Today is Thanksgiving Day in the USA and believe me I am Thankful for all of you on this site. !!! Happy Thanksgiving.
PMR : Today is Thanksgiving Day in the USA and... - PMRGCAuk
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yogabonnie
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Happy Thanksgiving to all our American friends on the Forum.
Thank you yogabonnie , did the turkey make it to the table, or did the big bad wolf get it? 🙏
ha ha Poor Blaze.... she really thought perhaps it was for her!!!
Aww Happy Thanksgiving Day to you too. 😊
Greetings from the UK yogabonnie - that picture is making my mouth water too! 
PMRproAmbassador
With people swimming in the sea and sunbathing, I walked past a beach cafe this morning that was blasting Jingle Bells. Loads of mince pies in the shops too! I resisted the gluten-free ones in M&S...
One of the most disorienting experiences I've had was being on Gibralter one Christmas Eve. People walking around in the blazing sunshine with reindeer antlers on their heads, Christmas music blasting.... On the other hand my first memory of Father Christmas was the year I was four and he arrived in a jeep. Kenya 1951.
Golly Heron, I was born in Nairobi a few years later. My dad ran the YMCA. Small world and that's a fact.
Christmas in Australia is a barbecue on the beach whereas the winter solstice in the Blue Mountains was magical. UK summer of course. At least I can get summer things for the children in the sales.
I was not aware of it at the time, but we left Nairobi in a great hurry, my uncle having been warned that the family was slated to be murdered by the Mau Mau. For the long train journey to Mombasa I was given the latest Noddy book. 🙂 We went to the UK on a troop ship, my uncle was in the army. All the women and children in one part of the ship (two women and six children in our cabin) and the men in another. I remember little of the voyage, except a day when there was a multitude of flying fish!
There used to be MauMau meetings at the bottom of our garden involving staff from our house. My feisty little granny would go and fetch them back to finish the washing up. It's a wonder I'm here to tell the tale.
We weren't rich but that's just the way it was before independence.
I visited once, I got a strong pang of home, I was embraced as an African because I was born there. I was there at election time and my vehicle was hit by bullets on the way to a safari. There was a gun battle going on across the street. I just laid across my kids - nobody hurt.
Fascinating -and terrifying— shared life experiences! Thank you both for sharing,
Wow, what an experience! I think we must both have had guardian angels working overtime for us. I've never been back to Africa, don't think I can count the holiday in Egypt. Oddly enough my stepmother was born in Ireland and at age four her father, Anglo-Irish doctor, family had been in Ireland for centuries, was warned they they were going to be murdered, and same thing, suddenly packed up and fled to southeast England where she grew up. My father was amongst the cohort of young Polish men who were told to get out of Poland (1939) as quickly as they could, and although many of them didn't make it he did, completed his medical training at the Polish School of Medicine (Edinburgh University) and fought with the allied forces. I've often wondered whether this background trauma echoes down the generations, whether my children are subconsciously affected, and if they ever have children how long does it take for the echoes to fade.
Yes Heron, It even has a name in psychology. Family Constellations. My daughter who is a psychologist practises it. It is about patterns of trauma that are revisited down the generations. In a therapy session people cast other individuals in the group as family members and direct a troubling scenario. What emerges is beyond rational explanation. I participated once in order to understand my daughter's world better. I observed complete strangers singing foreign protest songs whilst acting out somebody's story. I remain baffled and open minded.
Yikes, that's actually a bit scary! Not sure I'd ever want to go there! It's compounded for us by the fact that my mother died when I was very young, so in a way I look at our fragile branch of the family tree as a bit of a miracle.
HeronNS. I have become fascinated by epigenetics, the study of how our environment, inside and out, affects the expression of our DNA, actually affects how some genes turn on or off. It has been demonstrated that famine, trauma, can effect Gene expression down to line. Correlational studies in humans. Some experimental studies in animals. The are some fascinating TED talks on the subject.
I read Richard Francis's book a few years ago. Not an easy read, but not too hard. Either is a science writer. I'm looking for an updated version covering the same material at about the same level. Would appreciate recommendations any of you might have.
Of course there's more than one parent. As far as I know there is nothing whatever in living memory on my husband's side of the family which remotely resembles what I've outlined above happening to my side. So do the effects on the children become mitigated by this? I would hope so. And the fact that their upbringing was stable and safe.
Hi Heron, As I understand it, if patterns start repeating themselves the therapy sessions are designed to heal the inherited trauma. You would know if anyone in your family was troubled. I realise that I'm talking about a subject that I don't know enough about really. It was triggered by your saying that you wondered if background trauma echoed down the generations, and it reminded me of a part of my daughter's work.
Certainly in my own ancestral family there seems to have been a couple ( to my knowledge) of separate feuds over similar issues that are not directly linked.
Food for thought.
Hi Heron and Sheffield Jane:
The kinds of things they now think might be inherited have to do with anxiety disorders, caused by traumas that changed the parental nervous systems. Hard to tell environment vs genetic changes when traumatized parents raise kids. But there was some interesting data on children of World Trade Center survivors. This is a pretty cool article that ends with two of the most commonly cited epigenetic effects in humans:
This is really interesting Hindhags. Do you have a scientific background?
I think my daughter was working in the area of inherited behaviours particularly harmful ones and the oddest coincidences in Ancester's stories. This is without being exposed directly to the Ancester.
Are we talking in class? 👩🎓🙄
Hindags this is really interesting - especially after we get past the roundworms and their fluorescence and get to holocaust survivors. In Canada now we are learning about the intergenerational effects of cultural disruption, as in taking aboriginal children out of their homes and sending them to residential school. I think it's been suggested in the past that boarding schools had some influence on the way the British Empire developed because of the traumas the little boys suffered as they were whipped into shape to become future leaders. And one can barely even begin to conceive what the slave trade did. But you'd think, if trauma can damage people, then something good must also be able to help successive generations recover. Both Hebrew and Native American tradition suggest that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the seventh generation, so it's been known by some for millennia.
All this is FASCINATING. Who knew I would not only learn about PMR but so many other things too. I like now to think that doing my relaxation and as my mother said, try to keep a "calm and cheerful attitude right now!" might be helping future generations and their challenges! WOW. Thanks!
We’re right behind you, at 8 am. Getting ready to tune in the Macy’s T.Day parade❣️
🙏🏽Jerri
Happy thanksgiving yogabonnie Never seen a turkey with an eye like that though! ATB
Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow PMR friends!!! Soo Thankful for all of you and this wonderful health forum! Cheers!
🦃🍷🍁
Kathryn from the 🇺🇸
Yes!! This Forum is one of the things I'm most thankful for... Thank you all so very much.
Wow, so this is all so interesting! Thanks for sharing ladies. 😊
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