#22: From Black Sheep to Cycle Breaker: Healing Generational Trauma with Kat Daou
FEBRUARY 6, 2025
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In this powerful episode, Family Constellation Therapy facilitator Kat Daou shares her transformative journey from being the "black sheep" of her family to becoming an empowered cycle breaker. She explains how generational trauma gets passed down through epigenetics and discusses practical ways to heal ancestral wounds while maintaining family connections. Kat also reveals the unique therapeutic process of Family Constellation Therapy, including how it combines energy work, somatic healing, and emotional release to help clients transform their inherited trauma into generational gifts. Whether you're struggling with family dynamics or seeking to understand your role in your family system, this episode offers valuable insights on turning pain into purpose and reclaiming your authentic self.
[01:00] Understanding Family Constellation Therapy
[02:30] The Science Behind Epigenetics and Trauma
[04:28] Kat's Personal Healing Journey
[08:19] The Role of Generational Trauma
[14:54] Healing Through Forgiveness and Compassion
[20:55] The Process of Family Constellation Therapy
[28:08] Becoming a Cycle Breaker
[36:08] How to Work with Kat
Episode Links:
Experience a live Family Constellation Session on Kat’s podcast HERE
Transcript
Anna: Hello friends and welcome to Courage to Heal. Today you will hear an interview with Kat Daou. Kat is a Family Constellation Therapy facilitator and intuitive guide. Her healing journey began in her early 20s but took a pivotal turn at 28. When a Family Constellation Therapy session revealed that many of her struggles stemmed from unconscious, inherited family trauma.
She spent years uncovering generational wounds from emotional abuse to financial and war trauma, learning to break free from deeply ingrained patterns. Now, Kat helps others do the same by shining a light on inherited family wounds and empowering people to live in alignment with their true selves. Kat, welcome to Courage to Heal.
It's wonderful to have you here.
Kat: Oh, Anna. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you allowing me the space to be here and talk about this modality I love so much.
Anna: Oh, fantastic. So to begin with, I would love to know, because that's something that really intrigues me, what is Family Constellation Therapy and what can it help with?
Kat: Family Constellation Therapy is a beautiful modality that we use to look at all of the ways that you're blocked in your life and how we can connect them back to unhealed and unacknowledged. Family trauma. So a lot of people will look at ancestral healing and start with the ancestors and then go down to the client I was taught, and I prefer to work where we start with you because you are the one that's feeling blocked.
You're the one that's not manifesting the life partner that you want. You're the one that's feeling unworthy to be in the career that you want and make money. I mean, you're the one that's really suffering at the hands of the ancestral trauma at this point. Not to say that anyone else isn't, but you're just the one stepping forward for that help.
And so what we do is we look at you and your blocks and, and then, even your biggest fears and the things you're struggling with. And we look at it as you are the mirror or the portal into understanding what might have happened in the family lineage. And I always say that it's not the same thing, so T H I N G, that you're going through that your ancestors went through.
It could be like things with miscarriages or abortions or losing love. It could be. But a lot of times I'm looking at the theme, T H E M E. What are the themes that are repeating? And this isn't just woo woo you know, I am an intuitive and a medium, but this isn't just like woo woo spiritual. This is actually epigenetic.
Our bodies, based on our environment and the way we were nurtured, develop certain behaviors, patterns, coping mechanisms, beliefs, ways of being. That then get passed down lineage after lineage, which then feed how we're nurtured, which then feed how we create our reality.
Anna: Right, right. Epigenetics is a really interesting field, right?
Because it's very research based, and I know the studies that they've done sure, they were limited to animals for now. But they are starting to do studies in humans as well, and they know that trauma gets passed down through at least two generations, and the reason they say two is because that's all they've looked at.
They haven't done studies for more than that, yeah.
Kat: Well now studies are coming out and saying that it could be seven to fourteen. Wow. And when I look at it from an energy perspective. Not sure if your community is open to the woo, you know, spiritual part of it, but when you look at it from that perspective, we are looking at 14 generations.
It is an incredible impact. Something like war trauma can impact generation after generation after generation epigenetically in our bodies. And I just had a geneticist come on my podcast and talk to me about the science of epigenetics. And it is fascinating how you can just meditate, you know, five days a week for up to 15 to 20 minutes and over eight weeks, you will start to heal the nervous system, which heals the epigenetics, which heals your DNA, and then that becomes a part of you and how you live your life, and then you pass it on to the next generation.
