It Isn't All Yours
What you inherited from the people before you, and how the body carries what the mind was never told.
How I Work
What you inherited from the people before you, and how the body carries what the mind was never told.
Part One: The Fear That Wasn’t Hers
She sat down and said: “I do not know why I am so afraid of him leaving.”
She had said this in different words before.
Her partner was not leaving. He had given her no indication that he was leaving. He was, by her own account, patient and present. She loved him. He loved her. This was not in dispute.
Her body, however, had a different version of the story.
When she sat across from me, her hands were cold. Her shoulders were carried forward, held slightly toward her chest. Her breathing was shallow, sitting high. The body was already braced for something her mind kept telling her was not happening.
“When did you first learn that people leave without warning?” I asked.
She went still. “I do not know. I do not think I learned that.”
We stayed with it.
“My grandmother,” she said finally. “She never spoke about the war. She was fine. She was funny. She was always fine.”
I said: is it possible that the fear is not yours?
The quality of her stillness changed.
Part Two: What the Body Inherits
The body is an extraordinary record keeper.
It stores not only what has happened in this lifetime but what was transmitted from the lifetimes before it. This is not a metaphor. The research on epigenetic inheritance confirms what practitioners have observed for decades: trauma does not disappear when the person who experienced it dies.
It is encoded. It is passed down. Not as story, not as memory, not as anything the next generation can name or examine.
As a readiness. A bracing. A sensitivity to certain kinds of threat that arrives with no attached explanation — because the explanation belongs to a room the inheritor was never in.
Rachel Yehuda’s research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai found that the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors showed measurable differences in cortisol regulation compared to control groups. Their stress response systems had been shaped by events that happened before they were born. The bodies of the next generation had learned something about danger from a history they did not consciously share.
This research has since been replicated in studies examining the children of Rwandan genocide survivors, descendants of enslaved people in the United States, and populations affected by famine.
The conclusion is consistent: what a body experiences under extreme stress changes how the genome expresses itself. Those changes can be inherited.
In the session room, what this means is the following: when a client tells me their fear is irrational: that they have no reason for it, that nothing in their life explains it, they are sometimes right. Not because the fear has no source.
Because the source does not belong to them.
It belongs to someone who came before.
Part Three: What I Watch For
When I work with someone: whether through constellation-influenced mapping, Aspectics, Deep PEAT, or simply tracking what the body is doing - I am watching for the thing that does not belong to the person in the room.
The grief that is too large for the current circumstances.
The rage that has no corresponding event.
The loyalty to a way of being that costs the client everything and cannot be consciously traced.
These patterns show up in the body as distinctly as personal trauma. The difference is this: personal trauma, when worked with directly, traces back to a specific memory, a specific moment - something the person can locate even if they cannot articulate it.
When the source is ancestral, the somatic response has a different quality.
Weightier. Older. A heaviness that settles over the system in a way that is disproportionate to what the person is describing.
I have learned to feel the difference.
When I place my hands on a client’s spine and feel that particular quality of weight, I know to look beyond this lifetime.
Part Four: The Aspectics Method
When the source is correctly identified as ancestral, a different kind of work becomes possible.
I use methods developed by Serbian psychologist Zivorad Mihajlovic Slavinski, particularly a process called Aspectics, taught to me by Satyen Raja of Accelerated Evolution Academy, which works not with the whole personality but with the specific part that is carrying the charge.
In Aspectics, the part of you that is afraid is not treated as a problem to eliminate. It is treated as a part that has been doing something, faithfully, for a very long time.
It is asked: what do you want for her with this fear? What goal are you trying to reach?
The answers rarely come as words. They come as sensation, image, a felt shift in the body. They are followed. What does that goal want above it? And the goal above that? The chain is climbed, carefully, until there is nothing higher — until the charge dissolves into something that can only be described as stillness. Openness. The particular quality of a body that has stopped bracing.
What becomes clear, when this process is done with inherited charge, is that the aspect is not protecting the client from her own experience. It is completing a protective function that began in someone else’s body, in a time the client was not alive for.
The grandmother’s nervous system organised itself around the threat of sudden disappearance. The organisation was transmitted. The granddaughter’s aspect has been faithfully running it ever since — not because the threat is real in her current life, but because the body that passed it down never got to complete its own resolution.
When the aspect is asked what it wants, and the chain is followed to its end, something that belonged to the grandmother finally reaches resolution.
The granddaughter’s body exhales.
Not with the sharp grief of personal wound. With something older and calmer.
