Claudia is frustrated with her son Max, who is bright and amicable but has a strange behavioral pattern. He seems to be addicted to making wrong choices deliberately. On school exams, especially multiple-choice questions, he would roll out 2 wrong choices first. Between the remaining 2 choices, there is one right choice and one wrong choice. He knew which one was right, but most of the time, he would choose the wrong one as if under a spell. Claudia couldn’t understand Max’s strange behavior … until she understood the connection by looking within herself.
Claudia was pregnant with Max while in a short-term relationship with a man she barely knew. Just started a new job in a new city, unmarried and without a supporting system, she decided to get an abortion. While in the hospital, she went to the wrong floor. Instead of seeing a doctor for abortion, she visited a pediatrician. Upon examining her, the doctor told her what a healthy baby she had and gave her great advice on how to take good care of herself in order to take good care of the unborn baby. The conversation changed her mind, she decided to keep the baby.
Here is the interesting part. Although still in his mother’s womb, Max heard everything and understood it all. Here is a thought planted in his subconscious mind: “The only way (for him) to survive is (for his mother) to make a choice against the initial intention (by going to the wrong floor)”. Little max carried this subconscious thought and took actions according, until his mother recognized the connection through self-development. Only after the root cause of this pattern was seen, healing began, and the thought lost its power.
The first 7 years of a child’s life is the most critical period, in which his values, personalities and relationship pattern with the outer world are shaped. There are two factors that influence the result – one visible and the other invisible. The house and neighborhood he lived in make up the visible and physical environment of his upbringing. There is an invisible and emotional environment as well, which is made up by thoughts or ideas from people around him. Did he grow up with words of confirmation and encouragement or was told that nothing is possible? Did he feel loved and accepted or criticized and judged? Did he frequently feel humiliated and powerless or did he see examples of resilience and optimism? When the thought environment is positive, he grows up in a mental house of love. When the thought environment is negative, he grows up in a mental prison.
The child’s emotional reactions to his experience become memories, which are thoughts, and are stored in his subconscious mind. For this reason, how parents think and behave become the greatest influence in shaping a child’s thinking and behavioral patterns. Many people know that parents pass on their physical DNA to their children – hair color, height, body type, and genetic diseases. What most people don’t know is parents also pass on mental DNA – thought patterns. This is why children often have their parents’ temperament, ambition, talents and demeanor.
Here are examples of rather extreme cases. Throughout his life, Kevin liked to tell people that he would live until he reached 70 years old, because his father and grandfather both died at the age 70. Nobody took him seriously. At his 70th birthday celebration, Kevin was super healthy. Everyone predicted this athletic and humorous man could easily live another twenty years. Yet, a few months later, Kevin passed away with no apparent reason, except the power of the subconscious mind. There are many similar cases where the tendency of committing suicide gets passed on to the next generation or even how people die becomes a family legacy. For instance, there are many ways to leave this life, but one man died in an accident, so did his grandfather, his father, two uncles and one brother, each in separate accidents.
If those thoughts DNAs are healthy and constructive, lucky for the children. They can spend most of their energy creating their desired lives. But if children inherited many negative or unconstructive mental DNAs, they could spend most of their lives struggle to cope with the consequence. Some of us might think genetic diseases are physical inheritance. They are in fact related to mental DNA. Most human diseases are the result of emotion patterns, which is the result of thought patterns. This is the reason, even when a disease, such as cancer, is under control with the help of modern medicine, if the patient doesn’t change his thought pattern and lifestyle to remove the root cause, the disease will return.
Thoughts, both positive and negatives ones, can be passed on from parents to children, to grand-children and greate-grandchildren, up to 8 generations. Nobody comes to this world with a clean slate. All of us have inherited subconscious thoughts from parents and ancestors. They have inherited theirs from their ancestors, added their own, such as experience of war or other traumas, then pass them on. We can be grateful for the positive ones, but not blame them for the negative ones. Because they didn’t understand it themselves.
What we could do, as adults, is to take the responsibility and to start the inner cleansing as part of self-development process. This inner work is sometimes called shadow work or healing. It is the process of letting go of limiting and outdated thoughts and beliefs. It is the process of healing traumas stored as memories in our bodies or subconscious mind. The process will liberate us and improve life quality in every aspect. It will fundamentally change our health conditions, relationships with people and money. It will give us self-confidence, enegy to take actions and ability to make wise choices. By removing our own negative patterns, we remove it for the entire family system – ancestors and grandchildren. This means our children will live with more emotional freedom as the result of our inner work. We don’t need to clean everything negative, just enough in this lifetime, in order to live a fabulous life.
In Understanding Fear (3/4), we will explore how to start the shadow and healing work.