Reframing the Family Story: From Inherited Trauma to Generational Triumph

Welcome to Legacy Builders, strategies for building successful family enterprises. Brought to you by Beacon Family Office at Assante Financial Management Limited. I’m your host, Cory Gagnon, Senior Wealth Advisor. And on this show, we explore global ideas, concepts, and models that help family enterprises better navigate the complexities of family wealth.

Today, we welcome Ruschelle Khanna, Owner of Ruschelle Khanna Consulting. With over twenty years of experience, Ruschelle has established herself as a trusted advisor to successful families and high-performing individuals. She is renowned for her empowering approach that helps clients harness their innate healing abilities. Ruschelle’s unique blend of therapeutic expertise and wealth consciousness has made her a sought-after guide in overcoming chronic illness challenges and preserving generational wealth. Her work focuses on fostering mindfulness, stewardship, and the resolution of ancestral trauma, particularly through masterminds for women in positions of financial influence.

My goal is to be the most curious person in today’s conversation with Ruschelle, where we explore her innovative work at the intersection of family therapy, health psychology, and wealth management. We’ll dive into how uncovering inherited patterns can transform both individuals and family enterprises, challenging conventional wisdom about generational wealth. Ruschelle will share insights that promise to reshape our understanding of wellness, legacy, and purpose in high-net-worth families, offering fresh perspectives on building resilient family systems that go beyond traditional financial strategies.

Now, let’s dive in!

Cory: We’re excited to have you here today to share your wealth of knowledge and experiences with us. Let’s dive in, shall we? 

Ruschelle: Absolutely.

Cory: Ruschelle, imagine you’re delivering the commencement speech to the graduating class of 2024, and you have the chance to inspire them with your story. How would you begin your speech to convey the incredible lessons and expertise you’ve gained throughout your career?

Ruschelle: Well, Cory, I’d love to share three pivotal moments shaping my work. They will shape our listeners’ minds and give you some things to consider. The first is a story about inheriting things that we might not want.

I’d like for you to think about your earliest memory. Sometimes, we can’t remember our earliest memory, but just give it your best guess. My earliest memory was not my own, and I’ll explain that. Beginning at age 4, I had reoccurring thoughts. I had these reoccurring visions and fears that something was going to happen to my dad.

My dad would pass away, and four is a little bit young to know anything about death and dying, but that is my earliest memory. I spent from age 4 to about 12 worrying about my parents, and I would stay up at night, and I would watch them sleep.

I was just very scared and didn’t know how to articulate this. No one knew that this was something that I was carrying with me. As an adult, I learned years later in my work as a therapist that there’s a lot of research that says we can inherit memories.

That memory that Inherited was my mother’s, and one signal that we know that it is an inherited trauma memory is that I was the same age when I remembered the memory as my mother was when she had the trauma occur. My mother was 4, and her father died at home, and that is that memory shaped what I was focused on as a child.

By age 12, I was spending a lot of time introspective. I was interested in what was happening in my inner world, and I was interested in death and dying. I began to meditate regularly at age 12, and that set me up for a life of wanting to understand transitions and loss, and it set the stage for my career.

I wanted to work with grief, death and dying when I was entering my career as a social worker. I would like you to take away the lesson from that story that we are more driven by unconscious inherited patterns than we realize, and it really pays to uncover and explore those.

The second pivotal part of my development was early on. I moved from West Virginia, where I grew up and studied, to New York to do my graduate work at Columbia University and become a social worker. I stepped into the world really early in my career, into the world of ultra-high-net-worth lifestyles, venture capital, and hedge funds.

I was a live-in social worker for a family that had experienced sudden wealth, and their adult children were struggling with the sudden wealth. I was brought in and tasked with putting together an in-home program for one of their adult children who was struggling with a mental health episode related to certain wealth.

It was a completely different world for me. I had grown up in Southern West Virginia and the coalfields. That was a big learning curve, and what I learned from that was that business and wealth transitions have lasting consequences that are not just for us but also for our children.

Those consequences can have mental, relational, and spiritual impacts even on the third and fourth generations. The last story that I want to share, which was maybe the most recent and pivotal, was one about switching roles.

On March 3, 2014, I started having severe and disabling symptoms related to Lyme disease.

So, at that point, I became completely disabled, and I was no longer able to work. I then became the patient.

