Breaking the cycle

 

What is generational trauma? It’s the undealt with trauma that passes through families and generations until it is dealt with. Carl Jung once said “I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there is an impersonal karma within a family that is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished.” 

 

Being a parent who comes from generations of grandparents and parents who have a trauma background, who also has a significant trauma history myself, makes life so hard. Life feels impossible to navigate and live through sometimes. Stopping generational trauma in its tracks is overwhelming, and it feels like you're holding back this dam full of water. And the thing with generational trauma is that it's not just my past and my history that I'm dealing with. I'm dealing with generations of trauma. Generations of things built into genetics that are actively playing out in my body and my brain. I'm dealing with grandparents and parents who have never dealt with their own trauma, and the ways that they choose to live their lives and interact with me and my children. I'm dealing with my own trauma background and healing from those events in my past.  I'm also dealing with my kids’ trauma that I have passed on to them. Things that I have possibly done to them as children while I was stuck in my own trauma that I was not aware of yet and I didn't understand the full potential of what I was doing. Genetics that I have passed on to them because they were passed on to me by my parents and grandparents. The things that I did not take care of before they were born, were passed onto them. My kids did not ask for this, they did not ask to be born. I chose to bring them into this world & impose upon them all my “stuff”.  So, dealing with generational trauma feels a lot like you're holding back a dam full of water but on both sides. It's like you're being crushed from everywhere. It’s unbearable at times and completely suffocating. You're holding back all your stuff from the past while trying to stop all the things that you've passed on to your kids in their tracks and help your kids heal and be better and healthier human beings moving forward. While trying to hold all this back, you are trying to deal with your own stuff. you're trying to heal your own wounds, parent yourself, and change the neural Pathways of your brain and your genetics so that you don't keep doing the harm that has been done in the past by you and by previous family members. It's exhausting. I'm exhausted all the time. 

 

I feel like I walk around every day with a massive boulder on my back, and I'm so withered down that the simplest things stop me in my tracks. It's humiliating to run into other professionals, teachers that my children have, people from church, etc. who expect that I should be able to do basic normal life things. Things that I'm not doing as well as I should. I walk around masking all the time but feel completely incompetent in most of what society expects me to do. 

 

What I wish people could see is the absolute mountain that I carry around daily. I wish that they could have an outline of the past few years of my life and see all the different battles I'm still fighting, and all the demons that I'm shutting down, holding back, and trying to change into something completely different. These bigger unseen things feel like I have no choice but to deal with them and fight them. They are massive and in my face all the time. They haunt me, they show up in my dreams, they consume my thoughts and worries, and it feels impossible to see past them. I feel like I work so hard to keep everybody afloat, and everybody alive, that there is no actual time to live life. So, when it comes to just basic everyday life, basic needs, and what most people consider normal behavior, I can't keep up with it. Keeping my house clean, making sure my kids get their homework done, making sure my kids who also suffer from mental illness are showering or brushing their teeth, attending church, and participating in that area of my life… all of these things society sees as basic and easy to do things. But I can't do them consistently. I also can't go around explaining to people or showing people the burden that I carry every day and why I can't behave in these “normal ways” they feel like I should be able to behave. It's not appropriate to wander around telling everybody I come in contact with about my childhood trauma, or the ways that my immediate family has been traumatized in the past few years, or how I’m so depressed that I don't care that I’m not getting out of bed, or that my kids don't do their homework, and I don't care that I haven't gone grocery shopping in over a week and there's no food in my house, and I don't care that my house is a mess.

 

I wish the healing work that people spend their lives doing was more apparent on the outside. Like you know how when you download something & there is that bar that shows up that shows how complete the download is…. I wish we had something sort of like that following us around so we could see our own progress. So that society and others can see how hard we are working & see that we are in fact doing things. So that we could measure our own worth based on how hard we are working to heal ourselves and our families, and not by how good we can “fake it” to the world. I wish that this progress bar was present all the time, so we aren’t expected to have to ask for help or fight so hard just to be seen and treated with grace and compassion. Asking for basic common courtesies, for help, or just to be treated as a human being can get so exhausting…. Why is it our burden to have to prove that we deserve these things, instead of just being a basic human right? 

