The Trauma We Inherit

Michelle Hines

Michelle Hines has performed more than 100 exorcisms.

At least, that is how she describes the work that has become part of her life.

Her path into that world did not begin inside a church or with someone formally teaching her how to cast out demons. As an adult, Michelle was practicing Reiki and participating in a gathering with other spiritual practitioners when a woman she had known years earlier began behaving in a way Michelle believed was spiritual possession. Michelle remembers praying, calling on Jesus, and watching the experience unfold in front of her.

That moment became a turning point.

But as Michelle and I talked, I became less interested in simply asking how someone ends up performing more than 100 exorcisms and more interested in another question.

What happened before all of this?

Long before Michelle was helping people through experiences she understands as spiritual warfare, she was a little girl trying to understand herself.

Michelle remembers feeling different. She says she experienced things spiritually that the people around her did not always understand. Eventually, she learned how to fit in. She became social, made friends, partied, drank, used drugs, and found ways to receive the validation that belonging can provide when you are not completely sure where you fit.

At home, another story was unfolding.

Michelle describes her father as loving, present, funny, strong, and deeply involved in her life. She also remembers his anger.

Her father had survived severe abuse during his own childhood. Michelle recalls hearing stories of what he endured and eventually developing compassion for the wounded child underneath the man she knew as Dad. But understanding where someone's pain comes from does not mean you leave childhood untouched by it.

Years later, Michelle began recognizing something uncomfortable.

Some of her father's anger had started to look familiar.

She saw it in herself.

She saw it in her reactions. In her defensiveness. In the way conflict could unfold inside her marriage. In the feeling that if someone hurt her, she needed to protect herself, fight back, or win.

The deeper we went into Michelle's story, the further we moved away from a conversation simply about demons and exorcisms.

We started talking about family. Anger. Validation. Depression. Grief. Forgiveness. Spirituality. And eventually, the devastating loss of her father.

Michelle understands much of what happened in her life through her relationship with God and her spiritual beliefs. Those beliefs would eventually become central to how she made sense of herself, her family, her pain, and the work she now does with others.

You can decide what you believe about the spiritual experiences Michelle describes.

But underneath them is a question that does not require any particular spiritual belief to consider:

What happens when the pain someone carried before you becomes something you begin carrying too?

The Room We Clean: What We Inherit

Not everything we inherit comes with a will.

Sometimes inheritance looks like your father's eyes or your mother's smile. Sometimes it's the shape of your nose, the sound of your laugh, or a family recipe nobody bothers measuring anymore.

But families pass down other things too.

We learn how to handle anger by watching anger.

We develop ideas about relationships by experiencing relationships.

We learn whether emotions are safe to express, whether mistakes are tolerated, whether vulnerability gets comforted or criticized, and what we're supposed to do when somebody hurts us.

Most of this education happens before we even realize we're being taught.

That is what stayed with me while listening to Michelle talk about recognizing some of her father's patterns within herself.

Her story raises a question that I think is worth asking yourself:

What have you inherited emotionally that you have spent years believing is simply your personality?

Maybe your version is not anger.

Maybe you learned to keep everyone happy because conflict never felt safe.

Maybe you became fiercely independent because depending on someone once meant being disappointed.

Maybe apologizing feels like losing.

Maybe you struggle to trust people who have given you no reason not to trust them.

Maybe you constantly prepare for something to go wrong because there was a time in your life when something usually did.

When a response has been with you long enough, it can stop feeling like a response.

It just feels like you.

That's what makes this room difficult to clean.

You can spend years rearranging furniture without realizing some of it was never yours.

And recognizing where something came from does not require you to hate the person you learned it from.

That's another part of Michelle's story I found important.

She can talk about ways her father's anger affected her while also talking about how much she loved him. She can remember painful moments while remembering a father who showed up, taught her sports, made her laugh, talked to strangers, and taught her not to care so much about what other people thought.

Both can be true.

Sometimes our parents gave us the best version of themselves they knew how to give, and we still walked away carrying things we eventually had to confront.

Understanding that distinction can be uncomfortable because blame is often easier than complexity.

But cleaning this room is not necessarily about deciding whose fault the mess is.

Sometimes it starts with finally noticing what is in the room.

What did you learn about anger?

What did you learn about love?

What did you learn about conflict?

What did you learn about yourself?

And perhaps the harder question:

What are you still carrying simply because nobody ever told you that you were allowed to put it down?

Therapist Perspective

As I listened to Michelle talk about recognizing some of her father's anger within herself, one thing kept standing out to me: children do not need to be explicitly taught a behavior in order to learn it.