In those four years, I got the chance because Lyme gave me the chance to step away from my work and reflect. Lyme, for me, was a real learning experience and cathartic experience. Other than the physical pain, I don’t have anything bad to say about my experience of being severely disabled for four years.

That time in my life gave me a chance to focus on becoming healthier than I had ever been, becoming more patient than I had ever been, becoming more focused, and all the more committed to my clients.

After I recovered from that, I went into the world of private practice, and I wanted to take all of the lessons that I learned from being severely, severely sick into the families, the families and enterprises that I work with today.

The lesson that I would want you to take away from that is that our health is our wealth, and that actually those inherited patterns that I talked about at the beginning of of this interview, we know that inherited patterns are directly related to chronic illnesses.

Illnesses. A lot of my recovery was doing and uncovering the traumas of my ancestors. It wasn’t the whole of it. I was taking medicine, and I was doing all these other things, but spiritually, a big component of that was healing the experiences of my ancestors that I had inherited.

For families in enterprise, our family businesses are an entity just like our physical body, and they carry those stories and those pains, usually unconsciously. Sometimes, they come out as traumatic events that seem to erupt, much like a chronic illness.

What I would love for you to take away from that is that our inherited patterns are very important for families and enterprises to to take a look at.

I guess just one other thing that I would want to say about that is that my hope for the listeners on this call is that they can uncover their inherited patterns that are no longer needed.

Possibly, at one point, those patterns were needed in your family’s history. But maybe they’re not anymore, and I want your listeners to be able to take their families and their businesses to the next level.

Cory: Awesome. What fantastic stories, Ruschelle. I love it. And four years of dealing with Lyme disease is a lot, and some people can take it very different ways. I know that it’s not an easy thing to overcome.

That’s a fantastic story. One of the things that I was thinking about as you were telling it is that your first story is about having those thoughts start to show up as a four-year-old. And in our everyday language, we don’t have a lot of those words to describe feelings. Now they’ve if I think the research shows that there’s somewhere around a dozen different words that the average person has to describe feeling.

At four years old, you probably didn’t have the average as adults, which is still very low. How do families identify that those things are creeping in? If we’re talking about that young generation, not even the new generation, how do they realize that’s happening with one of the members of their enterprise?

Ruschelle: Sure. Play is the first entry. You’re exactly right. We’re we are one more four. We are verbal. We’re not preverbal, but we’re still building out what a story is, and we’re trying to learn how to formulate the beginning, middle, and end; what does this mean, and how does it impact me?

And we’re still driven by fear. How can I just be comfortable and not afraid? Curiosity and asking your children what their experience is. I often find that if I’m working with parents, they just don’t think to ask, what was that like for you?

What did you see there? What was going on? And the answer might not come out in words.

It may come out, so let’s draw a picture of what you saw there. If my mother had when my mother saw me staring at them in bed at night because I’d get up and I’d walk down and I’d be like, are they still okay?

If she had paused in the morning and said, what was happening there? What are you doing?

What were you thinking there? Let’s draw what it was like sitting alone, watching Mom and Dad.

I know that sounds very simple, but sometimes, as parents, we forget to be curious about our kids’ inner world.

Cory: Right. And I love that drawing is a way to explain something. That would seem like a simple strategy, but I think it’s fantastic to just have somebody start to draw and bring that out into an image.

And, Ruschelle, I’m thinking about the idea of inherent memories, and you made the comment about three generations in that some of these things can show up and continue. How do we go about identifying and discovering without thinking about just the guilt side of this, the shame of, wow, what have I done?

What have I passed on? Rather than coming from that perspective, what are those that are present? Because I know every family has them, whether they’re positive or negative.

How do they start and think about those things? And I bring up the positive because there’s probably some of those inherent memories that are some of those families, some of that amazing thing in the enterprise that really contributes.

Ruschelle: Absolutely. I will go over the identifiers of the more difficult ones that may not be surface-level, and then we’ll move on to the positive.

I call these the five liabilities of family businesses or the five liabilities of trauma. When we have cycles of chaos, Aunt Joe, Aunt Jane, and Uncle Joe can never get along, and this is just the way that it is. They act just like Grandma did or whatever.

