that goes back to the dawn of humanity. We’re part of a social system thousands of years in the making. We can see this legacy in our own lives: most of us are raised in a religious system of some sort, and all of us are the product of widely differing cultures. All of these different systems—their unique traits, their defining decisions, and the language we have inherited from our family system (our parents, grandparents, and those who came before them; our siblings; and our children) and our organizational systems (the companies we work in, the careers we choose)—determine how we think, what we think about, what we feel, what we choose, and how we act and live. They determine the direction our lives take, often shaping our fate when we should be creating our destiny. These systems that influence us, commanding our unconscious loyalty from first breath to last, are largely invisible yet intensely powerful.”
The following examples show how within us is an ancestral connection to the tragedies and difficulties our ancestors faced. ”We haven’t got a clue that great-great-grandfather’s terrifying struggle with poverty after the Bolshevik Revolution destroyed the family fortune is what drives us to pinch every penny long after our bank balance has passed the million-dollar mark. We have no idea that the anxiety that overwhelms us every time we’re alone at night stems from a long-dead ancestor’s abandonment as a little child. We just pop a Xanax and soldier on. We don’t realize that our career ambitions started when we saw our parents struggle.
Or how about what happened to Lucia? She came to me puzzled and upset because yet another fast-growing, non-cancerous tumor had bloated her abdomen into a mock pregnancy. This was the seventh tumor she’d had in as many years, and her doctors had no idea why her body kept producing them. She’d had six surgically removed so far, and each time a tumor formed, her body would swell as if she were with child. During our work together, it came to light that her grandmother had had seven miscarriages. Her grandmother and the rest of the family had refused to speak about any of those lost babies because it was too painful. Through a systemic lens, we know that what or who we exclude from our own experience finds a way to reappear through someone else later in the system. Exclusion of a grandmother who is institutionalized can reappear as a child who feels trapped in some way or excluded from the family. When Lucia could acknowledge each one of those seven beings, giving all the missing ones their place in the family system, the seventh mass shrank within a month. No surgery was needed, and no more tumors occurred after that.
Once we identify those patterns, we can break free of them. When I work with people to explore their family system, we surface the hidden patterns and unconscious loyalties between and around family members going back several generations. We examine the language and actions the family uses. Clients learn to create a full-on 3D experience around their issues and aspirations . Together we explore their pain and fear, the insistence that they’re always second best, the belief that they’re always “the invisible one” or “the unloved one” or “the unworthy one.” They actually walk through the emotional pattern that’s stunted their growth and, in a short period of time, they “get” the pattern and rewire their brains, changing how they think and act for good. “Oh!” I hear people say. “I’m not this small incapable being I thought I was. I’m really bigger than that! I can really make a difference with my voice and my presence!” Or, “I never saw that before! No wonder I’ve been so ___________ (afraid, resentful, anxious, fill in the blank).
On Valentine’s Day many people are not feeling the love. Your ancestry could be messing up your love life Tell us something of this. Remember, if you are adopted, you have twice the field and energetic flow—once from your biological parents and the second time from the parents who chose you. You don’t have less, you have more. You know the gifts your adoptive parents gave you. What are the gifts your biological parents passed on? Did it take courage to have you and give you up? Selflessness? What other gifts did they pass on that you have not considered? Your strength? Your smile? Your humor? Your gift of music? Systemic patterns pass on to you whether you are conscious of them or not. You have only to watch shows like Long Lost Family to see how patterns repeat. Even when we don’t know our family of origin growing up, it’s surprising to find how much of their history we have repeated without even knowing them.
Burgeoning studies indicate that external factors such as diet and exercise, trauma, emotional stress, and other physical and psychological effects can result in epigenetic changes that can be passed down to subsequent generations. For example, rats exposed to prenatal stress, maternal separation, abusive caregiving, and adult social stress show epigenetic changes in their DNA. There is also evidence that abusive caregiving traits are passed down to both offspring and grand-offspring.
Judy shares with us that studies of children of Holocaust survivors have revealed that the trauma their ancestors experienced may have left a chemical mark on their genes that was passed down, resulting in higher anxiety levels, lower self-esteem, greater inhibition of aggression, and more relational difficulties than those found in control groups.
Love then and the ability to give and receive love depend on physical elements and the conditioning of generations of our relatives who may have suffered and endured hardships that affected their soul spirit and physical DNA . Healing some of the issues of our families history can open our hearts to greater compassion and love for self and others.
A system to bring love into your life
- Set up a constellation of all the men in your life. Be sure to include a representative for yourself. Look for patterns and relationships.
- Set up a constellation with you, your family, and all the men in your life. Look at the relationships not only between men and women but also between women and women and men and men in the multigenerational pattern that has you stuck.