So it's, it's, it's beautiful. I could geek out about this all day long.
Anna: It is beautiful and there's still so much we don't know about it. That's what's fascinating to me. So I find this constellation therapy really, really cool and interesting. So tell me, how did you find such a healing modality?
Kat: Well, my story really is that I didn't have the worst childhood ever, but I certainly didn't have an easy emotional one.
And I am, I was born as the very highly sensitive person in my family. I was always told I'm too sensitive there. I have to emote too many emotions. Like I was, I took up a lot of space in the family system. I had a lot of health issues growing up. And so that base and then, you know, some other things I could go into for a while, but I'll keep it kind of short here.
But there were so many things that I was carrying on my shoulders from my family system. One of them was depression. I used to tell myself if I'm depressed and I've been depressed my whole life, and I know that people in my lineage are depressed and have struggled with depression their whole life, I'm going to be depressed for the rest of my life.
And so I was divorced at 27 out of an emotionally toxic and borderline abusive relationship, and I was really struggling with my identity. I was working for my family. In a very cool role in social media. And on the outside, my life looked really cool. It's working with celebrities and influencers and traveling all over the world, and I felt really empty when I went home.
At the end of the day, I had these emotional burdens that I was carrying in silence, and I didn't know where they came from, and I didn't know how to work through it. And I sat on my bed one night, and I said all of the pain that I've been through. It can't be for nothing. It has to have a purpose. A couple of days later, I went to go see my cousin and I said, I need a life coach.
I was having some really dark thoughts about my own life and struggling with some self-harm and some ideation that was really weighing down on me. And she said, I don't know a life coach, but I do know this woman named Karie Gonia, she's a Family Constellation facilitator. She's also an intuitive person as well.
Like she does readings. Why don't you just book a coaching container with her and see what happens. And the best part of the whole story is she said, Don't Google Family Constellation Therapy. She said, “I don’t like Family Constellation Therapy. She wants to do it with me. And I always tell her to do readings with me because it's too triggering.”
And I was like, “Okay, I won't Google it.” I'm just desperate at this point. I need something. And I did my first one. And I was like, “Oh, my God, I can't believe I've never seen this or heard of this before.” And then by the second session, I knew without a shadow of a doubt, my whole body was like, this is what you're supposed to do with your life.
This is what your pain is going to turn into purpose for and to be of service to others. And I've been doing it for almost four years.
Anna: Wow, that's an amazing story because I really hear you on carrying those emotional burdens and then realizing through this work that there is a purpose in that pain. I think that's such a beautiful moment when you can find that purpose and say, okay, this, this suffering wasn't all for nothing.
I'm actually healing trauma, not just in me, but in my ancestral line as well.
Kat: And for my children one day, I don't have children right now, but I am deeply on this journey of really intentionally focusing on how can I regulate my nervous system so that I'm not reactive the way that my parents were reactive so that I don't pass that on.
And I know that that's going to heal epigenetically. How do I take care of my body so that my autoimmune disease, it can become, you can go into remission, and I can pass on health as a generational gift to the next generation that comes through me, literally through me. Like, how am I going to pass that on?
And those are just some of the small ways, and there's also big ways that we do it in Family Constellation Therapy as well.
Anna: Very cool. Okay, and to take a bit of a step back here because I think a lot of people understand what generational trauma is, but there might be people out there who don't know exactly what it is and how it manifests in our lives.
So could you speak a bit to that?
Kat: There's two different kinds of trauma, where some, some trauma is called like little t trauma, it's more like a, a complex trauma, these little things that happen over time that compound into our subconscious and our psyche and even the way that we view ourselves or our relationships or the world.
And that happens, as I mentioned, over a longer period of time. And then there's big T trauma, which are like one really big event happens. It's really shocking to the system. And we don't compare whether small T or big T trauma is worse or better. It's all painful and heavy, but they're just different ways that trauma shows up.
And trauma is essentially our minds, our subconscious, our bodies, and even our spirit living in the past. And we're living in this constant fight, flight, freeze, or fawn prevents us from being able to move forward. How that manifests, Dr. Gabor Maté is one of my favorite people when it comes to talking about trauma.
