Animals & Us
Michelle Scheibner · 67 min
Michelle Scheibner's lifelong sadness finally made sense when she traced it not just to her own wounds, but to secrets, silences, and sorrows carried across generations of her family — and learned that understanding the past is the first step to reclaiming the future.
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Michelle Scheibner grew up in a house full of adults and unspoken grief. Her childhood in South Caulfield was quiet, serious, risk-averse. Her grandmother was dying of cancer in the house. Her aunt, who had profound disabilities, lived upstairs. Her father carried untreated trauma. And there was a brother before her, a fact no one discussed until she found his name on her birth certificate at 17, with no date of death. When she finally asked why, her parents told her he had Down syndrome and had been institutionalised by doctors' orders. The silence around him, around loss, around her father's Jewish family who died in the Holocaust, shaped how Michelle saw herself: not good enough, perpetually waiting to be abandoned, unable to imagine a future that included her own children.
It took a psychotherapist named Sarah to ask the question that opened everything: what was your mother feeling while she was pregnant with you? That single question shifted how Michelle understood her own infancy, her mother's distraction, the grief she carried in her body without knowing its source. Through years of narrative therapy and family research, Michelle uncovered layers of inherited trauma, not as diagnosis, but as survival strategy passed down through generations. She discovered her grandparents' names in the Holocaust database. She found her father's hidden suitcase filled with German documents. She learned that trauma can live in our DNA, switched on or off by the environments we grow up in.
Understanding these patterns freed her from them. Michelle brought her brother's ashes home. She stopped hiding behind a professional image and started showing up as herself. She wrote her book, Hush, to help others see that breaking family silence is possible, and that healing your past lets you reclaim your future.
⚠️ Content advisory: this episode discusses abuse & exploitation, which some listeners may find distressing.
If you need support, you're not alone. Help is available: • Blue Knot Foundation (complex trauma): 1300 657 380 · blueknot.org.au • 1800RESPECT (family, domestic & sexual violence): 1800 737 732 · 1800respect.org.au
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