The Living Memories of Our Ancestors:

Morphic Fields and Intergenerational Trauma

It is a strange thing to realize that you are doing something, or behaving in a way that is less than useful, healthy, or helpful, but you witness yourself doing it over and over anyway. Even when you do not want to do it anymore, it feels as though it has a life of its own. You find yourself in situations that you did not wish for or consciously choose. Your body or your nervous system responds to things in a way that is not how your mind would choose to react. What is going on? It is a pattern, but when you think about where the pattern began in your life, you cannot find its source. You cannot land on the moment where you initiated this pattern. This is when you realize that this pattern is older than you. It has been occurring for generations. It is like a riverbed, etched out over lifetimes. Now you, you are the water coursing through this riverbed as it carries you across the cracks, crevices, and rocks along the way. When we recognize the ways we are embedded within larger fields, we free ourselves from a binding narrative that is too small to truly hold us.

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Introduction

I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished. (C. G. Jung, 1963, pp. 233–234)

There are things that happen to us that we cannot explain, yet we know they are important to our lives. There are things we feel that we cannot put our finger on, and they seem invisible to others, yet they have a huge impact on us. There are things we know that we cannot rationally validate our knowing about, but they are deeply ingrained within us. These experiences, feelings, and knowings can all show up as what C.G. Jung called synchronicities. Synchronicities are meaningful coincidences or acausal connections, something I will elaborate on further. In this essay, I will discuss the experience of inherited or intergenerational trauma as a manifestation of synchronicity, defining what it is and how we might classify it as such. This will include my personal story as it relates to ancestral trauma. Further, I will use Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance to pose a possible explanation for how intergenerational trauma functions. Given that morphic fields operate outside of causality, this would pose an explanation of synchronicity which is a result of formative causation, perhaps challenging the entire notion synchronicity as an acausal phenomenon. I will conclude by presenting something that I might call the teleological aspect of intergenerational trauma. Through both the power of story and theory, I hope to pave a path toward creating a relationship with these invisible forces in our lives.

Synchronicity

To begin, let us explore what synchronicity is. Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Carl Gustav Jung worked closely with patients on their unconscious contents through dreamwork and active imagination in order to bring healing and wholeness into their lives. In doing so, he began to track patterns that held meaning and significance. Some of these were solely patterns of happenings in their own lives, while for others, their patterns were archetypal, meaning universal or primal, relating to patterns in the collective unconscious, the entirety of contents in the human species’ unconscious. Before doing this with his patients, he had been visited by many unexplainable phenomena throughout his life which he later understood as synchronicities. Jung (1952) defined synchronicity as “a coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same or a similar meaning (p. 25). He continued by stating “synchronicity therefore means the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state-and, in certain cases, vice versa” (Jung, 1952, p. 25).

Synchronicities show up at different times of one’s life in various ways. There are countless reasons for what they might mean or what their purpose is. However, the most common reaction to synchronicity is a sense of meaning, support, and validation that it seems to come with. It is common for this phenomenon to occur at transitional moments in life when the threshold of consciousness is lowered, when one might be more transparent to the invisible forces around them. They can occur through dreams, objects appearing at particular moments, music, hearing or seeing particular words, or other simple gestures such as finding a book about the exact new thing you learned about that same morning that had interested you. Often, there is a pattern of repetition or multiple occurrences of a particular experience — either in your life or in your life along with those around you.

Synchronistic events rest on the simultaneous occurrence of two different psychic states. One of them is the normal, probable state (i.e., the one that is causally explicable), and the other the critical experience, is the one that cannot be derived causally from the first. (Jung, 1952, pp. 28–29)

This means that one cannot ascertain a cause for the occurrence with the state of mind they were operating in when the event happened. The way I see it, synchronicities serve as bread crumbs along the trail, but they are not the trail itself. They serve to guide. And ultimately, they are very unique and personal to each individual.

