Inevitably, My Mind Was Blown

Recording a podcast on ancestral trauma with Lisa Schwarz, I wondered if I'd been starting with the wrong questions.

Apr 27, 2023

Cape May Point, New Jersey, where Lisa Schwarz conducts intensive generational healing work. Credit: Lisa Schwarz.

“Even the darkest perpetrators carry light inside them, albeit buried under decades or generations of traumatic experience. Are we not, as healers, responsible for holding the belief that everyone has the potential to be healed?” — Lisa Schwarz.

This edition of Resonant World is based on the first of two podcasts I recorded with Lisa Schwarz, developer of the Comprehensive Resource Model, a unique modality for healing trauma. We discussed her approach to ancestral (also known as generational) healing work — and the precautions practitioners should consider. Our conversation went far deeper than I anticipated, and I believe we unearthed some rare gems for both seasoned practitioners, and relative newcomers. You can jump straight in and listen here. But if you’d like some context, I share my key takeaways and an edited transcript of our 45-minute conversation below.

Resonant World #26

Had I been thinking about trauma all wrong?

I’ve known Lisa Schwarz long enough to assume that any time we discuss her approach to healing work, her answers will stretch my preconceptions to breaking point.

A licensed clinical psychologist practicing from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Lisa is the developer of the Comprehensive Resource Model, a unique modality for treating trauma that I’ve written about extensively — and have experienced myself in many sessions, conducted by both Lisa and her colleague Elisa Elkin-Cleary.

It’s hard to capture CRM in a few words. At the most basic level, it’s a system that therapists can use to establish sufficient safety in a client’s nervous system to enable them to repair the legacy of attachment disruption in early life, and process the most severe traumas. But to describe CRM as a therapeutic technique wouldn’t do it justice. I think of it as a kind of metaphysical dashboard for tapping into fields of information and energy that Western science mostly doesn’t even acknowledge — let alone harness in the service of healing.

My encounter with the model opened me up to a more expanded sense of the possible, and I wrote a cover story about Lisa and CRM for Newsweek in 2017.

I revisited Lisa’s work two years ago when she gave a series of lectures at the International Society for the Study of Trauma And Dissociation, a bastion of the medical establishment that platforms some of the top names in the field. For CRM to feature was a big deal. Though Lisa’s approach has won the backing of a number of highly credentialed psychiatrists, and she has co-authored an academic book on CRM, her attempts to build a bridge between conventional psychology and spirituality; neuroscience and metaphysics, and indigenous cosmology and the academy have inevitably led her far beyond her profession’s usual precincts.

The title for Lisa’s lecture was “Healing Perpetrator Patterns in Generational Lineages.” The discovery that trauma suffered by people during historical upheavals can be passed down to subsequent generations is gaining wider attention. But there’s often a tendency to focus on the victims of atrocities. Lisa wanted to examine the other side of the ledger: The trauma we inherit because our forebears were the bad guys.

This “perpetration trauma” — incurred in the course of war, slavery, genocide, colonialism and countless other manifestations of the collective shadow — can show up in an equally wide range of symptoms, Lisa explained. If a client is experiencing problems such as chronically dysfunctional patterns in relationships, physical illness, addictions, depression, or anxiety that seem impossible to shift, then it’s a clear sign the problem has a generational root. (Since Lisa uses the term “generational” where other therapists might say “ancestral”, I use the terms interchangeably here).

The clinician’s job is to use CRM tools to effectively tunnel back through time to clear the imprints of the original trauma laid down decades or centuries ago, and thereby resolve people’s present-day problems.

If that sounded like an extraordinary proposition, Lisa left her audience with a message of hope:

“Even the darkest perpetrators carry light inside them, albeit buried under decades or generations of traumatic experience,” her closing slide read. “Are we not, as healers, responsible for holding the belief that everyone has the potential to be healed?”

