The Sacred Work of the Cycle Breaker

How I Transformed the Unspoken Legacy of My Bloodline

Art by Autumn Skye Morrison

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The Cycle Breakers

“Family pathology rolls down from generation to generation like a fire in the woods, taking down everything in its path, until one person in one generation has the courage to turn around and face the flames. That person brings peace to their ancestors and spares the children to follow.”

Terry Real

I believe that we live in a generation of cycle breakers - people who have found the strength to end long-standing cycles that have run through their ancestral lines for generations.

I’ve heard some claim lately that intergenerational trauma doesn’t exist. That the past lives in the past. But those who have witnessed the same cycles repeat across generations know better.

Both science, such as studies in epigenetics, and psychology now affirm what many of us have always sensed: unhealed pain is passed through generations through certain behaviours, nervous systems, and relational patterns, and can even cause changes in gene expression.

Trauma experts like Mark Wolynn and Gabor Mate have spoken about how wounds we carry from our family histories can shape our core beliefs, influence the partners we choose, fuel the addictions we struggle with, and contribute to the physical illnesses we may develop. The past is not just in the past - it lives on in our bodies and has a direct impact on our lives in the present.

Ancestral trauma is an inheritance many of us unconsciously carry. It continues to ripple through our bloodlines until someone, in one generation, dares to face the pain. The act of facing and feeling what has always been there is what stops the cycle. It liberates the future and brings peace to the past.

That is the work of a cycle breaker.

This story will be a testament that intergenerational trauma does exist, and this is how it showed up for me.

This story will be my story - but it’s also the story of many others. It's a story I’ve witnessed unfold in different forms and constellations in people I’ve counselled over the years. Each has its own unique pattern. Each with its own unique history.

However, the basic theme remains the same: we carry an unspoken legacy from those who came before us.

This is a story of both ancestral trauma and ancestral healing.

And it begins with the story of my grandmother.

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The Unspoken Legacy

My grandmother’s name is Matsue, like mine.

But for most of her life, she went by Dorothy.

To me and everyone who knew her, she was an angel.

She embodied the ideal archetype of a grandmother: endlessly loving, compassionate, patient, rarely angry, incredibly strong, deeply giving, with a smile that lit up a room. She had a quiet wisdom and a profound love for children. She was the matriarch, a single mother who held her large family of nine children and countless grandchildren together.

We had big family gatherings in which she cooked elaborate meals, a fusion of Japanese, Chinese, and Polish cuisine, reflecting the mishmash of cultural influences of the small town I grew up in, Thunder Bay.

She loved her family, and she was the glue that kept it all together.

But her life was far from easy.

Growing up, I didn’t know much about her past, only that she was thrown into an internment camp as a young adult during World War 2, when the Japanese Canadians had their homes and businesses stripped away by the government, labelled as potential enemies of the country.

It was in that internment camp where she had my father and raised his siblings.

I didn’t know my grandfather. I didn’t hear much about him, other than that one day he left the family and never returned.

My dad never spoke of what happened, and my grandmother never identified as a victim of her past experiences.

But the unspoken pain from this haunted our family like a ghost.

Looking back, with the wisdom I have now, I can see the signs of trauma clearly on my dad’s side of the family - in the drug addictions, relational chaos, and mental illness. And yet, there was also so much love in the midst of it all, because of the beacon of light that was my Grandma.

I remember hearing stories of my grandmother taking care of my cousins’ children when their parents were too deep in a heroin addiction to function - needles scattered on the floor. Despite the ongoing drama, everyone was still invited to family dinners, and she continued to welcome anyone lovingly, regardless of what had happened to them in the days or weeks preceding or the lifestyle they lived. She never held a grudge and was endlessly forgiving.

I loved her deeply, and she loved me just as much. I could always count on her to show up in a way I wasn’t used to: attending my school plays and piano recitals, always dressed up and with her hair freshly permed.

Her presence gave me a sense of warmth and stability. I knew she would be there. I knew she cared.

What I didn’t realize then was that being given her name also meant I would carry her pain within me in a specific way.

And one day, I would be the one to break the cycle of that inherited legacy.