For the purpose of this paper, I am focusing on the phenomenon of inherited intergenerational trauma as an example of synchronicity. Combs and Holland (2001) explained that for Jung, synchronistic events “manifest as transitions across the margin between psychological reality on the one hand and physical reality on the other hand” (p. 84). This psychological reality also includes the collective unconscious, not just the individual unconscious. When we experience familial patterns, or suddenly find ourselves in circumstances similar to those of our parents, grandparents, or other ancestors, we might think that it is a crazy coincidence. How did that happen? These patterns are what can easily be placed in the category of synchronicity: two similar events happening across space and time that are not causally linked — at least in terms of mechanistic causality. We might feel we are reliving an experience that we never had or we find that our nervous system or psychology has been patterned as though we lived through something our great-grandmother did. We are lucky if we can build the bridge into the connection. Many people live their lives suffering and struggling, not realizing that they are carrying something that did not begin with them. Sadly, many of us end up being pathologized for the things we feel and are told we should just feel differently. When we bring consciousness to the pattern, we gain the capacity to zoom out so that we might see these happenings as a coincidence, maybe we will even see it as synchronicity. We might say “wow! How wild that I am having such a similar experience.” But, is this the truth of the entirety of the picture? Or, is there a way we might be able to explain that there is something very real manifesting in the transmission from one generation to the next? This is where we are going next.

What is Intergenerational Trauma and How Does it Manifest as Synchronicity?

As we deepen into our topic, we should address what intergenerational trauma actually is. Thought leader and practitioner in the field of inherited trauma, Mark Wolynn (2017) stated about trauma in general:

during a traumatic incident, our thought processes can become scattered and disorganized in such a way that we no longer recognize the memories as belonging to the original event. Instead, fragments of memory, dispersed as images, body sensations, and words, are stored in our unconscious and can become activated later by anything even remotely reminiscent of the original experience. (p. 15.

Trauma is what happens when these memories, sensations, and images get caught in a feedback loop and we find ourselves stuck in the traumatic narrative, often debilitating and severely impactful to life. These conditions wire the nervous system and end up getting passed down to the nervous system of the offspring. Wolynn (2017) went on to say that “recent developments in the fields of cellular biology, neuroscience, epigenetics, and developmental psychology underscore the importance of exploring at least three generations of family history” when it comes to understanding the patterns responsible for our trauma and suffering (p. 17). This implies that trauma is not always the result of personal experiences, but can also be transmitted from one generation to the next. This is a pretty remarkable discovery for the world of modern psychology which generally does not focus on anything prior to childhood as a source of trauma. It opens an entirely new doorway for how to understand our pain.

When defining trauma, specialist Bessel Van der Kolk stated (2015) “extreme experiences throughout the life cycle can have profound effects on memory, affect regulation, biological stress modulation and interpersonal relatedness” (p. 608). These are the very things that are very often transmitted. Epigenetics, “the study of heritable changes in gene function that occur without a change in the sequence of DNA”, is at the forefront of research in inherited trauma (internet definition as cited by Wolynn, p. 29). We are learning that trauma that happened to the parents, especially if left unhealed and unmetabolized, gets transmitted to their children. Further, trauma that happened to ancestors at least three generations back, again if left unhealed and unmetabolized, gets transmitted and impacts the offspring both physically and psychologically. The transmission happens with the purpose of adaptation and survival in stressful circumstances, but also comes with detrimental effects that significantly challenge lives. Wolynn (2017) expressed that in his practice he “often sees recurring patterns of illness, depression, anxiety, relationship struggles, and financial hardship” within families (p. 37). These patterns are what led him to look deeper into what is occurring. For example, Wolynn (2017) stated that “it’s not only what we inherit from our parents but also how they were parented that influences how we relate to a partner, how we relate to ourselves, and how we nurture our children” (p. 40). Here, I would also mention that this type of inheritance also impacts how we relate to the world. That is certainly my experience.

Typically, we consider that our genes determine everything about us through our DNA coding. However, these epigenetics points to something that is less known and less widely accepted, and that is that, actually, behavior characteristics can be transmitted through our genes as well. Experience and studies have shown that children, grandchildren, and descendants, in general, seem to be in touch with a kind of memory that is stored in their body, psyche, and nervous system but not exactly in their conscious mind. However, epigenetics is also limited, therefore, I propose that Morphic Resonance might help to fill the gap.

Morphic Fields

This section will discuss Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance. He explained morphic fields as “the organizing fields of animal and human behavior, of social and cultural systems, and of mental activity” (Sheldrake, 1995, 113). He concluded many of his theories under the assumption that “DNA alone cannot explain the difference in form, something else is necessary to explain form” (Sheldrake, 1987, p. 15). He then came up with a theory about what this something else is. Sheldrake suggests that we understand each species, each collective, and each organism as deriving its structure and patterns of activity from a field. He called these morphic fields and explained that they “include both form and behavior,” (Sheldrake, 1987, p.16). Sheldrake posited that these fields hold memory. Describing morphic fields, Le Grice (2010) stated

Information and memory of some kind are actually inherent within all of nature…memory exists within morphic fields, which are non-material regions of influence and information associated with all natural systems, from atoms and cells to animals and human beings. (p. 207)

We might think of morphic fields as attractors, pulling together all of the information from a particular organism or group. One of the common ways Sheldrake explains morphic fields is with an example. If, say, rats in San Francisco were taught something new, then rats in other places around the world would then more easily be able to learn this new task as it is now in the collective rat memory or the morphic field of rats. This explains morphic resonance.

