Contracts, Karma, and the Family You Chose.
- Penny Green
- Oct 5
- 7 min read
The irony of parents, children, and the lessons we sign up for.
My father was a high-earning and very high-end alcoholic who turned mortgage payments into empty bottles and whole paycheques into betting slips. He was also one of the most gentle souls I have ever met but by the time he left us, the house was gone.
My mother, stunning and magnetic, became prey in a world that rewarded predators. At six years old, I watched a neighbour rape her.
Weekly, sometimes twice weekly, she tried to die with the help of the first-generation antidepressants that were handed to her in bulk. Even after numerous attempts, no red flag was raised. Brutal shock treatments were the flavour of the day for women who were “out of sorts.” So she lost two years of memory, but somehow remembered our names on some days.
There were no solo-parent benefits and no trauma counsellors. There were three children, ten, eight, and six, learning how to keep a dying woman alive until the ambulance came. Sometimes we were too late for the morning check and had to figure out how to get her breathing back on our own. We would then dress for school in silence, walk ourselves there, and never tell anyone a thing. No one was ever the wiser.
Later came the abusive stepfather.
But none of this happened in a vacuum. My parents were Depression kids, born in the 1930s, a time shaped by scarcity and the echoes of a world war. They grew up with ration books, second-hand shoes, and the constant hum of financial anxiety. Mum spent a lot of time in orphanages, while my grandmother found survival with men who didn't want the burden of kids.
By the 1960s and 70s…. my childhood, our culture was still experimenting with blunt-force psychiatry and chemical optimism.
Pills and shock treatment stood in for compassion. Doctors were gods, trauma was a human weakness, and survival itself was treated as success.
Everyone in that story thought they were doing their best. The doctors, the neighbours, my parents, even the stepfather. It was a snapshot in time, and as we know too well, time itself carries its own culture of harm.
Fast-forward to today, and childhood is treated as Exhibit A.
Parents have become the single cause of every later failure in our love, wealth, creativity, or voice. When people overcome it, they package the wound and the triumph as an online redemption story —trauma, healing, and then the course. It’s neat and marketable. And 1000 online courses will teach you how to package those wounds for the best results and profit.
But what if the point isn’t to find a way out of our story, but a way in?
I believe you can clear every ounce of rage, grief, and chaos you carry around your parents, and still find yourself stuck. Why? Because not everything belongs to them.
Some of it belongs to ancestors you never met, patterns that have been quietly replicated for centuries. Some of it belongs to past lives, including unpaid energetic debts and open contracts. Some of it belongs to karmic themes you signed up for before birth, the kind you can’t pin on your mother’s temper or your father’s drinking.
This is the part our meme-driven culture doesn’t want to touch. There isn’t a three-step course in “karmic accounting.” You can’t put ancestral memory into an Instagram carousel, and past lives don’t sell nearly as well as inner-child workshops. And yet these forces…. the hidden design beneath your family drama are the things that actually explain why the same patterns play out generation after generation, even when you’ve “done the work.”
Every family has a theme. Some carry abandonment like an heirloom, others betrayal, secrecy, or rage. Some carry religious shame, the memory of priests, convents, confessions, long after anyone in the family has set foot in a church. Some bring war with them, passed down from grandfathers who never came home, grandmothers who learned to love men already broken, and entire generations living with a low-grade vigilance they can’t explain.
Some carry famine, hoarding, scarcity, cupboards crammed full of food, even in times of
plenty. Some land theft, ancestors who were colonised or did the colonising, and all the guilt, silence, and dislocation that comes with it. Some carry the memory of slavery, indenture, exile. There are as many themes as there are families.
From a spiritual point of view, none of this is random. Before we arrived, we agreed to certain contracts — lessons we wanted to learn, challenges we wanted to face, and strengths we wanted to test. Our parents, in all their chaos and brilliance, were simply part of that agreement. They provided the conditions we needed for our growth. It’s maddening when you’re living through it, but exquisite when you see it clearly: you didn’t end up in the wrong family. You chose the one that would give you exactly what you needed.
You don’t have to believe in any of this for it to show up. It appears in irrational fears, inexplicable longings, and in love affairs that feel as though they have lasted centuries. It appears in the child born into stability who still feels abandoned, or the adult born into privilege who can’t hold onto money.
So yes, heal your childhood.
Heal the bruises of memory and the scars of your upbringing. But don’t imagine that will be the end of the story. Some of what you carry is older than you can imagine, and the sooner you stop laying it at the feet of your parents, the sooner you can start engaging with the whole. And no, this isn’t about excusing harm, but it is about recognising scale.
Because our parents didn’t actually “give” us their wounds, we tethered them to our beliefs, our fears, our need to win, our anger when life didn’t bend to our script. The stories became woven into the way we lived, and they appear in the small and ordinary as much as in the dramatic.
We assume that by doing the opposite of what our parents did, we’ve broken free and that turning left where they turned right is the definition of evolution. But our choices are made inside this snapshot in time, shaped by the social norms, collective anxieties, and unexamined beliefs of the age we live in. Which, in their adulthood, our children will probably look at as archaic and traumatising. :)
And that’s the irony. Every generation blames the one before, convinced they’ll be the exception, not realising this is the very curriculum of being human. We come here to grow, to stretch, to find who we are, and our parents, like us, usually do a bang-up job of showing us exactly what we need, whether through their love or their mistakes.
You are not just the product of your childhood. You are an ancient thread weaving itself through lifetimes, carrying the flavours of past contracts, ancestral debts, and karmic themes. To blame your parents is to stare at a single wave and ignore the tide.
In the end, our parents are never just the villains or the heroes of our story... they’re the doorways. And the real question is whether you’ll keep standing outside, blaming the frame, or step through into the wider house of who you really are.
So yes, thank your parents, maybe not for getting it right, but for getting it so spectacularly wrong that you had no choice but to grow. That’s the human race for you:
A long line of people messing it up just enough for the next generation to wake up.
There’s also a place for gratitude. You can honour those who came before you without carrying their burdens. Thank them for bringing you here, for holding the line long enough for you to exist, and then look to the bigger picture. Their struggles are not your chains. They are the backdrop against which you discover your own light. You are not a damaged product of the past but a perfect spiritual being finding your way back to your higher self, and every step you take is evidence of that return.
Beyond the bruises of memory and the myths of blame, there is the thread of you, ancient, unbreakable, still weaving. That’s the part no parent, no past life, no karmic debt can take away.
And perhaps the most significant shift of all is this: our growth was never meant to be a punishment or a chore.
It’s magical evidence of just how powerful we are....every stretch, every stumble, every so-called failure is proof we came here to play, to learn, to shape. If you can see it that way, the whole thing becomes less of a challenge and more of an adventure.
And if you’re online demonising your parents to sell a product, then maybe that is the family theme you came here to live out… just saying. :)
At some point we have to stop blaming the past and start owning the thread we’re weaving now. No parent, no ancestor, no karmic debt can do that part for you — it’s yours.
If this piece stirred something in you, here are three ways to take it further:
1️⃣ The Book – I’ve gone deeper into these threads in my book, where childhood, ancestry, and karma aren’t just theories but a map you can actually use. Pre-order my upcoming book, Claim the Throne - The Keys to Your Ancient Power.
2️⃣ Sessions – If you’re realising that what you carry isn’t just yours — that it’s older, heavier, and harder to name — this is the work I do every day. You can book a session with me.
3️⃣ Stay Connected – If you want more of these longer dives — the kind that don’t fit into a Facebook scroll — join my list. That way, you don’t have to rely on algorithms to find me.
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