- If there’s enough information, set up a constellation of your mother and all the men in her life. Once you’ve set up the constellation, look for relationships. Who is close to whom, and who is further away? Just that initial picture in front of you begins to bring insight to what may be happening and illuminate your issue. Links, relationships, and patterns begin to emerge along with those pesky little jailers, our unconscious loyalties. I have women who tell me men don’t stick around in relationships only to find that a man in their family system left, or was lost. The original woman who was left may have said something like: “You can’t depend on a man, they all disappear.” Then generations of women are loyal to that saying and, in effect, to that first woman who lost her man. There seems to be an inner systemic sentence that goes something like this: “Dear Mom. If you couldn’t keep a man, I won’t either.” And now all the women unconsciously align with the governing sentence in the family system.
You can change that system by letting go of that person’s ideas and not embracing them any longer. Change your own thoughts to a more positive way to relate to a loved one and change your reality and love will follow your new thoughts.
Judy might life readers to remember after reading your book? Decoding Your Emotional Blueprint that life is change and change is possible because the brain is always able to adapt. As American psychiatrist Dr. Milton Erickson once said, “If you want happiness, you have to work for it. ”And, he was right. Happiness in life isn’t automatic or guaranteed. But no matter what the past has brought us, the possibility for creating the world we want, including happiness, begins with us. Until recently, doctors and researchers believed that the human brain was “hard wired” by the time we were in our twenties—that our thoughts and beliefs were difficult, if not impossible, to change after that, and that we inevitably became more inflexible as we got older.
And yet, as far back as the early twentieth century, the “father of neuroscience,” Santiago Ramón y Cajal, described nonpathological changes in the neuronal structure of adult brains as “neuronal plasticity.” In 1949, the Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb studied how neurons in the brain adapt during learning. He talked about how new neuronal patterns in the brain are developed through association, famously saying, “Neurons wire together if they fire together.” By the time the 1960s came along, the term “neuroplasticity” had come into vogue, but the age-old belief that adult brains are unchanging prevailed in the mainstream until the end of the century. Fortunately, researchers like American psychiatrist Norman Doidge, MD, author of the book The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, have finally helped us change our minds. “The brain can change itself,” writes Doidge. “It is a plastic, living organ that can actually change its own structure and function, even into old age.” The vision of a living, changing brain that responds to new experiences throughout one’s lifespan is most certainly a vision of hope.
Studies now show that new neural pathways can be formed or reprogrammed over a period of about twenty-one days, with the new behavior becoming automatic within sixty-six days on average. And yet most people live on autopilot most of their lives, changing very little. This is, to a great extent, because our neural pathways operate under the law of least effort or the path of least resistance, allowing us to conserve mental energy and respond quickly to life experiences
We thank you Judy Wilkins Smith author of Decoding Your Emotional Blueprint for using your ability to understand critical dynamics in personal and organizational systems and the points at which they intersect, to create growth and success. Your passion about visionary leadership and positive global change is much needed during these critical changing times.
In summarizing today’s episode of Healing From Within we clearly have seen that everything in our development from the earliest days of this life to the imprints of ancestors and family dysfunction fear and limitations affect our decisions and choices and until we realize the patterns and make changes in our thoughts and actions we are being overly affected and restricted from living our most authentic and healthy life experience here and now.
Judy wrote, “Evolution is a step-by-step process. What worked for one generation likely won’t work for the next precisely because we are evolving. Unfortunately, we tend to demonize what came before us, judging our predecessors for their beliefs, lifestyles, and actions. Even as the survivors of World War II were sitting around watching John Wayne movies, reminiscing about the liberation of Europe and American soldiers’ heroism, their children were marching in the streets shouting anti-Vietnam War counterculture slogans like, “Make love, not war!” We also judge our successors. We look at the “youngsters” who come after us and call them reckless and irresponsible precisely because we are not seeing the world through their generational lens, facing their generational issues. We sneer at the future, unable to see beyond the limits of our old rules. Instead of celebrating the steps forward and the steps behind us, each generation excludes the other instead of learning from each other. We can sometimes fail to put into evolutionary context what looks to us now like errors and limitations. Those were the solutions the system came up with for its time and place. When we only negatively label our forefathers and mothers, we exclude their lived wisdom from the system and set the stage for old patterns to repeat. Growth comes with a commitment to look at and learn from past and future generations with appreciation and informed perspective, not with hate, blame, and judgment. Instead of labeling things as wrong, it is so much more helpful when we notice that life happens in steps—that we are all standing on “our step,” looking to take the next step up. When old and new systems collaborate, we benefit broadly. If we can garner wisdom from the past and be open to and curious about the future, we take our foot off the brake and grow and elevate.”
Judy and I would have you begin to appreciate yourself as you continue to grow and prosper through self-awareness self-love and self-acceptance of all that is and become an observer of your own reactions to others and to situations so you may remember many of your behaviors are based on past imprints from family and ancestors and you can change those that no longer bring you happiness. Create new thoughts and patterns that fit your perspectives in the moment.
Sheryl Glick RMT author of a new book in a trilogy A New Life Awaits invites you to visit her website www.sherylglick.com to listen to and read about Energy practices, spirituality metaphysics science and the visionaries who help us awaken our souls so we may remember the best of the past and create the best future going forward. Shows may also be heard on www.dreamvisions7radio.com and www.webtalkradio.net