“Continuous Fractal”

I first encountered Lisa’s work when I was writing Aftershock, my book about British military veterans seeking new ways to recover from post-traumatic stress. I was then focused on understanding how CRM might be used to treat traumas suffered by soldiers on the battlefield. It’s only in the past couple of years that I’ve started to grapple with the question of how trauma might cascade down through generations, as so movingly described by Danny Cohen in relation to the Holocaust in last week’s edition of Resonant World. (Resonant World #25).

When Lisa invited me on as a guest interviewer on Trauma Healing Tribe — the official CRM podcast — we’d agreed we were going to talk about generational trauma work, and particularly the importance of establishing energetic boundaries to protect both client and therapist from potentially disruptive or malevolent ancestral energies accessed during sessions. (We discuss that — and a remarkable teachable moment Lisa experienced in this regard — towards the end of the podcast, which was produced by Melanie Swan).

I started by asking Lisa how she could tell whether she was confronting symptoms caused by a trauma suffered in a client’s lifetime — or something that had occurred generations before.

I was taken aback by the directness of her response:

“There’s nothing that’s originating in our own lifetime — at least in my belief system,” Lisa said. “From my experience and practice and exploration, as well as observing clinically over time, and my teachers helping me to learn, I’ve realised that our reality is a continuous fractal. Everything is rooted in either our biological lineages — or if one believes it, our entire soul’s journey.”

Lisa continued:

“The question isn’t: “How do you know if something is generational?” It’s all generational. Everything is connected from the beginning of time.”

This took me a moment to digest.

Based on her decades of clinical experience, Lisa seemed to be suggesting that all our traumatic experiences are connected in some fundamental way to events that may have occurred long before we born, perhaps even in the ancient past.

This seemed a huge statement. But as I reflected further, I wondered if it was actually a different way of stating concepts I’d been exploring in the two-year immersive Timeless Wisdom Training with the facilitator Thomas Hübl.

“Karmic Package”

In Chapter Five of his book Healing Collective Trauma, Thomas writes that a newborn baby arrives carrying a “karmic package” of trauma inherited from previous generations, and the relevant collective cultural field. So if, for example, the wider matrix is laden with residual Holocaust, slavery, or apartheid “packages”, all souls born into the field will be imprinted with this energy.1

From this perspective, the terms “individual,” “ancestral” and “collective” trauma start to lose their hard edges. These categories are certainly useful signposts for differentiating between different types of trauma at a high level. But the underlying reality is that the influences of ancestral and collective energies are braided tightly together. They may express themselves in our own life experience in seemingly random events that might seem to just “happen” to us — what we might call “individual” trauma. But everything is connected.

“My work has shown me that trauma is never purely an individual problem. And no matter how private or personal, trauma cannot belong solely to a family, or even to that family’s intricate ancestral tree,” Thomas writes. “The impact of human-created suffering extends beyond the original subject or subjugated group; trauma’s legacy weaves and wires our very world, informing how we live in it, how we see it, and how we see and understand one another.” 2

Or, as Lisa put it to me:

“The question isn’t: ‘How do you know if something is generational?’ It’s all generational. Everything is connected from the beginning of time. Galactic and cosmic history, and separations of energies and consciousness, lie underneath even the most three-dimensional trauma history of a person who has experienced attachment disruption with their mother. It’s all the same process.”

I loved recording the podcast with Lisa. I felt she entered a flow state where she conveyed the essence of her work with a precision and sweep that part of me grasped instantly — while my mind whirred to keep up. Likewise, I found myself dancing on the edge of my own beliefs about reality, while experiencing a profound feeling of resonance with the concepts Lisa was conveying. Please do give our conversation a listen: I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Podcast Transcript:

Trauma Healing Tribe

Healing Generational Trauma

Matthew Green and Lisa Schwarz

Matthew: When you have a client sitting in front of you, how do you know whether what you are dealing with is ancestral, or something originating in their own lifetime?

