Inherited Pain, Inherited Power | Mid Week Tease

This week on The Mid Week Tease, Adelle explores the quiet legacy many of us carry: the wounds passed down through generations of women, and the strength we inherit too. From the silence of our mothers and grandmothers, to the resilience that allowed them to endure, this episode unpacks how we can recognize both pain and power in our lineage. Adelle shares reflections on:

• The unspoken traumas women before us carried.
• The survival patterns we unconsciously repeat.
• The strength, creativity, and wisdom we also inherit.
• How to decide what ends with us and what continues.

✨ We are living proof that our lineage carried both hurt and hope. And in us, we get to decide which story continues.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Midwick Te's with me adele Jangle, where
I share some random and not to random thoughts on things.
And in this episode, I want us to dive into
something that sits very quietly in so many of us women,
and we never mention it. We have taken a lot

(00:22):
of it to be normal when it's not. And I'm
talking about the pain we have inherited from the women
who came before us, our mothers, our grandmothers, our great grandmothers,
and you know I can keep going, and the power
that we've inherited from them too. And this was all
spacked a couple of weeks ago when I watched a

(00:43):
TikTok that was talking about wounds of the womb and
the creator was unpacking the various pain and trauma that
we inherited from our mothers, right, And I really stuck
with it. But the more I thought about it, the

(01:04):
more I muled over it, the more I felt like, well,
I didn't any inherit pain. I also inherited power, right,
And I thought, I want to talk to you about
these two things, you know, these invisible things that are
passed down in families for so many of us African women,
our mothers, our grandmothers, our great grandmothers, were just not

(01:29):
given safe spaces to heal. Right, think about it, Think
about it, Think about your mom, think about even your aunt's. Right,
they were just not given safe spaces to heal. So
they carried unspoken wounds and traumas that just have never
been processed, dreams that they had to abandon because of survival.

(01:52):
They carried silence around abuse, they carried silence around their
own desires. And I'm pretty sure in this moment, if
you think about the women in older generations in your families,
you can pinpoint a few who you know are maybe

(02:12):
not the best people to hang around. Maybe they're too
hush or too mean, or they're labeled the crazy aunt,
you know what I mean. But if you really dig deep,
I'm pretty sure these unprocessed traumas they're carrying, I'm pretty
sure they'se abandoned dreams they're carrying. I have one of

(02:34):
those aunts, and for the longest time I used to
really resent her, And as much as I've gone no
contact with her, I can still also hold that feminine
humanity that recognizes that this is not the real her,

(02:55):
This is the traumatized her. Right, I wouldn't excuse it,
and I wouldn't allow it to harm me. But I
can see it. I'm sure you can see it too.
Write in a couple of your family members. And so,
because they carried all of this, they unknowingly handed us

(03:17):
a couple of things, and I want to focus on three.
The first thing they handed us is silence as a
coping mechanism. Think about all of the times you've wanted
an aunt or your grandmother to stand up for herself,
but they chose silence. Think about the many times you'd

(03:39):
wish that they would openly address certain things that maybe
have harmed them, but they chose silence. They unknowingly handed
that to us. The second thing they handed us is
to view endurance as identity, right, so where your worth

(03:59):
is measured by how much you can take as a
woman and not how much you can live as a woman.
The third thing they handed to us was a couple
of fears. Right, fear of softness. You've got to be tough,
You've got to be hard. Right. They handed us fear

(04:20):
of rest it was not welcomed to rests. They handed
us fear of pleasure. How many times have you seen
the older women in your family genuinely enjoying themselves, genuinely
and intentionally seeking and planning enjoyment and pleasure, be just

(04:45):
enjoying life or be it even sexual pleasure? Right? I
remember one of my closest aunts and I love her
down and she's in her fifties now, just got into
her fifties. I remember us when she was in her
late photies for the first time, having a conversation about

(05:06):
sex toys, yeah, and her saying how she was thinking
of getting herself one and exploring what that would look like.
I don't know if I've ever mentioned it on this podcast,
but I think those tools of self pleasure are very important,
not only just to enjoy, but also for you to
figure out what your body is, you know, what you like,

(05:30):
what you dislike, and to normalize pleasure in all its
various forms. And we inherited a fear of pleasure, and
all of these fears we inherited because, you know, for
their generation and to some extent ours as well, survival
demanded that they stay on God. There was no time

(05:51):
to chill, rest, softness, pleasure. Eh. We have to stay woke,
We have to stay on God, because we're not living.
We are try trying to survive. And maybe all of
these things I've mentioned you have spotted in yourself. Maybe
you work, you work so hard until you collapse burnout,

(06:11):
because that's what you saw modeled. Maybe you swallow pain
because that's what they did. Maybe you shrink your ambition
because chasing it as a woman felt very unsafe in
their time. I remember getting advice when I was married
from an older female relative to not live within my means,

(06:37):
but to live within my husband's means because of the
nature of my work, there were some payments that I
would be getting that exceeded my husband's right at the time,
and I always found out to be such weird advice

(06:57):
because when I wanted a soft life right, and we
can afford even more if we pull our resources together
instead of looking at who's earning more than who. You
know what I mean. But I don't resent the person
who gave me the advice, or even the advice. I

