How do we put right the wrongs of the past without harming present, innocent generations?

Are there any wounds in our history which we need to heal in order to free ourselves?

How can we integrate the dark side of our history so as to unlock our power and potential?

We have done things that we regret, and of which we are ashamed. We have all suffered abuse of one kind or another. Every family, workplace and community has experienced conflicts, poor leadership, poor parenting and traumas they’d rather forget. The same is true for countries, cultures, religions and civilizations. Men have abused women. Women have abused men. Adults have abused children. The rich have exploited the poor. The powerful have been corrupt. One race has denigrated another. One tribe has dominated another. Peoples have suffered persecution and genocide. These wounds exist at an intergenerational level. Babies born today, innocent and pure, will carry the burdens, guilt, shame, resentments and emotional wounds of people who died centuries before they were born. It is one of the major limitations on our collective human happiness and potential. Learn the lessons of the past then let it go without blame or attachment.

When the wounds of history are repressed, they don’t go away. They sit there like a pus-filled abscess. Nazism didn’t die in the rubble of Berlin 1945. It was pushed down into the unconscious, inverted and continues as political correctness and multiculturalism. Anger for the past domination of women by men can be unleashed as a hatred of men, a desire to emasculate them, rather than a mature drive for healthy masculinity and femininity. The guilt some white people have for past racism has been inverted as anti-white racism and the promotion of a victim mentality in minorities. The guilt for imperialism has been sublimated into the denigration of our national identities and our inability to set healthy boundaries for immigration and integration. Guilt for slavery has been ineffectively processed, so that, instead, it promotes racism, disempowerment and patronage of black people and abandonment of communities to crime, drugs and inequality of opportunity. The shame and guilt we feel for past racism, imperialism, war, slavery and genocide festers in our collective psyche as a cause of self-hatred, self-denial, low self-esteem, low confidence and lack of boundaries.

The Germans have done their best to transcend their history and the ghost of Hitler, and yet new generations, entirely innocent, are still burdened with shame and guilt that is not their own. They struggle to healthily assert their identity, instead appeasing and incubating imported forms of fascism, racism and nationalism.

It is time that we took control of this. Acknowledge past traumas, crimes and mistakes. Bring them to consciousness in a mature way. Open wounds in order to heal them. Create the conditions for deep, mature healing, never indulging guilt, shame, revenge, blame, projection, victim mentality or revenge. No goodies and baddies. No political correctness, which is acting out of wounds, maintaining and worsening them. Strive for forgiveness. Where possible, right past wrongs. Forgive others, forgive our ancestors and forgive ourselves. Have zero tolerance for those who use emotional wounds to stoke new hatreds and prejudice. Put all our energy into creating a better today.

We must be well defended against the projections of those who choose to make us scapegoats for their inadequacies and resentments. We need to achieve a state of deep forgiveness and peace with our past so that we can be free to live in the present and future. The deep intergenerational wounds of past tribal evils, done and done-to, must be healed as best we can, and the patterns must be changed patiently, one person, one classroom, one family at a time.