What I am describing here as morphic resonance is the idea that “similar things influence similar things across both space and time” (Sheldrake, 1987, p. 21). In order to understand morphic resonance, it is helpful to consider ourselves as tuning devices. We interact with morphic fields (and vice versa) through resonance, which means we must be able to tune into those particular fields. It is unfortunate but not surprising in the age of reductionism, these ideas are not accepted in modern biology. Sheldrake (1987) challenged these schools of thought by explaining that “behaviors which organisms learn, or forms which they develop, can be inherited by others even if they are not descended from the original organisms — by morphic resonance” (p. 21). It will be useful to keep these concepts in mind as we move forward.

Can Morphic Fields Help Explain Ancestral Trauma?

Insofar as we tune into archetypal fields or patterns which other people have had, which other social groups have had, and which our own social group has had in the past, our minds are much broader than the “things’ ‘ inside our brains. They extend out into the past and into social groupings to which we are linked, either by ancestry or by cultural transmissions. Thus, our minds are extended in time, and I believe they are also extended in space. (Sheldrake, 1988, p. 68)

Now that we have dipped into what morphic fields are, we can begin to see how this theory overlaps with what we learned about intergenerational trauma. Sheldrake is painting a beautiful image of our inner landscapes, and the landscapes that they are nested in. I feel this passage gives us a bit more of a visual representation to imagine as we mull over some of these abstract thoughts. My thesis in this essay is that morphic fields and morphic resonance might help us to comprehend the possibly synchronistic phenomena of inherited trauma. Again, this would suggest an explanation that is validated by formative causation rather than efficient causation (cause and effect). Sheldrake (1987) explained that just like individual organisms, “societies have social and cultural morphic fields which embrace and organize all that resides within them…the fields by their very nature are both within and around the things to which they refer” (pp. 320–321). I am suggesting that the phenomenon of intergenerational trauma is both stored and accessed in and through these fields.

In an interview, when asked where he believes the information is stored that is being transmitted between generations, Wolynn (2021) stated that he thinks

There is definitely a field of knowledge that we tap into, like Sheldrake talks about, and it is a field that contains information from the past, information that tends to repeat, patterns that play out largely in the form of suffering. In other words, unconsciously we’ll suffer similarly to those who have suffered before us. We will give voice to their experience by repeating it.

Wolynn himself makes the connection between inherited trauma and morphic fields. As individuals, we have access to the morphic field of whatever cultural, social, or familial groups we are embedded in, along with their entire storage of memory. For example, I will be attuned to the Jewish morphic field as well as the Armenian morphic field. Further out, I am also able to access the morphic field of the entire human species. Focusing back in, as well, I am tuned into the morphic field that my immediate family constellates with their particular experiences and histories. As Sheldrake (1987) suggested, “there is a collective memory to which we are all tuned which forms a background against which our own experience develops and against which our own individual memories develop” (p. 24). There are different collectives that comprise this space, and they are, again, nested within one another. Most of the transmission of history and experience happens unconsciously, therefore, it sometimes takes investigation of our familial and cultural histories to get to the bottom of it.

Connolly (2011) spoke of a consequence of trauma called “‘the death of time’ which refers to the discontinuity between past, present and future that survivors of collective trauma experienced and transmitted to their children” (p. 611). Survivors, then, live in two states at once; one being the recollection of the traumatic event, and the other their current reality. If we think about morphic fields as fields of memory from the past, especially the past of groups we are woven into, then the ‘death of time’ idea aligns well. Morphic resonance is a way of existing and feeling across space and time. Synchronicity, as well, is the connection between two or more events across space and time. Here, all of the information I have been presenting begins to coalesce. Connolly (2011) continued by explaining that “the death of time creates a dissociation between history and memory with the result of the creation of a history without memory, history as abstract dead facts, and a memory without history” (p. 612). I find this particularly fascinating and apropos in terms of morphic fields as fields of memory. Inherited trauma connects us with a memory we did not personally experience, yet we are tuned into it as though we did. We have no personal history with the memory, yet it colors our experience in our lives and in our bodies.

