OK, timeLESS, here comes part of it. 
Recently I read The Daughters of Copper Woman, a collection of women’s stories from the Nuu-Chah-Nulth, aka Nootka, people. Somewhere in there, an elder said that once a people descends into war and slaughter of each other, it takes 4 generations of healing for them to get their heads back on straight. This really resonated deeply with me.
That means, if that crazy shit stops, the grip of the trauma-soaked ghosts it created will finally release their grip on the great grandchildren of the folks who lived through the experience. Of course, their people (the Nootkas) never got the chance, once the white folks and civilization arrived on the scene.
Modern culture even recognizes this phenomenon, to some extent, with all the pop pysch talk about the continuing cycle of domestic violence, for example, and how it perpetuates itself from generation to generation. People who suffer grievous damage to their spirit continue to wreak it on others. Obviously. But we live surrounded by such a tidal wave of trauma, civilization has made a several-generations-worth break from it impossible.
So I guess reading that paved the way for me to hear what Sobonfu had to say about inherited grief. That explains what she said fairly well, actually. The families of those who come home from war absorb the extreme grief they’ve lived through. I’ve become very curious about one specific line of grief in my own family, passed down through the women in my family, trying to trace the source back and finding the trail of events that triggered certain behaviors and interactions that perpetuated that grief, when no one found a way to heal or release it.
I think the damaging beliefs civilization puts in our head = grief–the blame, shame, and guilt, measuring up and getting evaluated, the shoulds, etc. We definitely inherit that. How far back do you think you need to look in your ancestry to find people free of that? I think about this a lot.
Generations later, our entire nation reverberates with grief from pain inflicted by genocidal-scale trauma, like the various holocausts, slavery, wars, etc. She called this collective grief, the ripples of grief that hurt people even far removed in time and place from the initial pain. The already monstrously damaged people who collectively create horrors like that never got four generations to heal. Nor their forebears. Neither did their victims. Nor the millions who witnessed them. That grief speaks so loudly, it would need an ocean of distance, in iterations of people, cycles of birth and death, of ripples in the pond, before it quiets down.
So how can it possibly fall on the individual to heal and deal with grief like that? How can you call it your own problem?