 

The author of the book titled “It Didn’t Start With You” is Mark Wolynn, he says “The healing we do in ourselves becomes the healing we bring into the world”. This is my goal. To be a better human! To be the best version of myself, to be a better spouse, mom, friend, and fellow human that I can to everyone I come in contact with… but most days I feel like I am losing that battle. The battle feels too hard when the only thing I feel like I can accomplish is maybe holding up both sides of the dam that feels like it’s doing its best to crush me.

The Luxury of Being Allowed to be Depressed

 The title of this feels a little bit like dark humor, although it's not. If I were to say this out loud I would probably be saying this to someone with a little bit of a smirk on my face because what will become of us if we cannot make light of, just a little, of our own mental health struggles. However, in this context, I really do mean what I say. It is a luxury to be allowed to be and feel depressed when that is the emotional state we are in. 

It is a luxury to have a spouse that allows you to feel depressed. I don't really like the use of the word "allow", but if I am being honest that is how I have experienced my depression in relation to other people. I never felt like those around me would allow it, would allow me to acknowledge and feel my depression. I spent my life masking & pretending to be someone completely different than who I really am. The people pleaser in me learned at a very young age that if I was happy, joyful, uplifting, and making sure the people around me were okay then I was accepted. I was good. I was not going to be abandoned. I was safe. Depression was that awful thing lurking in the background, in the shadows, that broke through every now & then when I let my guard down. The fight I had to fight to shove this giant monster back into the shadows was so exhausting, and not something I could handle doing very often, so I got good at just never letting my guard down. Never acknowledging what I was actually feeling. It's crazy that I put all of this effort and energy into never being abandoned, left, or unsafe, and this whole time I was abandoning and leaving myself on a daily basis. I was doing the very things to myself that I spent all of my time trying to prevent.

Back to that word "allowed". Why aren't we allowed to feel what we feel? To acknowledge what we are feeling & experiencing? I personally feel it's because it makes those around us uncomfortable. There was just no room in my life for anything that wasn't making everyone else happy and comfortable. It also makes us uncomfortable... to feel sad and alone in a world full of people. That feels like a problem that can never be solved. Like you are the problem and there is something so fundamentally wrong with you and you can never be fixed. In my eyes, the "fix" to the problem was all around me, I was always surrounded by people. I should have been able to be fine. But I wasn't. So if the perceived "cure" couldn't cure me, then there was no hope. There is also the acknowledgment of just how depressed we are when we allow ourselves to really feel what we are feeling. I don't like that version of myself. I don't like looking in the mirror and seeing her. Allowing myself to really see my depression is like looking into the eyes of my "shadow self" and really seeing her. Telling myself that if I am going to heal, I have to learn to love her too. Learning to love this shell of a person who hasn't showered or washed her hair in days, has bags under her eyes, can't get out of her sweats, and has no willpower to exercise or eat healthy. She is exhausted all of the time, she can't stop crying and it's a real struggle to get out of bed. I look at myself in the mirror in this state and I usually can't stand myself. Having someone who will stick with you in this state, someone who can stand to be around you even when you can't is a luxury!! 

What happens when you lose the ability to keep that monster in the shadows? Because it will happen. I don't care who you are. It doesn't matter how much money you make or don't make.  How much education you have, or don't have.  How much time you have spent making all the right decisions, ect. Life will eventually pummel you to the ground. There is no escaping it. If you are lucky it will leave some shreds of who you used to be as a person, but you will come out of that pummeling unrecognizable. It is not sustainable to be masking & pretending all of the time. At least for me, it wasn't. I just couldn't do it. 