When we have intergenerational trauma, we have “memories without experience” which “in their essence remain unchanging but over time they accumulate around themselves in an amalgam of images taken both from personal experience and from the stereotyped image of family history or the social group” (Neri as cited by Connolly, 2011, p. 612). Sheldrake “proposed that memory can exist without any material substrate to support it (Le Grice, 2010, p. 210). Many of the connections that I am putting forward here seem uncanny. There is much to be gleaned from allowing the theories of morphic fields and inherited trauma to inform each other. For myself, this rings true. For years, I have been exploring various forms of ancestral healing and yet, the ideas I am presenting here have allowed me to deepen my understanding of what is going on. My sense is that this framework might support individuals to reframe their lives and allow them more agency in interacting with and healing their inherited trauma.

My Story

I was born a short month after my parents immigrated to the United States. My mom, Jewish, was born and raised in Uzbekistan, and my dad, Armenian, was born and raised in Armenia. They had just turned 20 and 21 upon landing in Detroit, Michigan where I was born. My story, on both sides of my lineage, is that of genocide, displacement, uprootedness, and seeking belonging. Even in utero, I was feeding off of an extremely stressful situation — immigration. Leaving home. Seeking home. Being spit out into a foreign land. This certainly added to the transmission of a traumatized nervous system. The horrors endured by my people were too difficult to digest. Herein lies the root of the inherited trauma: the sufferings of my ancestors were too much to digest, so they did not do it. Unmourned, ungrieved, undigested trauma was pushed far back into the collective psyche of these social and cultural groups. The main desire was to start over, rebuild, and create families and keep them close. “When the trauma is massive, prolonged and deliberately inflicted whole tracts of our being can plunge back into unconsciousness and vanish from the surface for years and decades” (Jung as cited by Connolly, 2011, p. 609). What happens, though, when we build something on an unstable foundation — a foundation that has not been as fully tended as it needed? Everything that is built is connected to this foundation and feels and functions as such. The consequences are undeniable, and these days, they are everywhere.

My maternal great-grandmother, born in 1928 in Poland, and her entire family managed to bypass extermination during the holocaust where six million Jews were massacred. As they escaped, they confronted the nazis with fake identities, somehow managing to fly under the radar perhaps because they did not look “Jewish enough” though fully Jewish. She and her family ended up in Uzbekistan. Given that she died when I was 19, I grew up hearing her stories about fleeing, and all of the harsh and unconscionable circumstances she either experienced or witnessed. As a child, I did not quite comprehend what she was talking about, but as I got older and learned more about history, the reality sunk in. There are two most prominent fragments of her stories that I remember. One is her confrontation with the nazis, lying about her age and identity, and holding her baby sister in her arms as she did. The other is that in their escape, they had a sack of potatoes that was almost taken by wolves, and they had a close encounter with these wild creatures. There was no shortage of fear and unrest. Threats were around every corner as she and her family ran for their lives, knowing of the atrocities they were fleeing from. Although they were uneasy, she told the stories over and over. Even as a child, I could sense that there was something really important about what she was sharing.

I grew up only with my mom’s family. My dad’s family remained in Armenia and the relationship between the two families was not great. They divorced when I was 11, so I have not had the firsthand experience of getting to know their stories. However, I have managed to learn some things from my father. I remember only first learning about the Armenian genocide when I was in high school. I was completely shocked and confused about why this was something so unacknowledged. I remember the moment when I realized that it was not just the genocide of the Jewish people that was in my body, but the Armenians as well. Over one million Armenians were slaughtered by the Nationalists of the Ottoman Empire during World War One. The circumstances were horrifying and inhumane. My father has told me that several members of his family were killed, many or most were displaced, and that an incredible amount of torture was experienced. I remember asking him if he was taught about the genocide in school in Armenia because I was so shocked that it was so underrepresented in my education and in the world. He told me “of course, we have not forgotten. We can’t.” However, he followed this by telling me I should not be concerned about this, I should not spend my life dwelling in the dark, and that I should do what the generations prior have done: stop talking about it and move on.