We are constantly observing the environments we grow up in.

We watch how adults respond when they are angry. We notice what happens when someone makes a mistake. We learn whether conflict ends in conversation, silence, yelling, withdrawal, or pretending nothing happened. We begin forming ideas about what relationships are supposed to feel like long before we have the language to explain any of it.

Eventually, some of those responses can become our own.

From my perspective as a therapist, this is where I think an important distinction needs to be made. Sometimes a behavior that creates problems in adulthood originally developed for a very understandable reason.

Defensiveness may have once helped you protect yourself.

Constantly reading people's moods may have helped you anticipate what was coming next.

Keeping everyone happy may have reduced conflict.

Anger may have helped you feel powerful during periods when you otherwise felt powerless.

The problem is that a response can outlive the environment that created it.

You can grow up, move out, build a career, get married, have children, create an entirely different life, and still find yourself reacting to certain situations with a version of you that learned how to survive years ago.

Sometimes the version of you that learned how to survive gets promoted into jobs it was never meant to have.

Now that protector is showing up in your marriage.

It is sitting in meetings with you.

It is parenting your children.

It is deciding whether someone can be trusted.

It is interpreting criticism.

It is responding to rejection.

And because that response has been around for so long, you may not recognize it as something you learned. You may simply call it your personality.

"I'm just defensive."

"I've always had a temper."

"I don't trust people."

"I don't need anybody."

"This is just how I am."

Maybe.

But I think some of those statements are worth getting curious about.

What if something you have been calling your personality is actually a pattern you have practiced for a very long time?

That does not mean every difficult characteristic comes from childhood. It also does not mean our parents are responsible for every problem we experience as adults. At some point, part of adulthood is becoming responsible for what we do with what happened to us.

But responsibility does not require us to pretend our experiences did not matter.

This is something I appreciated about the complexity of Michelle's story.

She could recognize the ways her father's anger affected her while also recognizing the horrific experiences that helped shape him. She could have compassion for the little boy her father once was without pretending that everything she experienced as his daughter was easy.

I think some people struggle to hold those two realities at the same time.

Maybe you've learned more about what your mother survived, and suddenly some of her behavior makes sense.

Maybe you know what happened to your father when he was young.

Maybe you understand why your grandparents were emotionally distant.

Understanding can create compassion.

But compassion does not require you to deny impact.

You are allowed to say, "I understand why you became this way, and growing up around it still affected me."

Both can be true.

Michelle's story becomes even more complicated when grief enters the room. Losing someone with whom you have a complicated history can bring emotions that do not fit neatly into one category. You can miss someone and still be angry with them. You can love someone and have unresolved hurt. You can understand why someone made certain choices and still wish desperately that they had made different ones.

Grief does not require you to rewrite a relationship into something simpler than it actually was.

And sometimes after someone is gone, you are left deciding what parts of the relationship you want to continue carrying.

That brings me back to inheritance.

Recognizing an inherited pattern does not automatically make it disappear.

Awareness is the beginning, not the entire process.

Start paying attention to the moments when your reactions feel bigger than the situation in front of you. Notice what happens in your body. Notice the thoughts that appear automatically. Pay attention to what you assume another person's behavior means. Ask yourself what you are protecting and whether the danger you are responding to belongs entirely to the present moment.

Then get curious about where you learned to respond that way.

You may discover that some things you thought were permanent parts of your identity are patterns that can be understood, challenged, and changed.

If you recognize yourself in some of these patterns, therapy can give you a place to explore where they started and what continues to reinforce them. Not so you can spend the rest of your life blaming your childhood, but so your childhood does not quietly keep making decisions for your adulthood.

Michelle uses spirituality to make sense of much of what she has experienced. She talks openly about demons, spiritual warfare, Jesus, grief, forgiveness, and experiences that some people will deeply believe in and others may question.

You do not have to arrive at the same conclusions Michelle does to sit with the deeper question her story raises.

What did you inherit?

And now that you can see it, what do you want to do with it?

There is much more to Michelle's story than the fact that she says she has performed more than 100 exorcisms. Our conversation moves through her childhood, her relationship with her father, spirituality, anger, marriage, grief, forgiveness, loss, and the experiences that eventually shaped the work she does today.

If the title brought you into the conversation, I hope the story underneath it gives you a reason to stay. Watch the full episode of I've Performed Over 100 Exorcisms to hear Michelle explain that story in her own words.

When you clean your room, you can change your life.

Payton Hogan MS, LIMHP