These kinds of things where it’s, like almost normalized chaos. These are indicators. If someone asks if we have conflict avoidants, the next one is conflict avoidants. Conflict avoidants are harder to identify because they are like the third one, which is people-pleasing.

People pleasers and conflict avoiders go under the radar. Now, they might be passive-aggressive things that come out in conversations, resentments that pop up later on, betrayals, those sorts of things.

But they’re not blatant, like a constantly angry sister in the business or something like that, and then we have abandonment. If there’s a pattern of someone abandoning the family, like Aunt Sue abandoning the family, or not wanting to work in the business, now my kid seems to act just like that.

Abandonment is another one, and I’m blanking on the fifth one—cycles of chaos, conflict, and procrastination. If there are people in your business or in your family who just can never seem to get anything done, they might have big ideas, but there’s always a lot of overwhelm. That’s the very surface level where it might be there. 

And like I said before, chronic illness is another one that is directly linked. That is not one of these cut types of liabilities, not a personality type. But chronic illness and addictions are the other two outliers. 

Cory: On those on those liabilities, like, I’m just thinking about the cycles of chaos and how that’s normalized or even the conflict avoidance. Some of those might be, well, that’s just how we are, who we are.

That’s how we are, right? It’s been normalized, as you said. And what is it that people can’t see? As we’re talking, it’s yes. These are things that are holding the family back. But if it’s like, well,  what? This is just how we communicate. We do try to please everybody. We act that way, and we see that among many family members.

How do they know what it would be like if they didn’t have that? Sometimes, it becomes, well, we figured out a way to cope with this, and we’re doing okay versus thriving because this isn’t present. How do we figure that out?

Ruschelle: Yes. Well, it usually comes from one family member who’s, for example, listening to this podcast. And they’re like, it doesn’t have to be this way, or I had experiences in my internship at a different company. And can you believe they didn’t act like this?

And so, usually, an outlier starts to come in and change the entire system. And you’re exactly right.

I will talk about the book I’m writing about a little later, but I wanted to do this because of denial and how to move families out of denial, and you’re exactly right. It is difficult, especially what you said, as Seth Godin would say, right?

We’re not those people, or we’re not the family that I’m a Sicilian. Sicilian families pride themselves on fighting, throwing hands, and everything’s loud. It can also come up when couples get married, and your partner is from a different culture or family.

It’s like, this is not going to work.

Cory: Yes, and as you mentioned, bringing people into the family can bring their own stories, their own generational trauma. How do we identify what cycle was through the bloodline and what was brought in? And as we see different branches of the enterprise, how do we identify those?

Ruschelle: Well, you might be marrying out of inherited patterns if we’re talking about marrying in. If you’re talking about hiring and who you’re unconsciously bringing into your family business, again, you are; I’ll go back to that inherited unconscious drive.

You may not even know why you picked that person, but a lot of times, it’s familiar familiarity with your family system. But to answer the question, how do we do that, for good, positive things that are helping your legacy and negatives?

I really encourage families to start an audit when we do, which is what we’ll talk about a little bit later. Then, they can start listing out the stories about their family and writing them down.

Even if it’s snippets, I didn’t know Uncle Joe very well, but I did know that he had great big hair and sold electronics. Whatever stories you have heard, start to write them down, positive and negative.

Cory: Yes. Awesome. And one thing I wanted to clarify, Ruschelle, when you talk about abandonment, I just want to clarify that for listeners in abandonment doesn’t necessarily need to be; I have my own goals and aspirations.

And as your story, you moved away from West Virginia. You went to Columbia. You pursued your own thing. If you were a family business member, what’s the difference between that and, as you talk about abandonment being a cycle within families?

Ruschelle: Abandonment can be emotional. I work in the family business, but nobody ever listens to me, and I’m constantly rejected. It’s an abandonment—an ongoing, pervasive abandonment.

Then there are people who abandon their families, move three countries over, and don’t want to be around anybody. Take what you said about my move, for example. I abandoned a culture and learned a new one, and that was a positive experience because then I reintegrated my history into what I learned.

But usually, abandonment in the case of trauma is it can either happen to us, or we can do it to another person, and it causes severe pain.

Cory: Right. That makes a lot of sense. And, Ruschelle, bringing back up the concept of your audit is a great way. We talked about the positive stories and what those contributors are to the family’s success.