My life has been plagued by the sense of not knowing where I belong. As a kid, I felt like an outsider. I grew up speaking Russian, and watching Russian children’s movies, with a family who had just arrived in the country. My upbringing was completely different than my peers. Though I was born in the US, this land has never felt like home, and I have felt that in my bones. The memories of displacement have been palpable for me since childhood. I was an extremely anxious child, though bright, creative, and very well-behaved. I had unexplained health challenges which have spiraled into a journey with chronic, mysterious kinds of issues. Mostly, I have lived with this feeling like the world is not a safe place for me, where I belong, and with whom. I felt something immense when reading the following quote from Jean Amery, a survivor of Auschwitz who later committed suicide:

Whoever has been tortured remains tortured…whoever has undergone torment is no longer at home in the world… the faith in humanity which is already fractured with the first blow to the face and then demolished by torture, can never be regained. (Levi as cited by Connolly, 2011, p. 608)

If this is the experience, one cannot help but imagine what is transmitted to future generations. This heartbreaking sentiment feels like the core of my experience, the core of what I feel I hold, and what I am tuned into. This is the collective nervous system that has shaped me.

I am thirty years old and for lack of better words, I have been on the run most of my life. Not just literally, but in my nervous system as well. I have spent the last several years coming to terms with the extreme consequences of living in a constant state of hypervigilance and nervous system dysregulation for my entire life. Now I understand that it did not begin with me. In my adult life, I have sought refuge and longed for stability, grounding, community, and belonging. My life has taken me on a path that has perpetuated a sense of being uprooted. These last several years my body and my psyche have put up a boundary with this feeling and I have been forced to dig further and further into healing ancestral trauma in any way that I can. Wolynn suggested that if we look at our greatest fear in life, it is a good indicator of clues about our inherited trauma. I have always felt that both abandonment and dying alone were my biggest fears. When considering this as it relates to genocide, displacement, and concentration camps all being a part of my ancestral makeup, it only makes sense that these fears would live in me. As I mentioned before, the response from holocaust survivors was to rebuild families and stay close, very close.

“The lasting hormonal changes found in Holocaust survivors with PTSD have been replicated in a high percentage of adult children of these survivors” (Yehuda as cited by Connolly, 2011, p. 610). Understanding this as the context for my experience has been crucial for many reasons. For one, it helped me to understand that I am not inherently broken. I learned how not to pathologize myself and instead cultivate resources to break these binds and heal. In other ways, this kind of first-hand experience of inherited trauma expanded my worldview in a way that I could truly embody. It is easy to talk about being connected with one’s ancestors and the greater web of life, but living it takes work. By seeing my sufferings, chronic pain and illness, and inability to ground into my life as not only my story, and this, this is deeply relieving even if learned through challenges. It invited me to inhabit my place in the world that I have known is true, but now could also feel to be true. Both my mind and my body had to get on board.

Perhaps one of the most important pieces to bring forward from my story is the gift that I feel has come from understanding some of my afflictions as inherited, ancestral trauma. Yes, I said gift, in relation to trauma. Amidst all of the challenges I have faced and continue to face, somehow, I have walked with a sense that when I am finally able to ‘root’ I will bring healing into my life and perhaps to my ancestors. I can either perpetuate the story of displacement and hypervigilance by allowing the unconscious to become my reality, or I can choose to look that story in the eyes, hold it tenderly, and create something else from those memories which have formed me. Rather than living in the victim story that I will never belong, find home, or feel safe, I have instead reframed my story of being on a mission to create the stability for myself that my people never had. Whether I will have children of my own or not, I do it for future generations as well. I do believe that it is not only the morphic fields that impact us, but that we impact the fields as well. If I can bring healing to the field, then perhaps many more others will be able to as well — especially the ones that will come after me.

Could There Be a Purpose Behind Inherited Trauma?

A morphic field is comprised of information that is used in the organization of the living organism to which it relates, both to guide organisms into actualization and to maintain their structural form. As in the stratified order of nature, each morphic field is nested within the morphic fields of larger systems and can access and contribute information stored in these larger fields. (Le Grice, 2010, p. 208)

Returning to the topic of synchronicity, I am curious about whether or not there might be a telos, a purpose, behind the phenomenon of inherited trauma. What I have shared from my personal story has led me to the idea that there might be an intelligence here. This, of course, is a radical proposition, and it is exactly why I feel it is especially critical to ask such questions. In the dominant reductionist paradigm, everything is categorized as good or bad. This polarity is engrained and conditioned into us collectively. However, I believe that if we challenge the common notions and associations we have about what is good and what is bad, we might discover a paradigm, or worldview, that holds far more possibility than we are familiar with.