And he actually says that trauma is not the event that happened. Trauma is the response to the event that happened. And if we're not given the security or the tools, or even the safety to be able to process these things, which most of us don't have starts in our family systems, then we aren't well equipped to go into difficult things happening to us.
And I've heard many people say, well, this, this generation of millennials or, or, or the other generation, Gen Z, they're all weak. They're all weak. And it's like, no, we're emotionally abandoned. Like we have, we need, you know, we are trying to reclaim our emotional sovereignty that our parents’ generation did not have the freedom to, to procure, to create for themselves.
They, they were breaking generations of generational cycles of their own. And I really believe that each generation does break a cycle of some kind, but the beauty of being a millennial and even a gen Z and all the other younger generations is that we're reclaiming our emotional sovereignty and in that we're creating a world where it's safe to say I go to therapy.
And I have my therapist on speed dial, and I do this and I do plant medicine and I, we're creating an openness for that and I think that that's going to really start healing a lot of us who are afraid to speak up about the things that we've gone through.
Anna: Right, right. So, you know, generation after generation, stuff happens.
And for lack of a better word, it kind of gets stuck in, you know, in your energy, in your nervous system. And then finally, you can be that person who says, okay, I recognize that that's happened. And I'm going to, like you said, go to various types of therapy, to various types of maybe energy work. And clear that through and not carry that forward.
Kat: Yes, a hundred percent. You, you, I forgot to answer that part, but you closed the full circle on that for me. So thank you. But that's exactly what it is. Yeah.
Anna: Oh, that's wonderful. So, tell me how does that kind of work? Kind of avoid repeating that pain of the past? While still maintaining a connection with your family, because I can imagine if, let's say, it's your parents as well as your grandparents and, you know, other ancestors who perpetuated some of that trauma, it might be difficult for you to do this healing work while still maintaining that connection.
Kat: The first tool that I recommend for people who want to stay in connection with their families and heal generational trauma is boundaries. Knowing your boundaries is a very, very important tool, and even to take that a little bit deeper is understand your values. When you understand your values, you understand what you, you're willing to tolerate and what you're not willing to tolerate, or even, even more so, you're willing to see, you're honest with yourself about what kind of connections you want to have with people.
And when we're born into our family systems, we put our parents and our families on pedestals because, you know, that's just the, the primal thing that we do are when we're born, we're infants, we're at the vulnerability of our parents taking care of us. And we tend to think, you know, sometimes they walk on water, they can do no harm or, and that's simply not the case.
A lot of people that I work with, and even in my life, the grief that comes with awakening to the idea that our parents are imperfect. And that they've made mistakes and they're human we have to not only grieve that for ourselves, but also recognize that you get to decide if you want to have a relationship with them moving forward or not.
And if you do, boundaries are so important because they protect you and they protect the other person. And they also set the tone for how you, how you want to be treated. And if you are being treated in a way that you don't agree with, you setting a boundary in a loving way reaffirms I respect myself and I need to be respected if we need to have a relationship.
And if you set boundaries and they can't meet you in that, then you know very clearly whether or not it's an authentic, real, loving connection. And then sometimes, you know, I feel that there's boundaries on spectrums. Okay, well, maybe they don't respect your boundary. Maybe then the boundary comes a little bit stronger.
And then some people get to a place where they have to go. No contact and that is beautiful. And that is totally fine. If that's what people need to do. But so and then what I want to say as well, and this is just a side note of whenever this topic comes up around contact or no contact.
With my work, I work deeply with no shame, no blame, no judgment and no criticism because there is a good reason for why certain people do certain things, even if it's harmful, they have justified in their mind that what they're doing, you know, usually stems from pain, hurt people, hurt people. So I would rather use values like understanding.
Or compassion, or acceptance, or even if you can get here, forgiveness, because what we're doing is we're not actually doing it for the other person, we're doing it for ourselves. Forgiveness, understanding, compassion, these are all ways that we allow ourselves the freedom to not create a story, a life story, or a reality that is rooted in trauma.
Anna: Oh, I love that you're bringing forgiveness and compassion into this because that I think was going to be my next question is for this kind of work would the person who's trying to heal this trauma kind of have to forgive the perpetrators of the trauma or, you know, is it more for them? How does that whole thing work?