As you mentioned, writing down those stories and thinking about all the history of the family that you can come up with, not just focusing on the things that cause me grief or are painful stories.

How does that audit go? What would be the way that somebody could say, “Yes?” This is how I want to engage my brain to come up with all of those stories and memories that I have.

Ruschelle: Well, if we think about words like from a social work perspective, one of the first things that we are taught is we need to come at things from a strength perspective.

The first thing that you look at with the client is what factors are already supporting your business, your family, and your business. The things that you’re very proud of about your parents and your grandparents.

I love to do long narrative interviews during the audits when I work with families and collect all of that. And then, if we really want to have fun with it, I recommend they go to a documentary and have them do a documentary on their family, which is amazing, incredibly healing, and good for family businesses.

They can even use those stories for marketing and branding. And if we think about long-lasting family brands and the legacies and those little snippets of stories of how they survived difficult times, how did European companies survive World War 2?

How did wealthy families survive having to move countries and keep their families together? And there are many good stories like that.

Cory: Right. I love that. That sounds like a lot of fun. It sounds like there could be some great benefit there. I think that taking that moment to reflect on those stories and say, “Are these things helping or hindering?” not just from a branding perspective but going in and saying, “Alright.” What are these, and where do they come from? And how do they support us? And do they support all those members?

As you mentioned, could be people who are actually alienated by those stories.

Ruschelle: Yes. Cory, what I do with individual clients and families is this reframing that we talk about in cognitive behavioural therapy, which is about changing the perspective on the story.

Sometimes, there’s a story, but you have added your own layer of perspective to it, which is causing the family ongoing pain.

Part of the idea of marketing and branding is that a lot of times, therapy is just helping us rebrand ourselves. I don’t have to even just use saying that I’m from West Virginia as an example.

When I first moved to New York, I experienced a real culture shock because I didn’t get much positive feedback that I was from West Virginia. And how do I spin this story that I’m not getting respect or positive feedback about, but I’m not ashamed of where I’m from? I’m not going to change where I’m from, but I do need to change how I’m presenting.

Cory: Ruschelle, going back to the family that you worked for, at first, a real dive into the struggles of family wealth, what are some of those catalysts?

You mentioned sudden wealth, but I’m guessing it’s not always sudden wealth that causes some of these events or makes this change where we see it show up in the form of a mental health issue.

How do you see that within families where this wealth is now actually damaging the family and the mental health of the members?

Ruschelle: Well, Cory, you are really making an argument for my work just by asking that question because we’ve heard, I’m sure you’ve heard on a lot of other people in finance talk about that wealth just enhances whatever problems are already there.

It enhances the good things about our family and brings out the very painful things. It brings things to light. The trick with high-net-worth families is that they can hide behind their wealth and not have to address those things.

Many things can be paid for, covered up, taken care of, and hidden from the public, but what would be better is if we just started to heal. We can have a lot of money and need better relationships with money. We can have a successful business rather than a toxic work environment.

Cory: Right. The hiding behind the wealth and paying to cover things up—how long can that last? It doesn’t sound sustainable.

Ruschelle: Well, it can be sustainable for a lifetime, Cory, but it doesn’t look very good. It doesn’t make for a very satisfied life.

Cory: Right.

Ruschelle:  The answer is if you have the money to keep, if you have the trust never to have to do anything, and I mean the trust fund, not the actual internal trust.

If you have the money to keep being bailed out, and many people do, then it can end very, very badly because where is your bottom?

Whereas, in some other circumstances, we might find and be able to hit rock bottom without that. The other thing is this concept, which we know in chronic illness as secondary gains. What am I gaining from continuing to be combative in my family? What am I gaining from continuing to be sick?

That doesn’t mean somebody wants that necessarily, but it does mean that there’s a payoff to be dysfunctional.

Cory: And what are some of those habits within families that create the payoff for that dysfunction? How would those show up in a cycle where the family is actually, maybe unconsciously, promoting that behaviour?

Ruschelle: Well, I think one of the most common ones is actually one that I just see being more addressed. It’s being addressed a lot these days: the preparation of NextGen earlier and earlier, and parents becoming more aware that they need to include their children in the family business and in the full transparency of what they have so that they can respect what they have later on.