Combs and Holland (2001) conveyed that synchronicity is

The uncanny intrusion of the unexpected into the flow of commonplace happenstance, an intrusion that hints at an undisclosed realm of meaning, a disparate landscape of reality that momentarily intersects with our own. The seeming intelligence with which synchronistic events orchestrate themselves gives the sense that some personal but larger-than-life agency is operating behind them. We might imagine, for instance, that some whimsical god has taken a personal interest in our affairs and arranged them in some pattern… (p. 81)

My desire is to marvel at this intelligent orchestration and return to the notion of morphic fields being nested within one another. If we zoom out from, say, the morphic field of the Jewish people, we will eventually hit the morphic field of the entire cosmos. Ultimately, I believe, the cosmos is the ordering principle of all life, so could it be that the morphic fields nested within it have a crucial role to play, to support the unfolding story of the universe? This is a big leap and definitely a meta-perspective, but it bears significance for those of us traversing the path of transmuting ancestral trauma.

For many, the healing of trauma leads them to their life’s purpose and work in the world. It puts many of the pieces together. As well, even though it is through trauma, the experience may put their lives into a context that is more aligned with what they believe about the world. It connects them with their ancestors in a visceral way, perhaps even the land where they or their ancestors are from. After all, our darkest periods are often initiations into exactly who and what we are meant to be. I believe this is true of the confrontation with inherited trauma. I hope to expand upon this idea in future work and research.

Conclusion

This essay has been an attempt to recontextualize ancestral trauma in our lives. Through Jung’s theory of synchronicity and Sheldrake’s concept of morphic fields, I am weaving together what might be an archetypal and depth psychological interpretation of what is actually occurring in the experiences of intergenerational trauma. I shared my story with the intention of touching something in you that might point to a new way of seeing your own life. What I have shared here is about the bigger picture of my life and as it relates to the collective of my lineages. I have several examples of how inherited trauma has manifested in my life in very specific and personal ways. I hope to be able to expand on that one day as well. As with much of my work, my intention is to pave a path for how we humans might cultivate a relationship with the invisible, how we might see, feel, and sense the invisible as a real force with intelligence and meaning.

I feel the potency of these connections. My hope is that we might learn from these ideas and continue to expand them. The theories presented here have the capacity to inform way more than our understanding of the human and psychology. Within them, they hold the extraordinary potential of understanding how to relate to the universe in a more intimate way. At the end of an essay, Sheldrake (1987) boldly stated that

The main difference [from morphic fields] is that Jung’s idea was applied primarily to human experience and human collective memory. What I am suggesting is that a very similar principle operates throughout the entire universe, not just in human beings…[If accepted in the mainstream] Morphogenic fields and the concept of the collective unconscious would completely change the context of modern psychology. (p. 25)

It is my hope that this work will significantly impact the future. I feel that this is what it will take so that we might create the possibility to live in a world infused with meaning, purpose, and intelligence once again. I have the sense that this is what our ancestors want from us.

Works Cited

Chek, Paul. (Host). (2021, July 27). Mark Wolynn: DNA: Are Our Ancestors Acting Through Us? (№147). [Audio Podcast Episode]. In Living 4D. https://chekinstitute.com/blog/podcast-episodes/episode-147-mark-wolynn-dna-are-our-ancestors-acting-through-us/

Combs, A. & Holland, M. (2001). Synchronicity: Through the eyes of science, myth, and the trickster. Da Capo Press.

Connolly, A. (2011). Healing the wounds of our fathers: intergenerational trauma, memory, symbolization and narrative. The Journal of Analytical Psychology, 56(5), 607–626.

Jung, C. G. (1963). Memories, dreams, reflections. Vintage.

Jung, C. G. (2010). Synchronicity: An acausal connecting principle. Princeton University Press.

Le Grice, K. (2010). The archetypal cosmos: Rediscovering the gods in myth, science and astrology. Floris Books.

Sheldrake, R. (1987). Part I: Mind, memory, and archetype morphic resonance and the collective unconscious. Psychological Perspectives: A Semiannual Journal of Jungian Thought, 18(1), 9–25.

Sheldrake, R. (1987). Society, spirit & ritual Morphic resonance and the collective unconscious part II. Psychological Perspectives: A Semiannual Journal of Jungian Thought, 18(2), 320–331.

Sheldrake, R. (1988). Extended mind, power, & prayer. Psychological Perspectives: A Semiannual Journal of Jungian Thought, 19(1), 64–78.
Sheldrake, R. (1995). The presence of the past: The habits of nature. Park Street Press.

Van der Kolk. B. (2015). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Penguin Books.

Wolynn, M. (2017). It didn’t start with you: How inherited family trauma shapes who we are and how to end the cycle. Penguin Publishing Group.