What is a Cycle Breaker?
What makes you a cycle breaker is your ability to recognize an issue and decide it doesn’t have to be this way anymore, and recognize your autonomy and power to change it.
Perhaps you notice that at times you feel confident but when you get close to the things you want you second guess or sabotage yourself. Or maybe you value honesty but you keep a lot of feelings to yourself in relationships. There are countless ways we can find ourselves caught up in cycles of behavior that seem to run counter to who we really want to be.
These cycles come from a place of survival. As counterintuitive as it may seem to keep hiding your feelings when deep down what you want is true intimacy, or to criticize yourself when you’re working on improving your self esteem, or to go back to people who treat you badly when you’re working on loving yourself, these patterns usually come from somewhere.
They could be how we’ve gotten our needs met at some point in time.
These cycles can originate from past experiences in our own lives, can be handed down intergenerationally, or a combination of both. A lot of what you know in terms of dealing with your emotions, dealing with yourself, with relationships, and with life is learned from your family. Even if logically you can point to the behaviors your parents had that you know you don’t want to recreate, you may end up doing so unwittingly.
Many folks come to these realizations when they become parents and dedicate themselves to not treating their children the way they were treated. But you don’t have to be a parent to be a cycle breaker. The cycle ends with you.
You may be a Cycle Breaker if…
You’re the first in your family to go to therapy
You’re the first in your family to go to college
You’re the first in your family to achieve financial security
You’re the first in your family to start your own business
You’re the first in your family to end patterns of substance abuse
You’re the first in your family to set boundaries
What is Intergenerational Trauma?
Intergenerational trauma is the idea that traumatic events that impact one person can have a ripple effect on their children and family, which can continue on for generations.
Perhaps you notice that you have a tendency to avoid uncomfortable emotions. If you look at how you were raised, maybe you see that your parents often drank or used drugs or food or humor or denial or any number of things to avoid dealing with uncomfortable feelings.
Even if you’re not aware of traumatic events in your parents’ lives, it’s likely that they learned these ways of coping in response to something they lived through. So while you may not have had a traumatic experience yourself, you could have learned behaviors as a result of someone else’s response to trauma.
It’s important to remember that you have also learned and inherited resilience, tools and healing from the other people in your lineage. They all had to survive back to the beginning of human history in order for you to be here, so there’s great strength and power in you as well.