Kat: I will never ask someone to forgive someone in their family in a session. I will never be like, you need to forgive them. Or if we're in the healing statements, I will never say, I forgive you to the other person because it's really such a personal, deeply personal. And when we're working with really big traumas.
It takes a lot of time and free will for the other person to want to forgive somebody, their abuser or the perpetrator, right? So you know, we have to tread lightly with that one. And I find that if I just ask the client that I'm working with to understand maybe why their parent was abusive, were they abused?
Did they go through something difficult? It really is this moment, and it's just like 10 out of 10, every time, I have not had one person who has said different. They're like, at the end of the session, they say, “Oh, well, gosh, I didn't even realize that my parent went through that. I went through that too. And I don't know if I want to have a relationship with them, but I do feel for them. That, that really, that's, that sucks.”
And I'm like, yeah, see, they were just giving you, they're giving you the pain they don't know how to hold. And they're, they want you to join them in that pain. And, and so when you're forgiving them, you're really just saying, “I can't hold this pain anymore. You can hold this pain if you want to, but I need to forgive myself and forgive you and move forward.”
And I will say that I have a lot of stories of clients who do willfully come to me in a second or third session and say, you brought up forgiveness and, and I know I don't have to forgive them, but maybe I'm ready.
Maybe I understand my parents enough now that I'm ready, and then it's just the personal choice that they, they guide me into giving me permission to say, okay, let's do some forgiveness work together.
Anna: Wow, yeah, that would be really powerful, I think, to be able to say, I cannot hold this pain for you, and I am, you know, I'm, I'm gonna be the one that the cycle stops with.
And forgiveness, of course, can be a part of that, but I hear you that it's never something to be forced upon the person, that they need to come to that if they come to that.
Kat: One million percent. We feel very validated in our pain and the anger it does something to us where it makes us feel that are the things that we went through were real and we stopped disassociating, and I do think that going through the victim mentality for a little bit.
It is a part of the healing journey because maybe for some of us, we've gone through such terrible emotional manipulation and abuse that we have disassociated and thought that this is the way we should be treated. And there is a point in the journey where we go, “Oh, I am a victim and I'm pissed about it.”
And then you just, you have the support team and the tools to move through that anger and that victimhood in a safe way. And then, hopefully, you do get to a point where you're ready for forgiveness and you're ready to move forward.
Anna: Right. Right. In my work with trauma, I often see, and it doesn't necessarily have to be in this order, but I often see people come in and they carry shame, then anger comes up, which is very healing for the shame, so like the shame kind of gets transmuted into anger, and then after that, they're finally able to grieve.
I wonder if you see that progression in your work too.
Kat: One million percent. One million percent. And it's interesting because grief, it could look like anger. Or it could look like sadness or it could look like going no-contact for a little bit. There's just different ways that we hold ourselves in the grief and that's why I emphasize have somebody like you or like me or a professional who can help hold you in that experience so you're not alone in it.
And who can prove and prove to you through your own work that you can get through this and that you, there is light on the other side. And, I know for me it's not a black and white journey with my family. I grieve and then I find light and then I grieve and then I find light again. And it's just this it's this wavering experience.
Of moving through the layers of me as a person and in, for anyone who's listening, you know, that may be the case for you too, that you are just this dynamic being, you are not black and white, you're not a robot, you're, it's not going to look like A to B, it's going to go A to Z to Y to Q, it's going to go, you know, in such a different direction and, and having people to help you hold space for that is really powerful.
Anna: Yes, that is so true that healing is never linear. I always compare it more to a spiral, but I think the way you just described it might be even more accurate. It's all over the place, but as long as you're Moving in some kind of direction, I do believe that it's all movement forward, right? As long as you're not stuck again in that fight flight freeze fawn state.
Kat: Yeah, that's the point of Family Constellation Therapy, is that we want to get you in the front of your lineage. And many times when I do my work, people are behind all the trauma and they're blocked by it. They can't even move forward because other people's trauma is writing the story of the lineage.
And so what we're doing is we're putting you in front so you can take a deep breath and say, “Oh my God, I didn't realize, like, I actually love speaking my truth, even though I wasn't allowed to.” And then you use it for something really positive. You do it in service to others or whatever it is. So yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Anna: Hmm. Now I'm curious, would you be able to kind of describe what an average Family Constellation Therapy looks like?