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Where The Descent Began

I spent most of my life in a small northern town in Ontario until I moved away at the age of 15 to follow my mom, who was relocating to Montreal. I believe she was going there to be with an ex-boyfriend, but like most events in a toxic family system, things were hardly ever shared with me explicitly - rather, I would learn to piece the truth together from overheard phone calls and messages on our voicemail.

Moving to a big city after spending my whole life in a small one, especially at the age of 15, was a shock, to say the least.

In some ways, it was a good shock. The city opened up a whole new world to me that I had previously only seen on television - fashion, art, culture, and an eclectic creativity that awakened the artist within me.

But the shock also came with challenges. I was thrown into a new school where I didn’t know anyone, regularly bullied, and left to navigate a whole new world without any emotional anchor or someone to guide me.

I also lost connection to almost everyone in my extended family - my father, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandmothers, and grandfather, all of whom remained in the small town where I grew up.

It didn’t take long for me to find ways to numb the pain.

By age 16, I had a fake ID and was regularly going to bars and hanging out with men who were in their mid-20s and spiralling into a growing drug addiction - one of many that would follow. Substances made me feel “normal” and dulled the complex emotions I was dealing with and trying to shove down.

I was a teen with no parent to set boundaries or offer support.

When I turned 18, my mother kicked me out of the house. On the morning of my 18th birthday, she sent me an email telling me I had two weeks to move out.

From there on, I fell into a deep panic that didn’t leave me for many years.

I began drifting around, looking for people to save me.

I moved to LA to be with a boyfriend, which ended traumatically, and then moved to Vancouver, where I managed a year or two of relative stability before moving back to LA - where it all fell apart again.

By 21, I was back in Vancouver suffering from a full-blown nervous breakdown.

Eventually, I ended up moving back in with my mom and my new step-dad in Montreal (a different man than the one I mentioned before). They took me to a psychiatrist who put me on an insane cocktail of drugs, which only deepened the downward spiral. I fell into one of the most self-destructive periods of my life.

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When Everything Fell Apart At Once

It’s a strange thing to witness in retrospect how the trauma you didn’t know you were carrying eventually catches up to you.

Being raised by two emotionally unavailable parents left me searching for comfort and love in all the wrong places - partly in drugs, but mostly in controlling and emotionally unavailable men.

The years between 16 and 21 were a blur of depressive episodes, drug benders, and intense relationships. I was completely lost at sea.

During one of my darkest depressive episodes, I told my mom I wanted to kill myself. The drugs I was on made me feel completely empty and numb.

She responded by telling me that she was going to move to a different continent, on the other side of the world, to start a new life with my stepdad and my two stepbrothers.

That moment broke something in me. My life spiralled even further out of control. I was physically and emotionally unstable, barely functioning, just trying to get through each day. This was a survival mode that I would be in for many years.

Then, one day, just a few months later, while I was staying with my brother in Vancouver, he came out of his room, his face sombre and white.

“Ralph is dead.” (Ralph was my stepfather.)

I laughed, assuming it must be a dark joke, that my brother was playing a prank on me.

“What?!”

“Don’t laugh,” he said firmly.

“Wait - you’re serious?”

Ralph had died suddenly of a heart attack while waiting for the train, mere months after my mother moved there to start a new life with him.

My brother flew out to support her. I stayed behind, alone at his place for a few days, until less than 2 weeks later, I got a call from my dad:

“Grandma is about to die. You need to come home if you want to say goodbye.”

Still deep in depression and in one of the worst mental states of my life, in shock from what happened to my stepfather, I boarded a plane to my hometown to say my last goodbyes to my grandmother.

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The Story That Set Her Free

When I returned to my hometown, my grandmother was lying on her hospital bed in the care home she had been living in for a few years. She wasn’t speaking. She couldn’t move. My extended family filtered in and out of the room. There was a thick feeling of anxiety and uncertainty in the air.

Much of that time is a blur. But certain moments are etched into my memory forever.

As I mentioned earlier, I didn’t know many details about my grandmother’s past. But there was a book written about the Japanese-Canadian internment camps, and she had an entire chapter in it about her experiences.

The book was sitting on the bedside table beside her.

I decided to read the chapter about her life out loud to her, with some of my cousins next to me.