Lisa: “There’s nothing that’s originating in our own lifetime — at least in my belief system. From my experience and practice and exploration, as well as observing clinically over time, and my teachers helping me to learn, I’ve realised that our reality is a continuous fractal. Everything is rooted in either our biological lineages, or if one believes it, our entire soul’s journey.

“But there has been such a separation from the acknowledgement of how important our ancestors are, how important our family history and lines are. It’s only recently it seems that the trend of looking at this has come to the foreground.

“So for me, everything is rooted in our lineages as far back as thousands and thousands and thousands of years. And those same unhealed, unresolved, continually-dissociated-from truths and wounds, have created this dissociation from the reality that this all started a long time ago. There’s almost an energetic desperation for these things to be remembered, and for us to return to the truth of what is trauma. And where does it originate?

“The question isn’t: ‘How do you know if something is generational?’ It’s all generational. Everything is connected from the beginning of time. Galactic and cosmic history, and separations of energies and consciousness, lie underneath even the most three-dimensional trauma history of a person who has experienced attachment disruption with their mother. It’s all the same process.

“That doesn’t mean that you can’t work on something in the current timeline in the more traditional way of working with trauma. But I have found truly that the most thorough healing occurs when you do both: When you find out what (inter-generational material) is expressing itself through people’s clinical presentation.

Matthew: Let’s say we’ve adopted this framework, we’re working within it, we accept it. How does the ancestral work start? When do you notice the moment that you can begin to tunnel in to this much bigger reality?

“There’s two answers to that question.

“One is determined by the client’s ability to be as fully embodied in their earth-bound physical body as possible. Because the paradox and irony of all of this, is that the more embodied, and consciously aware and connected to our three-dimensional human self and experience we are, the further back and out we can go — into the more disembodied truths, and the more multidimensional information, which might seem to be counter-intuitive. But that’s the reality. So the more embodied you are, the further out multi-dimensionally you can go.

“If it’s (healing work) done in a disembodied trance state or meditation state, then it doesn’t actually stick and promote actual change in one’s life or the lineage.

“And then the second answer to the question is that there are certain kinds of red flags. When I have a client who is stuck in victim consciousness — and I mean the victim consciousness is screwed in tight — and they’ve created all kinds of defence systems, and all kinds ways to justify the victim stance — that always, one hundred percent indicates there is a generational root. And that has to be cleared back then, as far as I’m concerned, to truly clear the issue.

“You can work on being victimised as a child in this timeline — of course that’s going to be helpful and necessary because the victimisation has an impact on our neurobiology, which is what creates all of our symptoms, and thoughts and behaviours and relationship issues, which people come to therapy to have healed.

“But the victim stance has been around in every lineage, in every human life since the beginning of time — as well as the imprints and energies of perpetration, and the imprints and energies of the failed rescuer. Those unresolved experiences are all ancient. That’s human nature, that’s in the collective, as well as in every human being on the face of this earth since the beginning time.

“It’s the red flag of being screwed in tight to victim consciousness that lets me know there’s something back there and we have to work generationally with this. But more often than not, there’s also unresolved perpetrator activity trauma in the lineage, that has then flipped into an expression of victimisation in this timeline — as a way to mitigate, avoid and try to work through the perpetration trauma.

“But it’s the victim stuff that’s so up in the world today. And there’s a big difference between people who have been victimised, and it’s part of their life and it’s their truth — versus this energy that you feel behind people that are just dedicated to holding on to it — whether they do it through social issues, a more radicalised approach to social activism — or the way they hold belief systems about being a victim.

“Another thing that informs this is perpetration — and I’m not only talking about the big perpetrations: sexual abuse, physical abuse, stealing, robbing, ruining our planet, political manipulations. I’m talking about the subtle perpetrations that we have towards ourselves, even towards our loved ones: how we manipulate relationships to maintain this perpetrator stance that protects us and makes us feel powerful. That also has its roots back there.

