I am not the Shame Bearer, I am the Cycle Breaker
Share
My grandmother once told me that my belief systems would send me, my children, and my children’s children to hell.
Today I reclaim that.
My belief systems do not destroy generations.
They free them.
I have lived under the dark shadow of shame, handed to me as an inheritance, and I know I am not the only woman who has lived this invasion of her truth.
Perhaps my saving grace was in the very absence of my single mother, where I was left to navigate my childhood mostly alone, in dangerous places, around dangerous people, and make up my own versions of safety. In the spaces where my grandparents stepped in, my grandmother did what many women of her generation did. She tried to shape me through shame. She tried to control who I would become, how I would think, what I would believe, and how I would live.
She was terrified I would turn out like my mother (the black sheep of the family) I guess, so shame became the tool of choice; and in many ways it worked. I became the responsible one, the one who carries: The Martriarch that skipped a generation, and sadly, the one who looks after everybody else’s needs, before she looks after herself.
She told me directly that I could never leave Rotorua, so I never have. I had so many opportunities, it wasn’t that I lacked them, or dreams, or courage: it was because it was made very clear to me that my life was tied to my mother's needs. That was programmed into me from three years old and became set in stone when she collapsed with an aneurysm when I was 14, leaving her with permanent brain damage. My grandmother carried that role before me, and I was raised with the full understanding that I would take it over when she no longer could.
Now my grandmother, who despite what this post may look like - I love very very much - is in a rest home, and dementia has taken her ability to control anything about her own life, let alone anybody elses. She cannot even remember who I am, or who my mother is. That is heavy.
And I have been sitting with the weight of that, and of everything that was placed on me, normalised, and spoken over me and into me as duty, righteousness and love. I have been torturously separating out the things that have served me, even in the midst of their long cast shadows, from that which I am no longer willing to carry.
One of the cruelest things my grandmother ever said to me was that my belief systems would send me to hell, my children to hell, and my children’s children to hell.
For a long time, that sentence lived in my body as trauma-poison, but this morning, something in me rose and became the antidote.
I realised I could take those words and turn them inside out.
Because no, Grandma,
My belief system does not destroy generations.
My belief system breaks the cycle of control and shame for generations.
My belief system ends the cycle for me, for my children, and for my children’s children.
My belief system reaches back through the ancestral line to the women who were silenced, condemned, shamed, threatened, and shut down for their knowing, for their love of nature, for the instinct, their intuition, their medicine, their spirit, their power…
And it reaches forward too, into the lives of those who come after me. Into a future where my children's children do not have to inherit fear, dressed up as social morality, into a future where shame is not the family language, and truth, instinct, connection, spirit, self-trust, and freedom are things to be lifted and celebrated.
I used to carry those old words as old wounds. Now I hear those words as a confirmation.
Confirmation that I was always a threat to the system that raised me, and fierce joy in the knowledge that when a woman breaks the cycle, she becomes dangerous to everything that depended on her obedience.
If that scares people, that is not my burden; I am not here to make people comfortable with my freedom. I am here to live it.
I am here to put down, to end what should have ended a very long time ago.
I am not the shame-bearer.
I am the cycle breaker.
If this speaks to something deep within you, I invite you to join me in Creative Communion, our online spiritual creativity gathering held every Sunday after the Full Moon. Each session follows the lunar cycle and opens a new theme for self-awareness, sovereignty, healing, and love. I bring a wealth of lived experience to this work, holding space for those who are ready to find their own way with greater truth and self-trust. New Zealand Ticket link below, please email info@karenhansenart.com for international paypal details if you would like to join - the invitation extends worldwide.
Tickets - https://artalchemy.co.nz/products/creative-communion-the-hidden-waters-sunday-3-may-2026
For International Bookings - email info@karenhansenart.com
-Karen Hansen (the Art Alchemist)
copyright Karen Hansen 2026