What I read shocked me.

The story recounted her life before, during, and after the internment camps.

How she was pressured by her family into an arranged marriage to my grandfather, even though she was in love with someone else.

How one day, my grandfather surprised her by showing up with flowers at her doorstep and asked to take her to a Charlie Chaplin movie - and she said yes.

It described their beautiful wedding, and then the painful descent into reality, how he would become an addict, an alcoholic, a gambler and a serial cheater. He was abusive to her.

Then, one day he left - and never returned.

She went on to raise their nine children on $80 a month, working seven nights a week at a Chinese restaurant to support them.

The story ended with her receiving a phone call years later. It was news that my grandfather had died.

She collapsed on the floor.

Then she got up, pulled herself together, and went to work the next day in the pouring rain.

As I finished the story, I started sobbing.

I was overwhelmed by the magnitude of suffering she had been through - and how little of it I had known.

And then, as I finished the story, the machines hooked up to her started beeping.

Something was wrong.

Still crying, in what seemed like seconds after I had read the last line of her story…

She died.

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The Last Gift She Gave Me

Watching someone die really changes something in you. Especially when it’s the person you love the most.

It’s one of those moments I’ll cry about for the rest of my life. That grief has been one of my greatest teachers.

One of the hardest things to witness was my aunt, her eldest daughter, sobbing as my grandmother left her body, crying out for her mom like she was a child again.

Moments after she passed, I sat outside the hospital, alone, still sobbing uncontrollably, barely able to breathe, for what seemed like forever.

But I felt her spirit close to me the whole time. I sensed she wanted to comfort me.

The moment I took a breath and wiped my tears, I felt her spirit shoot away and leave.

She had gone to where souls go between lives.

Maybe I’ll meet her again in the next life.

Maybe in this one.

She’s visited me a few times since then. Always when I least expect it, in moments of stillness and silence, where I’m clear enough to hear.

In many ways, she was the mother I never had.

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Ancestral Echos in a Handful of Flowers

One part of the story that I read with her stuck with me: the moment my grandfather asked her out, showing up at her house one day with a surprise bouquet of flowers.

It brought back a memory I had with her.

Shortly before I was about to move to Montreal, I decided to drop by her house unexpectedly.

I picked some flowers from the neighbourhood to give to her. It was a small, spontaneous gesture. Picking flowers and surprising people was something I had been doing since I was a child, and although I hadn’t done it in a long time, it was a familiar routine for me.

When I opened the door to surprise her with the flowers, she burst into tears. She wasn’t really a big crier. I think that was the only time I had ever saw her cry.

“I’m just so happy to see you.. You don’t visit that much anymore,” she said, wiping her tears, trying to pull herself together.

Later, when I read about how my grandfather had shown up with flowers all those years ago, I couldn’t help but feel the parallel.

I often wonder if that moment stirred that memory in her, as if some part of her remembered being surprised with a gesture like this.

It made me realize how, in hidden ways, my grandfather, whom I had never even met, was also somehow living through me.

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A Legacy of Pain on Repeat

If I thought I was on a downward spiral before her death, that spiral only quickened into a total free-fall afterward.

Some truly terrible things happened during that period - real confrontations with darkness and evil.

As a young, vulnerable woman in survival mode, I was often surrounded by people who did not have my best interests at heart. Predators can always sense the wounded, who are weak and unprotected.

It was the darkest night of the soul I have ever experienced.

I got into a long series of short-lived, emotionally intense relationships - each one reflecting the unhealed relational patterns of my grandmother.

The addiction. The abuse. The betrayal.

Trauma doesn’t always make you the innocent one, and in some of these experiences, I would be the victim, while at other times, I would play the offender. I thought that if I hurt people before they could hurt me, I might be able to protect both myself and them.

This went on for years, until eventually I ended up in detox.

And after one last short and explosive relationship, I made a decision. It was time to get clean.

From there, I began the long road of healing.

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The One Who Faced the Flames

I wish there were one single moment that encompassed how I healed some of these patterns, but healing is never that simple. It was a long and winding road, filled with a variety of teachers, experiences, and methods.