Kat: Yeah, absolutely. So there's a lot of moving pieces to it. It's two hours long with me, and I use every single moment of it. There's some facilitators out there who do them in 25 minutes.
I could not. I'm an emotional, Nurturing motherly whole. Yeah, I want to hold space for people. So I like to do two hours and the first hour is really just an intake. It's usually us building rapport in the first session, building trust with each other. I work as an intuitive and as a medium. So many times I'm getting downloads of information to understand what's really happening in the family system along with the client showing me it.
Or telling me, well, my mom had an abortion, or I, I don't feel worthy of making a lot of money, or my grandma really triggers me, or my dad left me when I was younger. So we're getting into the nitty gritty of why they feel that they're there. And then in the middle of the session, we opened something called a morphogenic field.
It's an energy field. And Bert Hellinger, the gentleman who modernized Family Constellation Therapy, called it a phenomenology. He didn't understand what was happening, but he knew that as soon as he opened this field, and he called in the ancestors and we ask spirit for permission. It's this, this knowing this consciousness of what's been said and what hasn't been said in the family system, what's been done, what hasn't been done in the family system, every single ins and outs of it.
When we open that field together through just a short meditation, I assign family members to pieces of paper. And the beauty is, is that you don't know what paper you're standing on, only I do, because I want you to have an emotionally raw and vulnerable experience with the paper, so if paper number three is mom, and you know that it's mom, I don't want you getting on the paper and saying, I hate this paper, this paper pisses me off, and you know, you have all these preconceived notions.
I want you to get on the paper and have a real experience of channeling through this energy field what mom's experience is in relation to what you brought to the session. And so then we do the discovery on the papers. And then I have you come off, we discuss it, and then we do healing statements at the end.
So we rearrange the papers to create a healthy image in a family system. And then I have you speak to each paper. I have you speak to mom, or I have you speak to grandma, or whoever the people that we're working with are. So it's hard to explain without actually doing it or seeing it. But on my podcast, on the Heal with Kat podcast, I had, I did a live Family Constellation Therapy session with a client of mine who volunteered.
It's here, I think it's number Like 62 or something, 63 and you can watch a whole session, and you'll understand what the paper is, what I mean by everything. So,
Anna: Oh, that's fascinating. I'll make sure to find that episode of your podcast and link it in the show notes because I would definitely like to see it for myself.
And I, I hear that it seems to combine, like, several therapy techniques, like gestalt therapy, where you talk to your family members who aren't present in the room, along with energy work, and some maybe meditation and mindfulness as well.
Kat: And parts work. Parts work. Parts work. Pretty acute part of it.
And also somatic therapy, because when you're standing on these papers, some people, when there's an early death in the family system, and nobody's acknowledged the person who died early. Many times people will fall to the ground on the paper. Or, I did a session once my mentor needed help with one of her clients, and the client, whenever she'd get on a paper, she'd burp, like releasing energy.
Or sometimes people will lean to one side or the other, and all of these different body feelings that they're having on the papers, it shows me information. If people start swaying in a circle, it shows me that there's a pattern that's been stuck in the lineage for a long time. So we're just like gathering so much information in a session.
You leave well informed about what's happening in your lineage, but you also leave with a healing, as you said, with the energy work too.
Anna: Oh, that's fantastic. And you said that at the end you kind of come up with these healing statements that, that rearrange the pain into, you know, something that's more healing, more positive.
Can you talk more about that? Like maybe give an example of a healing statement that you would use?
Kat: Yeah. It really depends on what we're talking about and who we're talking to. The kind of foundational script that I work off of was given to me by my mentor, and sometimes I kind of change it around depending on, you know, what we're talking about, but it's essentially saying, dear mom, you know, I honor you.
I wonder what life was like for you. I today I have learned that you went through this pain and it has been generationally passed down to me. We talk about the, the nuances of how it's been passed down and how the client feels about it. You know, it's been, it's been weighing heavy on me. It's been manifesting as health issues.
And I realize now, Mom, that I have carried this pain for you because it hurts me to watch you in pain. And when I was in the womb, I didn't know the difference between me and you, so I took on so we could survive. And now I know that I don't have to carry your pain to be close to you, so please give me your permission to move forward in my life with love and the gifts of this lineage and protection so that I can heal for all of us.
