Do you believe in hexes or family curses?

[Espoge]

Are they real or is it all woo? Families who seem to have the worst luck possible, have they been cursed or is it all luck of the draw mixed in with generational trauma?

My great granny once told me somebody had cursed her friend's family, generations on and they still seem to have the most dreadful luck, nothing ever works out for them. How do you lift a curse like that?

I think it’s a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy.

Everyone has crap things happen, but most people put it down to general life and understand that there are enough good things/periods with no bad things going on that balance it out. But if you’ve got this idea that your family is cursed, then eventually you’ll start attributing bad stuff to the ‘curse’. The bad stuff takes on more significance and the good/quiet periods barely get noticed. And so you start to believe that you’re having a terrible time when, actually, it’s just the normal highs and lows of life.

Well said Nagado. Shit happens. Don't believe in medieval curses. This is 2023.

I know it was a magazine I read once that thrives on ' real life ' stories or events, but a woman I read about once was convinced she had been cursed and people had said to her she gave off a strange vibe. She organized a kind of exorcism for herself via a friend and things did look up a bit after this apparently. Even she wasn't sure what it was , but she genuinely believed she had been cursed.
I do think that some people have more luck than others and it's generally those who tend to be very self serving who have the most good luck. Maybe they are more confident or less likely to be pulled down by life's more negative aspects or something? Only my own observations here though!

It's probably more like some intergenerational trauma that's not been resolved and keeps passing down the family lineage. E.g trauma passes down through families. It's even scientifically proven to have genetic expression in dependants of generations that went through war trauma, for example.

Until someone does work on themselves they will keep passing that down to their kids and onto other family members.

And of course, trauma and upbringing means you approach life differently, whether you're aware of it or not.

No. Curses aren't real. Believing you are cursed and attributing every random negative thing to that is real though.

Truth is, shit happens. There's no higher power or supernatural force at work.

My great grandma insisted an ancestor of ours had killed a gypsy and in retaliation their family had cursed our family for eternity.

Mind you, she also claimed we are descended from nobles living at the court of Versailles and during the revolution, our ancestor rowed across the channel to the UK with lots of valuables but the family wealth was lost by a gambler ancestor.

I was a kid and believed that one for years. I even told people!! So embarrassing.

I used ancestry websites to do the family tree.

We're Irish. Came to England a couple of hundred years ago.

@IncompleteSenten 🤣 I feel like your great grandmas version was better 😆

No. Having said that, I did once work with a person who seemed to have the worst run of luck imaginable. It was a joke in the office that none of us would willingly fly with them. A totally nice person but as far as they were concerned if it could go wrong, it would.

They are the one and only case however.

Sometimes it plays on your mind that you've been 'cursed', if you have a particularly spectacular run of bad luck. I've had the worst year of my life - in the space of nine months, I lost my Dad, my partner of 10 years, my job, my 14 year old dog and a very young cat to a very obscure condition. I also developed a severe liver condition and my health was the worst it's ever been. I just kept thinking, "surely nothing else can happen now?!", but then something else would happen.

It's been 'all quiet on the Westen front' since June...but I'm still absolutely reeling and freaking out something awful is going to happen.

My Mother is fond of saying, "I must have killed a China man" - I'm not even sure where that phrase originates! But I can't help feeling that I must have done something really awful to deserve all that's happened...

Me too 😁

Mental illness, such as bipolar, is hereditary to some extent. If you look at the Hemingway family, there is huge tragedy. And if there is suicide and mental illness and addiction then the trauma engulfs those around them.

Things happen randomly, and it is the nature of randomness that it isn't evenly distributedm but it clumps, so you have run of all good and then a cluster of bad.

I did read a booklet at Durham Cathedral's book stall of blessings and curses, and I was moved to write to the bishop about it. Not only did it teach about curses as real, but it held that some family curses were of God, and those you shouldn't attempt to exorcise or pray for the family or God would be very cross with you and you would get the lurgi too. The bishop agreed with me.

I don't believe in curses. They aren't consistent with God or physics. Thereis no mechanism for them.

Michael Bentine did and told of an evil family of Satanists somewhere near Folkestone who cursed someone who offended them. He had a car crash, I believe survived, to prove this curse, but it was found the brake cable had been cut. If evil Satanists can't trust Beelzebub to do a curse without help, I'm pretty sure they don't exist.

I think there's probably an element to truth in that, but I also think that some forms of mental illness have a heritable component.

My grandfather (who died long before I was born) believed he'd been cursed by a neighbouring farmer. His wife died, leaving him with two children, his crops failed, his cattle got ill, and the farm was eventually repossessed (and bought at a discount by the neighbour.) He had poor MH, married my grandmother (who was pregnant at the time of their marriage, possibly not with his child, and that baby was stillborn) and had another family while working odd jobs, and they were very poor, and he was hospitalised in a psychiatric hospital on several occasions. Two of his sons, one from each marriage suffer with bad MH, and one has also been hospitalised and has had longterm treatment, and was not able to cope with life, and unfortunately my brother also struggles. There seems to be a pattern of poor male MH on that side of the family. Which is hidden and not talked about.

I think that the idea that the neighbour cursed him probably stems from the part my grandfather played in the civil war, and something else he did, which meant he suffered from internalised guilt. He was still talking about one of these things on his deathbed.

I kind of do a little bit, Well I believe places can have bad energy/ be cursed but not people.

One story of why is my good friend. When she was 18 her parents moved house ( this house had made local news because of a crime that happened here but they brought it anyway ) when she is 24 her dad has a heart attack in said house and dies, her mum gets cancer and dies just 4 years later, then her sister 3 years after that. My friend still lived at home so she inherits the house, eventually finds a loving partner and they have a baby. Life is all good until a few years later when her dh gets sick and dies leaving her a widow at just 36.
That house has got to be cursed hasn’t it? She has now sold the house thank heavens!

That house has got to be cursed hasn’t it?

Can you prove that those things wouldn't have happened if they'd lived elsewhere? Of course not. So there's no reason to conclude the house is at fault. And if it were down the house, there's no rational reason to point to a curse rather than, say, industrial contamination of the land leading to health problems. (When Florence Nightingale first went to the Crimea there was a superstition that 1 group of beds was unlucky. She initially put it down as nonsense, then did the stats and realised they did genuinely have a higher death rate. So she looked at a map and realised there was contamination from the sewage system in that area that was causing infections.)

In answer to the OP, no. It's a combination of woo, confirmation bias, and in some cases family trauma or inherited health problems.

No, don't be ridiculous.

That's interesting , it's a phrase from Australia & NZ apparently wordhistories.net/2022/07/05/must-have-killed-chinaman/

It is all absolute rubbish imho.

@memyselfi Thank you for that - very interesting! I'm Australian, so that fits. It's just such a weird thing to say, I think.

This along with maybe some poor choices that have consequences further down the line that people don't necessarily connect.. like keeping people who are big drama in your life, but then being short of money because you lend to them and don't see it back, then not having that money when you hit a financial roadblock and thinking the roadblock is the bad luck rather than the decision to keep bad friends was the issue in the first place?

It's also that thing where if you look for happy things you'll find them and if you look for sadness and negativity, you'll find it too. Obviously everyone can have bad things out their control happen and it feel like a 'bad run' but I think that's just life rather than anything more mystic.

Yup. Cognitive bias.