This can sometimes happen through the body’s orientation in space alone. I have turned a client ninety degrees — held a finger in the charge while the body physically reorients — and watched an experience that had been immovable for years simply dissolve. The charge is not only psychological. It is encoded in the body’s specific relationship to the spatial world.
The brace, the lean forward, the slight turn away: these are positions the body took in response to something that happened, and they are positions the body has not been allowed to leave.
A change in orientation can be enough to break the encoding.
The body discovers it is no longer in the room where the original thing happened.
Part Five: Spinal Attunement
There is another layer to this work that cannot be captured by any verbal process, however precise.
Inherited charge does not live only in thought, memory, or the aspects we can name and ask questions of.
It lives in the tissue. In the spinal cord and the connective structures surrounding it. In the particular quality of tension that has settled into a body organised around threat for so long it no longer registers the bracing as unusual.
This is where spinal attunement enters the work.
Dr. Donald Epstein, who developed Network Spinal, made a precise observation: when a body experiences something too overwhelming to fully process, the energy and information of that event is translated into vibration and stored as tension along the spine. Not metaphorically. Measurably. Research conducted at the University of Southern California using surface electromyography mapped two distinct waves that develop in the spines of people receiving this work.
The first is the respiratory wave — the body learning to use breath to begin unwinding held tension, the nervous system remembering it has a tool for self-correction.
The second, which develops as the work deepens, is the network wave — a rhythmic oscillation that begins at the sacrum and travels upward through the entire column. When the upward and downward waves finally meet and settle into coherence, the neck and pelvis move in coordination for the first time.
The body is reorganising.
I draw on this lineage directly through my training with Soma Mystica, founded by Sigourney Belle — Spinal Attunement — a modality that integrates Western neuroanatomy with Eastern energetic philosophy and works precisely at this intersection: the spine, the nervous system, and the energetic field as one continuous system.
I often do not touch the body at all.
I work in the field around it — the energetic layer that surrounds and interpenetrates the physical. A hand held a few inches from the spine. A shift in my own presence and attention.
Something in the client’s system begins to move: a breath that drops lower than it has been for years, a shoulder that releases without being told to, a tremor that passes through the back as old tension finds a route out. Sometimes sound. Sometimes involuntary movement — the body stretching, reaching in a direction it couldn’t reach before.
None of this is performed.
It is the nervous system completing what it was interrupted from completing.
This is significant for inherited trauma specifically because the body does not distinguish between what it experienced directly and what was transmitted through the bodies of those who came before. The grandmother’s terror of sudden disappearance is encoded in the granddaughter’s spinal tension with the same fidelity as if it had happened to her. The sacral tension. The forward hold of the shoulders. The breath that never fully drops into the belly.
When the tension is given permission to move — through attunement, through presence, through the simple act of being witnessed without anyone trying to fix or manage what arises — it completes what it never got to complete.
This is why the work travels across distance. I have facilitated this kind of release through a screen — with women in Beirut whose bodies have been in chronic sympathetic hyperactivation for years, through bombing, displacement, the accumulated vigilance of living inside continuous threat.
The spinal tension in those bodies is not only theirs. It belongs to mothers and grandmothers, to a history that has been in a state of emergency for generations. When the body is finally given a container safe enough to release even a fraction of that holding, what moves through it is not only personal grief.
It is older than that, and it belongs to more than one person.
I will be writing more about what I have found working with women and couples in the Middle East, and what their bodies are carrying, in a coming piece.
Part Six: The Dyad and the Collective Field
The container in which this work most often happens is what Slavinski called the dyad — a two-person process, one holding the question, one processing. The holder says nothing. Does not interpret. Does not advise. Simply witnesses, and receives. The processor goes where the charge leads.
I use dyads with individuals, and I use them in groups.
In a group, something amplifies. When one person’s inherited aspect becomes visible — when one body begins to locate and follow the charge that does not belong to it — others in the room feel their own version moving. The collective field creates permission that the individual cannot always grant themselves.
The woman in my opening had done years of work before the session I described. She had learned, through structure, what it felt like to follow a charge to its source rather than manage it from the outside. When I asked whether the fear was hers, she could hear the question.
She had been practised in going underneath the story to what the body was actually holding.
That is why what happened next was possible.
Part Seven: How It Was Transmitted
The woman whose grandmother had survived the war without speaking about it was carrying a specific kind of inheritance.
She had been raised by a woman whose nervous system had been organised entirely around the threat of sudden disappearance. The knock on the door. The person who did not come home. The morning when the family was no longer intact.