Things like that. And then we, sometimes we say, you know, I will always look kindly on you and I hope that you look kindly on me too. I will no longer carry the pain of the past, things like that.
Anna: Wow, that's so powerful. Even as you were saying this, you know, statement that's not directed at anyone in particular, I'm feeling it in my body.
I'm like, oh my God, that would hold such power to the person who's healing from this trauma.
Kat: It's the most emotional part of the session, and, and what the beauty of working in the energy field is, is that you really truly feel like you're talking to that person.
Anna: Wow. Yeah, it's, it brings up for me the empty chair technique from gestalt therapy, where you imagine the person sitting there across from you, but here it sounds like it's more charged because of that energy work.
That it's as if the person is present in the room with you and you can see their reaction to the words you're saying.
Kat: Well, similarly to the gestalt therapy, you are saying the words that you wish you could say. And this might be the first time that you're actually saying, Dad. Your abuse hurt me. I get emotional even saying it, and I'm not saying it to anyone right now, but those words, they have power, they have meaning.
So, sometimes it's just, even if people don't really believe in the woo of it, the spiritual, the energy part of it, just saying the words, it releases something that's, it's somatically releasing a part of them that they've been holding on to for so long.
Anna: Absolutely. Absolutely. Like I said, that's, just you saying that I had chills in my body listening to it.
And Kat to kind of take a step back to when you talked about boundaries. I wonder, cause what I find with a lot of my clients who have family trauma is they want to establish boundaries. But they feel this sense of loyalty to the family. And it's like, how do I set boundaries if that means I will be quote unquote disloyal and somehow betray my family, my family's trust or something like that.
Can you speak to that?
Kat: That is a foundational belief that we have in family constellation therapy, that we are staying enmeshed and entangled in the family trauma with our families, even consciously or subconsciously out of duty and loyalty. And we've called those things love. So we've called loyalty love.
We've called duty love and what we're, we were actually not operating in a, in a vibration or a place of love. We're actually operating from a place of abuse or manipulation or addiction, whatever the language is of the family system. Many times the previous generation set the tone for what the family system should look like or how they operate and people just follow in line.
And so if you want to break out of that line and do something differently. And implementing those boundaries is difficult for you. I really empathize with you because even with all of the work that I've done, I still battle this. And this is a, brings up a topic that I'm really passionate talking about called belonging.
We, you know, belonging and fitting in, they are completely different. We belong to our family system, and we are lovable and worthy in our family system because we exist in it, because we were born into it, and because we belong, and that is not up for negotiation. But our families, when we don't fit in, or we want to break outside of the mold, we stop adhering to the way that everyone's been doing things, and so we think we don't belong anymore.
Actually, good news. You still belong. You just don't fit in. And so that's why the journey of really reclaiming our authentic self, our values, our, our beliefs, and really getting really intimately in tune with who we are, it helps us build confidence so that if we do step out of the family system, quote unquote, for any reason, and for whatever reason, I was going to use a personal one, but really for any reason.
Then we still feel okay, just because I do this differently, and I'm not harming anyone, I'm not hurting anyone, I'm not trying to hurt anyone's feelings, I'm not punishing or judging, I'm just doing things a little bit differently, I still belong, I still keep my place in the family system, and actually maybe the way that I want to do things differently is a gift, so my personal example is, In my family, I am very emotional.
I've always been very emotional. And in my family, emotions weren't always welcome. It was a lot of, like, you're a good girl when you just perform, and you get good grades, and you be quiet, and you do what you're told. And I, the rebel in me, was like, I don't want to do that. I want to break out, and I want to express myself, and I want to do this, and at 13 years old, I started having debilitating depression and anxiety and insomnia, and I was getting a ton of health issues, and I was suppressing my emotions.
I did that for so long that when I found Family Constellations, I started to express myself again, and it was a battle because I knew that I was going against what I had been trained to do, but I also knew that it was a gift because now I have learned to express myself in a way that is loving and kind, compassionate of the people in the family system.
I'm not judging or blaming or shaming anyone, but I am reclaiming the gift of self-expression by doing it differently. Is it challenging? Yes. A few months ago, I was told by somebody in my family system. I'm too emotional. It triggered me. But then I realized it's a gift because I've done so much work on myself to realize that I have a good heart.
