Trauma and Intergenerational Healing

"Trauma is not destiny. It can look like destiny when people choose to blow their trauma through others. But when you make a deliberate choice not to pass on your trauma to others, that choice begins to heal some of the trauma.

By protecting others from our trauma, we offer them safety and the opportunity to build resilience, both of which can then be passed down to the next generation."

~ Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands:

Although Resmaa focused a lot on racialized trauma in her book, she also focuses on intergenerational trauma of many kinds.

I’ve thought a lot about epigenetics and intergenerational trauma, the idea that trauma exists not only through our own lived experiences, that we personally encounter or experience. But rather, traumatic experiences—especially when they are not processed and treated or dealt with—change our brains, our bodies, and our very DNA and in that way, we pass it down to the next generation.

After my own trauma and my work with EMDR to help release some of that trauma, I am fully convinced that we do indeed carry stories and experiences in our bodies, especially, perhaps, traumatic ones.

Trauma can be felt in our bodies. But I also think sometimes if we are very careful observers then we can witness this trauma in others and how they carry their bodies. I have witnessed this in others, even within my own family. Those who carry their heaviness, from suicides, from childhood abandonment, from abuse, from addiction. It’s intense to see how they were hurt, how this trauma affected their loved ones, how their trauma became other family members’ trauma.

That is not fun to face—the reality that your trauma must be addressed so as you do not further traumatize others. It makes me think of that very simple adage:

“Hurt people hurt people.” (Maybe not entirely black and white, but I do think hurt people who don’t heal or address their hurt are more likely to hurt others.)

Similarly, traumatized people are much more likely to traumatize other people if they don’t address the trauma. (And sometimes even when they do.)

But eventually, if you want to break the cycle, you’ve got to do something, and something different from what others in the family have tried.

For me, that looks like not turning to alcohol as a coping mechanism and to self-medicate, as my father and grandfather and other relatives did/have done. For me, that looks like therapy and exercise. For me, that is anti-depressants and anxiety medication. For me that is not sticking my head in the ground and pretending that it didn’t happen, but in addressing it so as to try to clean out the festering wound, for a better hope of a more healthier healing.

The scars will remain, sure. But they won’t agonize others, or develop further problems with other relationships, and within yourself.

Maybe it’s the difference of whether or not you take the time to open up the scab, to clean out the dirt and infection, and provide the neospirin before covering it up to heal.

I wish real-life trauma-cleansing and the path to healing was so simple as cleaning dirt from a wound. But, you got to start somewhere, I suppose.

Ignoring an infection doesn’t make it go away. It only exacerbates the problem, the situation.