“The other thing that I notice that will inform whether I want to really go for [the generational root], are medical conditions that are not responding to Western medicine, because the reason that many people either have a mystery diagnosis, or they have been diagnosed with an actual medical condition but it isn’t responding to treatment, is because there is a multi-dimensional unresolved traumatic component of some level of separation, some type of wound, trauma and screwed-in-tight belief system, that due to the fractal nature of reality, is actually sitting in the cells, and the cell membranes, and the energy field around the DNA, which communicate with the cells and allow the cells how to know how to be healthy. And so trauma sits in there because of the fractal nature of everything. Trauma isn’t just between human beings. There is separation and manifestation of disharmony, and separation from unification of wholeness, all the way down to the molecular structures, and so that does compromise and impact one’s ability to heal physically.

“If somebody has any kind of addiction — I’m not even talking just drugs and alcohol — I know to at least start exploring what are the potential root origin sources of the journey into addiction in this timeline.

“If a therapist is competent and is using CRM the way it’s designed to be used, and it isn’t clearing something and nothing is moving, it’s informing us that this is rooted somewhere else: It’s not working because I’m missing a key piece of something that is actually wired in there.”

Matthew: When you made that point about victim consciousness being really screwed in tight being a red flag for ancestral trauma, I got goose pimples throughout my body. That’s such a big insight, because as you said it’s such a huge issue playing out in the world, in the way we’re trying to address genuine injustice — there’s so much victim consciousness present on the planet, and it feels like it’s coming up to be healed in some way.

Lisa: At the same time, we are becoming more dissociated from the reality of how much perpetration is going on, because it feels helpless; it makes a person feel afraid; it makes a person have to look in the mirror and look at the reflection in them of perpetration energies. And so while the victim consciousness is gigantic…it’s allowing the perpetration energies to take on an even bigger life of their own.”

Matthew: Give me more of a sense about what this would involve: I might come to therapy, and I know I have symptoms, I may be aware that I’ve suffered trauma in this timeline. But how would it show up for me? How does this ancestral material present itself?

Lisa: “It’s a snake eating its tail. It will present itself according to what it is itself. If the trauma is, let’s say, separation from nature; or separation from homeland; tribal conflict or suppression of religion; or voice; or women or men; or whatever — it will show up in a way that diverts attention and suppresses all of that, because the nature of the trauma is that it does not allow itself to be fully seen.

“So the question is not: ‘How does it show up?’ But ‘How do we as the clinicians working with it know how to operationalise the model (CRM)? How does the clinician conceptualise what does need to be addressed regardless of how it’s showing up?’ Because if you just went with ‘how it’s showing up’, you’re going to go down a rabbit hole. We do need to have the courage and acumen to be able to know this is a diversion. The presentations (of trauma symptoms) are as desperate to hide what’s going on as are the [original traumatic experiences] themselves. So we have to be in charge of how we go in and work with it.

“When you get somebody into a generational process, the material will come up as either a story that they are seeing playing out like a movie, or they are hearing a story, or a sentient knowing that this is the narrative.

“Or it will come through in emotions: literally just emotional experience coming up and wanting to be addressed. It can also come up somatically: There’s no emotions, there’s no story, but there’s all this body sensation.

“In CRM — and this is the mission and the goal — knowing the narrative is not enough to promote and catalyse thorough transformation. You need the narrative and the emotional memory and the somatic memory. All three things. So a client may just be experiencing the narrative. But our job is to use the CRM model to get at what isn’t being expressed.

“Our job is to pull all three threads (narrative story; emotional memory; somatic memory) together.”

Matthew: And some people hearing this may say: ‘Wow, it’s amazing that we live in this reality where we can access these timelines, these layers, these depths.’ But they may have a voice in the back of their heads saying: ‘This is too good to be true.’ We can project back in time that ‘I was a witch burned at the stake,’ or ‘I was a slave building the pyramids.’ Isn’t there a risk of a kind of fantasy or false memory effect taking over when you’re opening up this box?