What I did have was sincerity and commitment. I was genuinely devoted to working on myself, taking responsibility for anything I could change (which was a lot) and improving my relationships.

I read book after book, sat with various therapists and healers, purged in ayahuasca ceremonies, and went into silent meditation retreats.

I tried everything and anything that could help me process the pain I had been burying my whole life.

When it comes to healing ancestral trauma, I think the most important thing is this: you must turn towards the places that hurt the most first and be with it.

Then, slowly, those places begin to hurt less.

You move on to the next wound.

And the next.

Eventually, you’re less triggered.

You’re more present.

You begin to feel a return to the self that existed before the trauma.

A part of yourself you’ve likely long forgotten.

It feels like coming home to who you’ve always been.

One model that showed me how deeply my ancestors’ pain lived through me was Bert Hellinger’s model of Family Constellations.

Through constellations, I saw how the trauma my grandparents endured during World War 2 fractured our family line - and how that pain rippled through the psyche of generations to come.

Now, nearly 18 years after my grandmother’s death, I find myself in a life I never imagined possible for me.

It seemed like a dream I could never grasp.

I’m in a loving and secure marriage, with a partner who loves me, is loyal, and kind. I live in a stable home, doing meaningful work as a psychospiritual counsellor and coach. I am living a life that seems like a dream.

In many ways, it’s a life my grandmother never had a chance to live.

I know her spirit watches over me, and she is proud of me.

Because I broke the cycle.

Our cycle.

The one she lived through, the one my parents lived through, and the one I stopped.

I was the one who turned to face the flames.

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Breaking the Spell of the Bloodline

In psychogeneology, the study of how ancestral wounds are passed through generations, we can come to understand a powerful truth:

What is not healed is repeated.

What is not faced by one generation becomes the burden of the next.

We don’t just inherit our eye color, hair, blood type - we inherit the unprocessed grief, the betrayals, the beliefs about ourselves and the world, and the patterns that come with it.

We inherit the unfinished business of those who came before us.

This repetition occurs through what psychology refers to as repetition compulsion - the unconscious drive to recreate the very dynamics that once caused our ancestors pain, in an attempt to resolve them.

For me, this showed up in the form of tumultuous relationships, addiction, abandonment, and betrayal.

Beneath those patterns, my lineage echoed through me.

One concept in psychogeneology I reflect on a lot is something called “anniversary syndrome”.

It suggests that specific traumas repeat, eerily, around the same age, time of year, or under similar circumstances as the original event.

People may experience life events like divorces, accidents, or even illness, around the same age or time of year an ancestor experiences a similar trauma.

At 21 - the very age my grandmother entered her fated marriage - I found myself drawn into a series of relationships with charming but unfaithful men, much like my grandfather.

And then, there is the fact that I was named after her.

In psychogeneology, sharing a name with an ancestor isn’t just a sentiment; it signifies a deeper soul contract.

When a child shares the ancestor’s name, they may unknowingly be asked to also carry their unresolved story. That story will be one of either repetition or liberation.

You will either repeat their fate or break the cycle they carried.

So, I inherited not just her name, but a psychic and emotional legacy tied to her as well.

While I may carry the unresolved ancestral pain, I can also be the alchemist who transforms it through the emotional and spiritual labour of grieving, witnessing, and integrating what the family system couldn’t hold.

All the tears I’ve shed, the hundreds of hours spent doing inner work and in therapy, pays off the emotional debt and breaks the cycle.

In unhealed systems, a name like mine could have kept me bound to the unconscious fate of my grandmother, fated to live through a similar pattern.

But in healed systems, that same name then becomes the transmitter of gifts.

While I carried her name and her pain, now I also get to carry her compassion, her love, and her strength in the face of adversity.

I turned toward the fire and faced the flames, took a match, and lit a new path forward with it.

Perhaps, if you’re reading this, you’re one who broke the cycle, too.

You saw truths that others refused to see.

You felt pain that others refused to feel.

And through walking through the fire, you healed wounds that ran deep in your bloodline and all of humanity.

Through healing yourself, you healed those who came before you, and will come after you.

You became the prayer your ancestors didn’t know how to ask for.

“Only when the past is put in order are the living free.”

Bert Hellinger