Intergenerational Trauma and You...
Having lost both of my parents this year I've been thinking a lot about the intergenerational trauma that I've inherited from them and my ancestors. I'm living in the house where my father grew up and where I grew up so there are memory triggers all over the place. Most of the things that I did with my grands and my parents were domestic things around the house so doing daily chores brings back voices from the long gone and the recently gone. This has given me loads of opportunity to sit and visit with those elements of anxiety and control that constitute the majority of my inheritance.
This was something that I really was able to start working on with my mother who, in her Alzheimer's confusion, was very much the frightened and helpless youngest child of six who were guided by a gentle and quiet mother and a domineering father. Her largest daily fear was of making a mess. I found that the best thing I could do for her was to reassure her that if we accidentally made a mess, all we had to do was clean it up. This became more frequent once incontinence was plaguing her, but that became more opportunities for me to say, “All clean! See, everything is okay. Nobody is mad. Nobody is in trouble. This happens to everyone and we can always clean things up because we feel better once we're clean.”
This has given me a guideline for working with the moments of confrontation with my inherited traumas. Every time I hear a learned voice in my head telling me that I'm bad or I'm in trouble or I told you so or It always goes this way I notice that opportunity to say, “This happens to everyone. Now we're going to deal with the consequences of what happened because we'll feel better once we've dealt with it.” And rather than shutting down that voice or silencing it, I invite it to stay with me while I deal with the mess or the bill or the question to a lawyer or doctor and get whatever resolution I can get. Then I show it how things are better for having dealt with it and that there really was no shame in having something to deal with.
Yes, these are the things that those voices have been bred to pounce on and shame over, but even the worst possible things are things that happen to people. Those things we can deal with, we deal with. Those things we need help to deal with, we ask for or hire help to deal with. Those things we can't deal with we mourn or rise up against. None of those options benefit from shame.
I was talking to a friend who is a fellow ACOA (Adult Child Of Alcoholics) about intergenerational trauma the other day. He sounded really ashamed of the voices he had and the traumas that he'd picked up. I said something to the effect of, “It's better for us to tend to those things than to risk passing them on to others.” he said, “Well, I'm not having any children so this line of trauma will end when I take it to the grave with me.”
It was a neat moment for me because I noticed a voice coming forward in my head to pounce on him and shame him for that statement. Like, “Dude, do you think that we pass on our trauma only to those whom we spawn with our own loins? Do we not pass on our neuroses to everyone around us with whom we interact and over whom we have any influence? Do you think that your choice not to breed absolves you of having to work on your own shit?” And I did not say those things aloud because I noticed that the voice of pouncing and shaming was the same voice that pounced and shamed me the other day for spilling sugar in the kitchen.
I mean, cutting yourself off from feeling that you can nurture and care for others is not a painless way out from dealing with something. It is not unlike chewing off a limb to get free from a trap. It's not the easy way. And it is a way that people choose when they can conceive of no other way of coping or growing. Trying to show an alternative to that kind of choice by shaming that choice simply piles shame on top of shame and will reinforce the resolve of that hopeless resolution.
And yet, to myself, and to you who may not be crushed under the weight of your own inherited shame at this moment, I can say that the childless among us are not succeeding in ending our lines of intergenerational trauma. We are all giving away our traumas and our skills in every interaction with have with other beings. Those who see you learn from you. The stranger in line at the store. The other people on the bus. Your friends. Your partners.
It all feels pretty grim, doesn't it? How the shame and the shame about the shame layer up and layer until there is that huge crust of... impenetrable hopelessness. That sucks.
It's not hopeless. It's big. It's scary. But it is something that we can work with and care for. Instead of hearing those voices as powerful evil judgments against who we are and how we live, we can hear those voices as the frightened children that they are. Those voices don't have any power. They are the voices of other children who were repeatedly punished for something that wasn't worthy of punishment. Those children took in those punishments and absorbed them the only way children can. Children can't put blame on the caregivers whose support they need to survive, so they take that blame into themselves.
79 years ago my father and his sister spilled a whole cup of sugar on the kitchen floor. Their mother, stressed to breaking by the great depression, trying to manage having a job and raising two kids and an infant in a shitty apartment in a suffering city, freaked the fuck out on them. She hit them and shamed them and made them clean up every granule, put it on paper and clean it, and then sort it back into a jar.
As an adult I can read that and think, “Wow. That sucked for everyone in that situation.” and I can also see how those children learned “spilling sugar means that you are a bad person” rather than “When life is very stressful, we sometimes freak out hard about things that seem much more important than they maybe really are.”
79 years later, my 47 year old ass is putting sugar into glasses for Turkish Tea and I spill a few bits on the counter. I feel a frisson and I choose to pause and turn to look at my grandmother as a young mother. I give her the same smile that I gave my mother when she felt upset that she'd peed herself. I say, “Whoops. That happens to everyone. It's going to be okay, we'll clean it up and you'll feel much better once everything is clean.”
Then I lick my finger and collect the bits of sugar and press them to my tongue.
This will happen again and again every time I measure sugar or put some in my coffee. This will happen in a thousand ways as I move through my days and the stresses of those who came before me rain down on my mind and body. All I can do is notice it when it happens and set a good example by being patient with those who went before and showing how I can deal gently with situations that have been very stressful. I can offer them an option and I can offer them comfort and I can refuse to shame them or accept any shame from them.
It's not as exhausting as it sounds. It becomes reflexive after a while. It makes life so much happier and while I don't have children, I do not exist in a bubble and I know that my skills and my traumas can be passed along to those around me. Life is rich and full of experiences. Noticing those experiences and being kind and respectful to them and to ourselves can make a huge difference in how much we enjoy and learn from them.