Lisa: “Yes. This is an art and a craft in terms of being able to sort that out. And the ultimate answer is the proof is in the pudding. If someone comes to you with a symptom, some kind of addiction, some kind of clinical problem, if those things are clearing, and literally their lives are changing, the symptoms are decreasing — it doesn’t matter if the original thought is that this was imagination, this was fraudulent, this is woo.

“So they themselves can see part of me was really sceptical, but I choose to go through it, and now I no longer have chronic back pain; I no longer have this addiction any more; I no longer have migraines.

“A lot of people say: ‘I don’t know if this is my imagination or not.’ And I just say: ‘Imagination is the language of the soul.’ Imagination is trying to express in some kind of language what the human pre-frontal cortex cannot express cognitively.

“So I say: ‘So what if it’s your imagination? Something is speaking through it. Let’s go with it.’ Clinicians, by doing their own work, they can feel what’s real and what isn’t. There’s no substitute for experience in developing that discernment.

“The clearer we are, we have crystal clarity to discern what’s going on. That is what allows you to know and work from a place of intuition. After a while you can feel it, and you know it: You are connected to your own ancestral lineage when you’re working. You’re connected to the fractal of reality and information and the universal patterns of flow, and how conceptually reality really is structured. You are dedicated to practicing over and over, and you stay in this curious stance — but mostly it’s being clean yourself. Then the discernment is totally possible.

“It’s part of the dedication and commitment to believing that there is more out there that we don’t know, that empirical evidence hasn’t even begun to touch.”

Matthew: What are the risks with this ancestral work? Because you’re opening up portals to this wider reality, can this go wrong?

Lisa: “When you’re working — whether it’s in this timeline; or across the generations; or the soul journey — its’ Pollyanna naivety to think that because we have good intentions; and we have a protocol; and we are working from a place of unconditional love; that that’s all we have to think about…The fact that everything is energy means there’s high-vibration and low-vibration energy in everything when you are working in these other dimensions, using the portals of transmission that are created in CRM between a client and the disembodied seeds of identity, which are the ancestors themselves in energy form. You are not just accessing the good guys.

“We must remember that there’s two sides of the coin — the good stuff, all the positives, that’s going to promote healing; and the consciousnesses that are going to block healing. It’s risky because energy can affect our physical body.

“[Once] I forgot to do it, my routine in terms of self-care around energetic mitigation. And the session was extremely intense — the desperation in this client’s maternal line to heal, and the level and intensity across time. It was indigenous trauma. It was so enormous that when I opened up the work there were thousands of ancestral energies: disembodied seeds of identity; the good ones; the bad ones; the babies; the animals; all the memories — the reality of the history itself was all there. I know how to work with it, but because I hadn’t done my energetic mitigation system ritual I got really sick in the middle of the session. There was so much that was energetically less than beneficial, I got dizzy, I couldn’t think straight, I got nauseous. I almost passed out.

“I had a friend there who gave me some essential oils, and whispered in my ear. Somehow it worked out, and the session was fine, and she benefited from it.

“The next day I was so physically sick. I felt like I had the flu, but I knew I didn’t have the flu. So I called my energy cleaning woman who does my work a couple of times a month, or even more. I said: “I need a clearing.” I went about my day, got an airplane. She texted me: “What the heck are you doing? Are you at home?” She usually just calls and says: “You’re done.” She said: “When I went in there, there were literally thousands of spirits in you; on you; some were hopeful and excited, some were extremely pissed off and malevolent. It was all entwined in your physical body, as well as your energy field — it was like a blanket.” That was very scary.

“The smarter way to go — rather than opening up the trauma history — would be to open up the re-membering of ancestral resources.”

In the second podcast in the series — due to be published on Friday May 5 — we talk more about tapping into ancestral resources as we go deeper into the discussion of generational healing. Thank you for listening.