Who is the Veteran in your family?

If you have seen one of my talks about Veterans integration, you know that I always start by recognizing the service members and veterans in the audience. It is important to recognize and show respects to those who have served, and people are often surprised when coworkers or friends stand up. So often we don’t know how many people in our community have actually served at some point in their lives.

But then I also ask the family members of veterans to stand up and be recognized. Usually the parents, spouses and siblings of service members  feel connected to the service of their loved one. Children, grandchildren, uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, cousins, brothers, an often take a bit longer to remember their family connection to military service.

But every single time, at the end of this time of recognition, with the exception of maybe a handful of people, the entire room is standing. It’s astounding to see and a powerful testimony to how much we all are in reality connected with military service and potentially war trauma.

Usually never more than two generations back

The truth is that, even if we don’t have an immediate family member who has served, we only have to go one or two generations back, and we find our military lineage, and our connection to war. We can’t run away from this. This is part of our shared history, no matter which country or generation we live in.

This is why it is even more important for us to understand that we can’t just close our eyes to our service members and pretend that none of what they are going through impacts us directly. It actually does.

We all carry certain aspects of military trauma within us. Most of us are not aware of how much this actually still impacts us today. Science has long proven that trauma changes our genetic code and can be handed down in our DNA from generation to generation. So if an ancestor experienced war trauma, we still carry those genetic mutations in our own DNA as well.

What this means is, that war trauma is not just historic trauma that impacts our troops and veterans. It is still alive, contributing to the ways we live our lives today. PTSD symptoms such as hyper vigilance, re-experiencing and avoidance impact our decision makers all over the world, many of which have served or have family members who did.

War trauma impacts all of us.

It impacts our families, our teachers, our colleagues, our clients, our friends and communities. It’s part of the entire society and all of it’s members.

When we learn to identify this very specific trauma in ourselves and address it with an vibrational medicine tool or energy healing tool such as EFT, we can release ourselves and the next generations from carrying on this trauma and it’s aftermath.

Helping our troops and veterans heal with EFT is therefore also not just a patriotic or compassionate thing to do, it is essential and important for all of us.

While Veterans and their families carry the majority of the weight, we all carry a part of it directly or indirectly.

By healing war trauma and military trauma, we are doing our planet a huge service.

I hope you can agree.

I am curious to read your comments on this.

Love

Ingrid