Legacy Burdens

What are legacy burdens?

Legacy Burdens are essentially beliefs, feelings, and emotions that are handed down through the family line. For example beliefs around sexuality, gender roles, expressing feelings, money, success, you get the picture…
These beliefs (often implicit and unexamined) are linked to energies and painful emotions like shame, unworthiness, etc.
Legacy burdens are covert forces that increase our symptoms, influence our choices, control our behaviors, and veil our perceptions of the world.
Legacy burdens can haunt individuals and families for generations. However, the good news is that they can be easily unburdened once identified as “not ours”, which means they are not created from our own life experiences, that they are in fact inherited. 

Examples of Legacy Burdens

Legacy burdens make us reject anything that was regarded as unacceptable or shameful at any level in our culture and/or past generations. Some typical examples of legacy burdens are:

• Keeping up appearances

• We don’t talk about these things in our family

• Emotions are a sign of weakness

• Girls should be nice

• Boys don’t cry

• Women should not speak their mind

• You’ve got to earn your keep

• Shame around sexuality

This work is very similar to what happens in a family constellation session, the difference being that in IFS the work is done internally. The representatives are already present inside of us.

This internal work offers healing back through the generations and forward through the generations to come, known and unknown.

In this way, we actually get to choose again to choose what is the legacy we want to pass forward into our world, into our children and their children. And if we have no biological children, what is the energy and the legacy we want to leave the world. Because your work matters!