She sat down and said: I do not know why I am so afraid of him leaving.
She had said this in different words before.
Her partner was not leaving. He had given her no indication that he was leaving. He was, by her own account, patient and present. She loved him. He loved her. This was not in dispute.
Her body, however, had a different version of the story.
When she sat across from me, her hands were cold. Her shoulders were carried forward, held slightly toward her chest. Her breathing was shallow, sitting high. The body was already braced for something her mind kept telling her was not happening.
“When did you first learn that people leave without warning?” I asked.
She went still. “I do not know. I do not think I learned that.”
We stayed with it.
“My grandmother,” she said finally. “She never spoke about the war. She was fine. She was funny. She was always fine.”
I said: is it possible that the fear is not yours?
The quality of her stillness changed.
The body as record keeper
The body is an extraordinary record keeper.
It stores what has happened in this lifetime and what was transmitted from the lifetimes before it. This is not a metaphor. The research on epigenetic inheritance confirms what practitioners have observed for decades: trauma does not disappear when the person who experienced it dies.
It is encoded. It is passed down. It arrives as a readiness. A bracing. A sensitivity to certain kinds of threat that comes with no attached explanation, because the explanation belongs to a room the inheritor was never in.
Rachel Yehuda's research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai found that the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors showed measurable differences in cortisol regulation compared to control groups. Their stress response systems had been shaped by events that happened before they were born.
This research has since been replicated in studies examining the children of Rwandan genocide survivors, descendants of enslaved people in the United States, and populations affected by famine.
The conclusion is consistent: what a body experiences under extreme stress changes how the genome expresses itself. Those changes can be inherited.
In the session room, what this means is the following: when a client tells me their fear is irrational, that nothing in their life explains it, they are sometimes right. The fear has a source. The source does not belong to them.
It belongs to someone who came before.
What does not belong to the person in the room
When I work with someone, whether through constellation-influenced mapping, Aspectics, Deep PEAT, or simply tracking what the body is doing, I am watching for the thing that does not belong to the person in the room.
The grief that is too large for the current circumstances.
The rage that has no corresponding event.
The loyalty to a way of being that costs the client everything and cannot be consciously traced.
These patterns show up in the body as distinctly as personal trauma. The difference is this: personal trauma, when worked with directly, traces back to a specific memory, something the person can locate even if they cannot articulate it.
When the source is ancestral, the somatic response has a different quality.
Weightier. Older. A heaviness that settles over the system in a way that is disproportionate to what the person is describing.
I have learned to feel the difference.
Aspectics: the part that carries the charge
When the source is correctly identified as ancestral, a different kind of work becomes possible.
I use methods developed by Serbian psychologist Zivorad Mihajlovic Slavinski, particularly a process called Aspectics, which works with the specific part of you that is carrying the charge.
In Aspectics, the part of you that is afraid is treated as a part that has been doing something, faithfully, for a very long time.
It is asked: what do you want for her with this fear? What goal are you trying to reach?
The answers rarely come as words. They come as sensation, image, a felt shift in the body. They are followed. What does that goal want above it? The chain is climbed, carefully, until there is nothing higher: until the charge dissolves into stillness. Openness. The particular quality of a body that has stopped bracing.
What becomes clear, when this process is done with inherited charge, is that the aspect is completing a protective function that began in someone else's body, in a time the client was not alive for.
The grandmother's nervous system organised itself around the threat of sudden disappearance. The organisation was transmitted. The granddaughter's aspect has been faithfully running it ever since, long after the threat it answered has gone.
When the aspect is asked what it wants, and the chain is followed to its end, something that belongs to the grandmother finally reaches resolution.
The granddaughter's body exhales.
This can sometimes happen through the body's orientation in space alone. I have turned a client ninety degrees, held a finger in the charge while the body physically reorients, and watched an experience that had been immovable for years simply dissolve. The brace, the lean forward, the slight turn away: these are positions the body took in response to something that happened, and they are positions the body has not been allowed to leave.
A change in orientation can be enough to break the encoding.
The body discovers it is no longer in the room where the original thing happened.