I mean, we’re in this time period where generations have said, “I’m not telling my kids. They know we’re extremely wealthy, but I’m not telling them what they have or what they’re going to get.” I am not sure that they’re financially educated.

Then, when they’re 40 or 50, they’ll just get a bunch of money that I assume they’ll know how to deal with. That’s what I see the most in those in their 20s to thirties, and the parents are in their sixties.

But the younger parents are not doing that. They’re really stepping up and trying to financially educate their children.

Cory: Right. And where’s that change of narrative coming from?

Ruschelle: I would hope partially from the mental health world, partially, that the development of the child, that financial independence and financial knowledge is something that is makes for a well rounded human no matter what your income level.

Cory: Right. And preparing that next generation, how soon is it too soon?

Ruschelle: As soon as they can start counting and the respect of resources is something that can that can be taught from the very beginning.

Think philosophies like Montessori are amazing because they have children doing things, caring for things, and cleaning their houses early on. This is in the framework that I work with; the last piece is honouring resources, and the third piece is honouring resources. We can teach our children to start honouring resources very early on.

Cory: Right. How would it look actually to have them honour those resources? What are some examples where you could say what? This family has spent time and invested in that education and really built some of those foundations.

How would that be presented in that rising generation?

Ruschelle: If we’re talking about 20-somethings, that looks like, is your adult child capable of holding a job? I mean, that sounds simple, but I know I mean, I see families every day whose adult children, for a myriad of different reasons, are not capable of holding a job.

I think that’s a big concern for parents because there are many benefits of working that are that don’t have anything to do with withdrawing a paycheck. Maybe you don’t need a paycheck, but you do need a schedule and structure and to be able to interact with people.

Cory: Absolutely. And, Ruschelle, talking earlier, you commented on rock bottom. I want to go back to your story about the time that you were able to focus within to recover from your illness. It’s something outside of your control that put you in that situation, but you had control of the way you handled it.

And how can families take that and not necessarily feel like they’re at rock bottom before they start?

Ruschelle: The main thing that saved me while I had Lyme disease was the fact that I had meditated since I was 12, and the skill that I learned was being the observer of my circumstances. And you don’t have to go through trauma to learn to be the observer of your circumstances.

You can practice meditation. You can practice flow states. You can practice mindfulness and approach everything in your life that way without having to hit rock bottom.

You certainly don’t; I would not wish those experiences on you or anybody else unless they were incredibly spiritually awakening like mine and just amazing. So sometimes we go through things, and they just suck, and that’s it.

I try to teach families to become observers of their interactions. Just observe what’s happening, and you’ll see that it will change, and it will most likely change for the better.

Cory: Right. Observing is a skill you talked about in the state of meditation flow. That’s what’s that look like? Like, how do I think of observing? I’m a fly on the wall of my circumstance and situation. What does that look like?

I go to bed at night, saying, “I now have become the observer.” How does somebody say, “I’ve done this,” “I’m starting,” or “Wow, look at my perception and thought because I did this today?”

Ruschelle: The one that I meditation allows us to be the observer through body sensation.

And that’s one way we can start to pay attention to just the processes of our body and stillness, and that helps us observe other things better.

Intellect: If we want to go intellectually, observing might look like tracking and data. Is there a place in your home life or business where you need to be tracking data? It could be anything from your sleep to lead generation clients coming in. Tracking is 1. Also, using the arts is another way to become better observers.

If we become familiar with music, take up drawing, or do something, it usually involves the physical body and how we physically interact with the world, which makes us better observers. Those are all kinds of outliers, specifically family audits. In a family audit, we observe the patterns in your family.

Cory: Yes. I love that, and journaling is such a great way to reflect and observe. Just writing it down and tracking things is fantastic.

Now, Ruschelle, as we near the end of our conversation, I ask each guest a few questions before we wrap up. Are you ready for the tough ones?

Ruschelle: I’m ready.

Cory:  Alright. What is one key strategy you believe is most essential for building a successful family enterprise?

Ruschelle: Well, from my perspective, Corie, it would be family audits and looking at your inherited patterns just to mitigate risk.

Cory: And tell me more about mitigating risk. What does

Ruschelle: Yes. Well, if it’s unconscious and you don’t know what’s happening and it’s going to happen, then there’s an outcome from that. If we talk about executive coaching, everybody always wants to uncover their blind spots. Right? How can you help me see better?

