Therapists commonly recognize that when we get in the realm of "shoulds" we are in unfortunate terrain. With shoulds people commonly beat themselves or each other up. Should is the language of failure, disappointment, unmet needs, guilt and manipulation. Commonly we think of it as undesirable self-talk or as a tool in a power struggle between 2 people. But all of these conceptualization are fairly present centered.
Today I was working with a client on a heavy feeling of responsibility she chronically carries - a definite "should" about how she must be in the world. Somehow I thought to ask if the sense of burden to provide for day to day survival was something her parents or grandparents had actually carried. (since she does not really have this burden in the present.) She then revealed a very real and difficult struggle for survival that her mother had in childhood. Such a curiosity, how we can wordlessly carry down the fears and traumas of past generations. I remember a man telling me once how he realized he always held soup spoons in a strange way and then he remembered how his father, who had survived the concentration camps, but lost a finger there, had held his spoons this same way because of the missing finger.
Is it unconscious memories of parental actions or words - is it fears and angers so deeply held that they hang in the air- breathed in by our offspring- transmuted in the breast milk - or the the blood - held in the memory of cells? Is the memory actually like a hologram in the egg and the sperm that unite to create us? (The egg was there inside her mother even when her mom was a scared child.) And if the shoulds are simply cross generational memories carried as survival imperatives - can we release them to the past to live in the present? What is the karmic effect of releasing such bonds? As the daughter relaxes can back in time the ancestors somehow know their struggles will be successful?