I mean, well, and my emotions, my emotions are important to me. And that's a value that I really like to have.
Anna: Mm. I love it when you said that you may not fit in, but you still belong. I think that that's such a big difference in those words, belonging and fitting in. You're right. And, okay, maybe that ties into the next question I want to ask because on your website you say that you went from being the black sheep of your family to an empowered cycle breaker, that you reclaimed your self-trust and broke those generational patterns.
So can you talk about what it means to be a black sheep and how can a black sheep become the cycle breaker?
Kat: I definitely felt like the black sheep in my family growing up. I always, I couldn't tell you how I felt different. I just felt it. I just sensed it. I just knew it. And part of the trauma, emotional trauma that I have in my family was gaslighting and manipulation, and I disassociated a lot from my feelings because there wasn't a lot of safety to have them.
So when I was growing up, like I said, I always knew I was different, but I didn't really understand how. And then I remember saying in college, you know, I'm the black sheep, I'm the black sheep, and priding myself on it, but it was a very negative connotation. Very negative. And I battled myself because I wanted to fit in so badly.
I wanted to be like everybody else and in the ways that I was like my family, I resented them for it. And in the ways that I was different, I resented them for it. So either way, I was paying in my own resentment. And so I've learned to embrace the role of cycle breaker by flipping the black sheep on its head and saying, You know what?
I'm different in some ways, and they're actually more beautiful than I give myself credit for being emotional. It's okay. It's part of my gift. It's part of my role. It's how I help others by embracing their emotions and letting them express themselves. And I'm not weirded out by people who are emotional or out of the box or weird, right?
You But in the ways that I, I, I'm, I feel like the black sheep that I'm different, how can I turn it into a generational gift? And I really believe that with every generational trauma that we inherit, we also have the opportunity to inherit a gift. And so I, this is why I say our families are always in service to us.
Always, always, always. With your family, you'll go through a thousand deaths, a thousand rebirths, a thousand initiations. But you will always have an opportunity to evolve and grow and so I created this free cycle breaker quiz that you can take on my website and I've narrowed down different roles in the family system of people who feel like black sheep.
So there's the scapegoat, the hyper independent, the comedian, the rebel, the caretaker and the parentified child. And this was based off of research that I did with my clients and my social community trying to understand how do you feel like the black sheep in your family and these were the these were the main responses I got and then I created these archetypes for each one and in that quiz whatever your result is.
I give you how you could be looking at it as a black sheep, but then I also tell you the potential challenges, the potential strengths, a spirit animal for it, and how to flip that black sheep into cycle breaker, because even the hyper independent who isolates from the world, who's afraid of connection, who doesn't know if it's safe to trust people, they have gifts to bring to the lineage through that hyper independent pain that they've walked through.
Anna: Wow. Wow, I love that. And that quiz sounds amazing. I'm like marking it in my head to go to your website and take it. I hope my listeners do too. I'll make sure to link that in the show notes and, Kat, how can my listeners work with you if they are curious about becoming a cycle breaker in their own family?
Kat: Yeah, I offer Family Constellation Therapy sessions on my website that is like the main, you know, meat and potatoes of what I do. I also offer something called the ancestral chakra reading. It's an intuitive reading. And I offer it to people who are not really sure what they should bring to a Family Constellation Therapy session.
And what I'm doing is I'm going in intuitively and even with the mediumship and I'm asking for Any guidance or support on what the client needs to bring to a family constellation. Other than that, I have the Cycle Breaker Quiz. I also have a 3-day, $35 workshop called “The Age Mapping Workshop.”
It's all on my website. And then I have my podcast. So, this is a ton of free information that people can get every Tuesday when my episodes come out. We talk about all different kinds of topics that are adjacent to being a cycle breaker and healing ancestral trauma.
Anna: Oh, that's wonderful! Thank you so much for sharing all of that and Kat in general, thank you so much for joining me today sharing your story sharing this amazing modality and just talking about generational trauma.
That's a really fascinating conversation. Thank you.
Kat: Oh my gosh, thank you for giving me a space to express and share this work and I love the conversation. You're just so you're a great interviewer. So thank you so much.
Anna: And for all of you listening. I hope you leave feeling a little lighter and more empowered. Remember, healing takes time and you're exactly where you need to be Take care of yourselves, and until we meet again, be kind to your heart.
