At B-School January 2022 I dealt with displacement trauma that was severely triggered by being shut out of church with the discrimination & apartheid of vaccine passports. By the time I stopped counting at 18, we had moved 30 times & when we visited my family in Germany after 34 years, my uncles showed us 4 homes we lived in before we moved to South Africa at 5. I was in 9 primary & 3 high schools. By the time I was 6 I stopped trying to break into the groups because I had decided relationships don't last & spent the rest of my time at school a loner & remained an "outsider", never fitting in anywhere.

Displacement Trauma = Transplant shock. So much energy goes into trying to get established again after every move.

• Not rooted & grounded in love

• Inability to make deep & lasting friendships

• Not connected to extended family

• Country changes.

• No time to re-establish before being moved

I also discovered that those all those very noble causes I spent my life doing, church, choir & serving, were in fact, false refuges. Yes, I discovered the motive of my heart for doing all those things was a need to be needed & I was medicating my pain, not with alcohol, addictions, or other ugly habits, but with religion, serving & being a martyr to satisfy my need to be accepted & acknowledged. My sense of self-worth was wrapped up in serving others instead of my identity in Christ.

Parental inversion is not an easy sin to hate. The difficulty is that it has become for many the most noble definition of life; the sacrifice & service it involves are readily justified by Scripture. But God asks us to lay down our lives for others for His sake, rather than out of the impure motives of our wounded hearts. The problem is not what we are doing but WHY.

I spent my life denying, minimising & hiding my pain. You know that LIE that all is well & I am FINE whilst internally falling apart, I've lived it for as long as I can remember. My fine meant Freaking Out - Insecure - Neurotic - Emotional. About 6 years ago, Clive cottoned on to my FINE meaning something different & would ask my fine or your fine?

I also learnt that just like we clearly inherit blessings passed down from our forefathers, trouble passes from generation to generation & it was up to me to break the pattern of generational sin/trauma in my family. Children don't learn what we teach, but what they LIVE. If they live with love & acceptance, they become loving & accepting but if they live with abuse & neglect, they learn to hate themselves. We are all products of our environment & our responses to it. Too often we are the casualties of our parents’ unresolved trauma. There's a pattern of alcohol abuse, violence & divorce in both my parent's families. Even though, Jesus took upon Himself the sins of humanity in Gethsemany - past, present & future; our healing still requires confession, forgiveness & repentance.

It 'runs in the family" until someone decides to put a stop to it. I had to draw the proverbial line in the sand, repent & ask for forgiveness on behalf of previous generations so future generations can be set free from the curse Whatever we don’t bring to effective death at the cross will carry over to our children & their children with increase...

Like much of our walk with God, being freed from generational sin is a process.

This painting is based on what I saw God doing.