Her grandmother had transmitted this organisation not through language or story — which she refused to produce — but through body.
Through the quality of her presence when her grandchildren got too loud or too visible. Through the speed with which she checked on people who were late. Through the way she held herself in a room, always slightly oriented toward the exit.
A child absorbs this. Not through understanding. Through the mirror neurons that make human attachment possible.
The body of the child learns the body of the caregiver as its first map of the world. If the caregiver’s body is organised around the threat of disappearance, the child’s nervous system inherits that organisation as though it were the correct response to reality.
The granddaughter who sat in front of me had never experienced sudden abandonment in her own life. Her fear was real. Her partner’s stability was real. Both things were true at the same time, and neither resolved the other — because the fear was not a response to her current reality.
It was a response to her grandmother’s reality, transmitted through the body of her mother, installed in hers before she had the language to question it.
Part Eight: What Becomes Possible
What happens in a session when this is correctly located is one of the most significant shifts I have witnessed in practice.
When I say to a client: this is not yours — and when the body recognises the truth of that — something releases that years of cognitive work cannot reach.
The tears are different. Not the sharp grief of personal wound. Something older, calmer, like a river finding its level. The body exhales. The shoulders drop. The hands warm.
Then: a kind of clarity.
Because when you understand that the fear is inherited rather than yours, you do not have to defend against it anymore. You do not have to explain it to your partner. You do not have to build a relationship strategy around it. You can feel it, acknowledge its origin, and then do something your grandmother could not do.
Choose to put it down.
The difference between “I am afraid of abandonment” and “I inherited a fear of abandonment from a woman who had every reason to be afraid” is not semantic.
It is the difference between a life spent managing a wound that is not healing and a life spent completing a healing that belongs to a whole family line.
Part Nine: The Collective Layer
In collective trauma work, this layer becomes even more significant.
When I work with women who are moving through the current political moment — the systematic dismantling of bodily autonomy, the sense that something fundamental and hard-won is being taken away again — I am not only working with the individual woman in front of me.
I am working with the women who came before her.
The mothers who did not have the vote. The grandmothers who could not own property, open a bank account, refuse their husband’s legal right to their body. The great-grandmothers who were told, in language so ordinary nobody questioned it, that their personhood was contingent on their compliance.
These women are in the room.
Their grief and their resistance are in the field. What my clients feel right now is not only their own response to the present moment. It is a resonance with generations of women who have been here before.
When I hold this in a session, something changes. The individual burden lightens because it is correctly understood as collective. The rage becomes less isolating because it is placed in its true context — not an overreaction, not a personal vulnerability, but the very reasonable response of a body carrying generations of unprocessed weight.
What becomes possible when that weight is correctly named is not absolution.
It is something more workable: the capacity to carry what is yours to carry, to return to the family field what belongs there, and to act from a place of relative clarity rather than accumulated overwhelm.
Part Ten: The Conversation That Had Been Impossible
The woman whose grandmother had survived the war went back to her partner.
She told him what she had found. Just the essence:
“I think I have been afraid of you leaving because someone before me was afraid in a way that never got to resolve. I think I have been asking you to repair something that was not yours to repair.”
He sat with that for a long time.
He said: “I have always felt like I could not do enough. No matter what I did, something in you still doubted it.”
She said: “I know. That part was not about you.”
That conversation had been impossible for four years.
This is what becomes possible when the body’s inheritance is correctly located. Not a perfect relationship. Not the end of difficulty.
The end of fighting a war that belongs to someone else.
If any of this is landing in your body right now — not just in your mind — that recognition is itself information. You do not have to have it all figured out before you walk through the door. The body already knows more than the story does.
Still following the breadcrumbs.
Juliette
Sources and further reading
Rachel Yehuda et al., Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects on FKBP5 Methylation — Biological Psychiatry, 2016: https://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-3223(15)00652-6/abstract
Epigenetic transmission in Rwandan genocide survivors: Perroud et al., Biological Psychiatry, 2014
Zivorad Mihajlovic Slavinski, Aspectics and the PEAT system:
https://spiritual-technology.com
Satyen Raja: https://substack.com/@satyenraja
Accelerated Evolution Academy
https://acceleratedevolutionacademy.com/
Bert Hellinger, Family Constellations:
https://www.hellinger.com
Network Spinal wave research — Senzon, Epstein, Lemberger, Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2016: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4939370
Soma Mystica — Spinal Attunement Method:
https://somamystica.org
David Bedrick, The Unshaming Way:
https://davidbedrick.com