(07:18):
can recognize the pain in them, the survival in them
that led them to believe this to be true, and
to believe that them telling me this was them trying
to keep me safe. This is the pain we inherit,
and it's not because they wanted us to suffer, but
it's because that was their survival. But I also really

(07:42):
think when we never talk enough about this, that we
inherited power as well, and a lot of times this
power sits domant in us. Think about it. When I
was trying to unpack this, I thought about for things
under power that we inherited, like it or not, we
inherited resilience, which is a very powerful tool or skill

(08:09):
to have when you're navigating life. A lot of the
women who came before us lived through systems that were
designed to break them, right. I mean, we are still
trying to rebuild and break down some of these systems,
but they were in the thick of it, and somehow,

(08:30):
somehow we are here. They survived it. Resilience. Right. The
other thing under power that I think we inherited is creativity.
You could take it from a very tangible point of
Our moms are aunts. Our grandmothers could make meals out
of nothing, but they also weaved community within a system

(08:55):
and spaces that was working actively to erase them. Our moms,
our grandmothers weaved communities and created these powerful spaces, beat
in the salon in the market while they were meeting
as women in Chamas. You know what I mean, Like
they creatively designed safe spaces and communities in an environment

(09:24):
that was hell bent on erasing them. And you know
what that has done for us. We have those safe
spaces now. That is our normal. When I think about
all of the places I am most seen, most held,
most loved, it's in a circle of women. It's almost

(09:46):
so natural to us to create those female communities, And
unfortunately men just didn't get that right. That's a crisis
that you know, they are trying to solve now, But
for us, it was passed down. We inherited this. The
other thing we inherited was wisdom. Let me tell you,

(10:10):
even when to the outside world it looked like the
women who came before us had been silenced, had been
beaten down to a pulp, there were conversations they had
with us where they taught us through stories, through rituals,
and through intuition and trusting yourself and noticing things that

(10:33):
are unsaid and figuring out how to navigate when you
notice these things. There's a wisdom they gave us that
cannot be taught in textbooks and the last one, which
I think is the most powerful. They gave us spiritual strength.
You know, I don't even know how they did it,

(10:55):
because I don't even think there was a class. Like
I'm somebody who only had twenty three years with my
mom before she passed away. But there is a grounding
I inherited from that woman that connects me to something
bigger for me. I like to think of it as
my ancestors to the next woman. It could be God
to the next woman, it could be the universe. But

(11:17):
there is a spiritual strength that we inherited from the
women before us that contributes to the power that exists
within us today. And so I like to think of
our lineage of women as not just trauma. It's important
to recognize that so that we can decide that the

(11:39):
pain and the trauma stops with us. But it's also
important to recognize the artistry, the fire, and the power
that we also inherited from these women. And I like
to feel like anytime I'm nervous about this crazy little

(11:59):
life of mine that I've curated for myself that looks
so unlike any other woman in my lineage has lived,
and because it looks so different, sometimes I get so anxious,
and I wonder, up mind doing the right thing, eh,
going into business designing a life that I want full
of peace and ease and silence. I wonder if am

(12:23):
I on the right track? You know, I do get
anxious sometimes, But what always sets me back on track
is to understand that I am only able to do
this because of the power that I inherited from the
women before me, because of the sacrifices, the things they

(12:45):
had to abandon allow me to pick those things up
and live them now, no matter how different this life
looks to anybody else, right, And because of that, I
have to lock in. I have to lean in to
this life, and I have to believe and trust in it,
no matter how other it looks. And so sometimes I

(13:08):
think maybe the most powerful inheritance is that they endured
so that we could have the audacity to ask for more,
you know? And so where does this leave us? I
truly believe healing looks like us as women holding these

(13:30):
two truths at once. Truth number one, I carry pain
I need to tend to. Truth number two, I carry
power that I can build from. These two truths sit
within us at the same time, and we can tend
to them at the same time, and then we get

(13:51):
to choose from these two things what continues in us?
And that means consistently asking yourself two questions. Number one,
what patterns do I need to end with me? Is
it the using silence as a copy mechanism? Is it

(14:14):
the abandoning your emotions and when you pick up silence right?
Is it the endurance without joy? Is it the shrinking
of your dreams? What patterns do I want to end
with me? The second question is what strengths do I
want to pass forward? Is it the resilience? Is it

(14:38):
the courage? Is it the wisdom? But now you add
a bit of softness in there, a bit of rest,
you know, I mean, that's one is the one I'm
so passionate about. Softness and rest and joy? Are those
the strengths you want to pass forward? You need to
ask yourself these two questions, because when we name these things,

(15:00):
then we just stop being passive carriers. We then become
editors of the story. We are adding our own chapters.
So this week I really want you to reflect on
what pain do you think you have inherited? And what
power have you inherited that you want to amplify because

(15:20):
the truth is, we are living proof that our lineage
carried both hurt and hope, and so in us we
then get to decide which story continues. I would love
to hear your thoughts on this pain and power. Can
you identify under these two banners what you've inherited from

(15:45):
the women who have come before you in your lineage? Right?
Please drop me a comment, and if you have resonated
with this episode, share it with your community and let's
hold space for each other as we rewrite our legacies.
Thanks for listening to the midwik TI's a Legally Clueless

(16:05):
Africa production. Episodes go out every Wednesday, and you can
learn more about us by going to legally Clueless Africa
dot com