The spine keeps its own records
Inherited charge does not live only in thought, memory, or the aspects we can name.
It lives in the tissue. In the spinal cord and the connective structures surrounding it. In the particular quality of tension that has settled into a body organised around threat for so long it no longer registers the bracing as unusual.
This is where spinal attunement enters the work.
Dr. Donald Epstein, who developed Network Spinal, made a precise observation: when a body experiences something too overwhelming to fully process, the energy and information of that event is translated into vibration and stored as tension along the spine. Research conducted at the University of Southern California using surface electromyography mapped two distinct waves that develop in the spines of people receiving this work: a respiratory wave, the body learning to use breath to unwind held tension, and a network wave, a rhythmic oscillation that travels the whole column as the body reorganises.
I draw on this lineage directly through my training with Soma Mystica, founded by Sigourney Belle: spinal attunement, a modality that integrates Western neuroanatomy with Eastern energetic philosophy and works at the intersection of spine, nervous system and energetic field.
I often do not touch the body at all.
I work in the field around it. A hand held a few inches from the spine. A shift in my own presence and attention.
Something in the client's system begins to move: a breath that drops lower than it has been for years, a shoulder that releases without being told to, a tremor that passes through the back as old tension finds a route out.
None of this is performed.
It is the nervous system completing what it was interrupted from completing.
This matters for inherited trauma specifically because the body does not distinguish between what it experienced directly and what was transmitted through the bodies of those who came before.
This is why the work travels across distance. I have facilitated this kind of release through a screen, with women in Beirut whose bodies have been in chronic activation for years, through bombing, displacement, the accumulated vigilance of living inside continuous threat. The spinal tension in those bodies is not only theirs. It belongs to mothers and grandmothers, to a history that has been in a state of emergency for generations.
How a child absorbs it
The woman whose grandmother had survived the war without speaking about it was carrying a specific kind of inheritance.
She had been raised by a woman whose nervous system had been organised entirely around the threat of sudden disappearance. The knock on the door. The person who did not come home.
Her grandmother had transmitted this organisation through the body. Through the quality of her presence when her grandchildren got too loud or too visible. Through the speed with which she checked on people who were late. Through the way she held herself in a room, always slightly oriented toward the exit.
A child absorbs this. Through the mirror neurons that make human attachment possible.
The body of the child learns the body of the caregiver as its first map of the world. If the caregiver's body is organised around the threat of disappearance, the child's nervous system inherits that organisation as though it were the correct response to reality.
The granddaughter who sat in front of me had never experienced sudden abandonment in her own life. Her fear was real. Her partner's stability was real. Both things were true at the same time, and neither resolved the other, because the fear was a response to her grandmother's reality, transmitted through the body of her mother, installed in hers before she had the language to question it.
What correct location makes possible
What happens in a session when this is correctly located is one of the most significant shifts I have witnessed in practice.
When I say to a client: this is not yours, and when the body recognises the truth of that, something releases that years of cognitive work cannot reach.
The tears are different. Something older, calmer, like a river finding its level. The body exhales. The shoulders drop. The hands warm.
Then: a kind of clarity.
Because when you understand that the fear is inherited, you do not have to defend against it anymore. You do not have to explain it to your partner. You can feel it, acknowledge its origin, and then do something your grandmother could not do.
Choose to put it down.
The difference between “I am afraid of abandonment” and “I inherited a fear of abandonment from a woman who had every reason to be afraid” is the difference between a life spent managing a wound that is not healing and a life spent completing a healing that belongs to a whole family line.
The conversation that had been impossible
The woman whose grandmother had survived the war went back to her partner.
She told him what she had found. Just the essence: I think I have been afraid of you leaving because someone before me was afraid in a way that never got to resolve. I think I have been asking you to repair something that was not yours to repair.
He sat with that for a long time.
He said: I have always felt like I could not do enough. No matter what I did, something in you still doubted it.
She said: I know. That part was not about you.
That conversation had been impossible for four years.
This is what becomes possible when the body's inheritance is correctly located. The end of fighting a war that belongs to someone else.
Still following the breadcrumbs.
Juliette