How can you gain clarity over this situation or that situation?

Well, from a very macro level, family businesses can start to examine their stories and gain a lot of insight into their blind spots.

Cory: Fantastic. Now, what is the most common challenge that family enterprises encounter when it comes to wealth transition and generational continuity?

Ruschelle: Well, we didn’t talk about this one today, Cory, and that might be for another podcast. But the big ones coming up these days are grief and loss and the transition challenges with the first generation, the older generation, and stuck points around that. What do we do to get Dad to actually not come to the office anymore and harass the new CEO or that sort of thing? And you need to learn how to speak to denial.

You need to learn how to speak to grief and loss, loss of identity.

Once you do that and can help that person calm themselves through a huge transition, then everything is okay.

Cory: Awesome. I love telling you about the loss of identity because it is a real challenge, and it shows up in many ways in the business, in life, and in the family. Now, in your experience, what are the top three qualities that successful family enterprise leaders possess?

Ruschelle: I’m going to give you four, but I’ll be quick about them.

These are the four that I work with in terms of how I work with families and individuals. The first is effective communication. The second is compassionate decision-making. Are our decisions aligned with our family values?

The third is what we talked about earlier, honouring resources, and getting companies and families and children to honour them the best that we can.

And then the 4th is the openness to receive all the good things that you have coming to you in your life that you and your family deserve.

Cory: Fantastic. I love it. Thank you for the fourth. That is great. Before we conclude our discussion, I’d like to highlight where listeners can engage in more of the conversations that you’re engaged in. Would you kindly provide us with where guests can find you?

Ruschelle: Yes, absolutely. You can find me on LinkedIn, and I’m on LinkedIn all the time.

You can find me at my website, lifestyle for legacy.com, and that’s where you’ll be able to preorder my book, Inherited Trauma and family wealth, a guide to healing relationships and building a lasting legacy.

Cory: Amazing. As you mentioned, Ruschelle, there were many things we didn’t cover, but I wanted to make sure that we covered everything that you thought was relevant to our conversation today.

 Is there anything else you’d like to share with our audience that we didn’t get a chance to touch on?

Ruschelle: I would just reiterate again that my hope for families is that they can really start to see each other more clearly and have deeper and better relationships for a lasting legacy.

Cory: Fantastic. Well, thank you, Ruschelle. I appreciate you taking the time to share your experiences and expertise with us. Your insights have been incredibly valuable to me, and I’m grateful for your contribution to this episode.

I’m sure our listeners will agree that everything that you’ve shared has been very valuable to them as well.

Ruschelle: Thank you, Cory. It’s been a pleasure.

As we wrap up this episode, we invite you to reflect on Ruschelle’s insights about inherited patterns, generational trauma, and the intricate connection between wealth and family dynamics.

Whether you are part of a family enterprise or provide consulting to family businesses, Ruschelle’s approach offers invaluable tools for fostering healthier relationships and more effective wealth management across generations. 

Throughout our discussion, we discussed the significant role of inherited patterns in family enterprises. Ruschelle illustrated how addressing these often-overlooked influences can enhance both personal development and business performance. We explored practical strategies for improving intergenerational relationships, from childhood education to adult succession planning. These insights provide family enterprises with innovative approaches to tackle wealth-related issues, foster emotional well-being, and construct enduring legacies that harmonize personal satisfaction with business objectives. 

For families looking to strengthen their relationships and navigate the complexities of wealth through a lens of emotional awareness, Ruschelle Khanna offers expert guidance and support. You can connect with Ruschelle through her consulting practice, where she provides tailored strategies for uncovering and reframing inherited patterns. We’ve included her contact information and additional resources in our show notes to help you begin the process of transforming your family dynamics and creating a more resilient family enterprise.

Disclaimer: 

This program was prepared by Cory Gagnon who is a Senior Wealth Advisor with Beacon Family Office at Assante Financial Management Ltd. This is not an official program of Assante Financial Management, and the statements and opinions expressed during this podcast are not necessarily those of Assante Financial Management. This show is intended for general information only and may not apply to all listeners or investors; please obtain professional financial advice or contact us at [email protected] or visit BeaconFamilyOffice.com to discuss your particular circumstances before acting on the information presented.