I have a spouse that allows me to acknowledge and feel my depression. It is hard to put into words what this does for me. To be able to say to the person who I am the most worried about abandoning me that "I'm depressed and I'm just not handling life great right now", It's like I've been buried alive and he's digging me out. To be able to have this side of me seen and acknowledged is like being alone in suffocating darkness, and they shine a light on you. When you have a spouse who can say to you in these moments "What can I do today to make your day better" or "Thank you for letting me know what is going on" or "It's completely reasonable for you to be feeling this way". For me, these are some of the most healing things that he can do to help me pull through. I no longer have to work at belonging, I am accepted. There is a difference between belonging and acceptance. I spent most of my life masking, aka trying to fit in and belong. Saying exactly how I am feeling when I am feeling it and having my spouse love and support me through it.... that = acceptance. 

Allowing my depression to be someone in the room that is seen and acknowledged allows me to use less energy to manage my depression and to use less energy to recover. I recover faster. My episodes don't seem to be as low or last as long. There is not this mountain of anxiety lurking in the background wondering if he will notice I'm not okay, or if he will be annoyed that I am not my bubbly, happy self. I have openly acknowledged that I am not okay, and he has openly accepted that. We work together as a team to do what needs to be done for everyone to feel like their needs are being met. There is no judgment, resentment, or blame being thrown. Just acceptance of where I am at and where he is at. This also allows me to not be so defensive, and to be able to see outside of myself to understand and acknowledge just how much he does for me, and for my kids. It's easier for me to be able to see how I can help him, even through a lens of depression. I don't have to be 100% okay in order to be helpful, and he is willing to accept what I can give. He is grateful for what I can give him in these moments, and it helps heal me when I have something to give that is accepted. 

I will forever be grateful that we have made it to this point in our relationship. He lifts me up and helps me to want to be a better person. 

Losing friends

 The world doesn't talk about how to break up with a friend. No one talks about how painful it is to have to walk away from a good friend, or how much it hurts to be left by a good friend.  There is so much focus on how to break up with a partner, and how to grieve and move on from those types of romantic relationships. But no one really talks about what to do with the grief of losing a friend.  It's normal for someone to struggle through a breakup of a partner, there is sympathy and understanding that come from the world around us. But if I was honest with the world around me about how I struggled to get out of bed, and how I was dragged down into a deep depression because I had to make the choice to walk away from a friend, everyone would look at me like I was crazy. 

Friend relationships are different from romantic ones, but that does not mean that they mean less to us... it's just different. There are different levels of friend relationships too. There are regular friends that we get along with and interact with on and off, and they come and go but it's not really painful. That connection is much more of a surface connection. But close friend relationships are on a different level. These people have been allowed into your safe spaces and they have been allowed to see parts of your soul. They "get you" and they accept you for who you are at any point in life. 

I think it's a little unexpected how hard it hits you when you have to let a friend go. I think it's the actively choosing to let them go that really makes things hard. If you are letting them go, you are already at some place of acceptance that they are just not anything that is good for you. For someone like me, choosing myself over someone who I cared about and who for a long time I believed cared about me, is not behavior I am used to or comfortable with. Willingly causing harm to another person for the sake of my own mental health has never been anything I have been interested in entertaining until recently. And then there is the major fear that "What if I am not actually causing them harm? What if I made everything up & it was all in my head? What if they never cared for me the way I believed, and my leaving them doesn't phase them at all?" I don't know what's worse.... causing harm to another person, or learning the awful truth that they never cared for you to begin with. Maybe this is why we stay in relationships and friendships that do not serve us, because the rejection we would face when we stop and look at the truth would kill us. We would rather exist in a pretend world where we are being used and exploited, just to feel a shred of acceptance, even if it's fake than to accept that we are not wanted by the people we believed cared for us and that we put so much of ourselves into. 

Maybe I just get too attached to "my people". Maybe I just need to learn to connect on a more shallow level. Then losing people wouldn't be so painful. Rejection wouldn't be so painful. Maybe if I was less invested and connected I'd be less surprised when they turn out to be completely different people than who they were showing me they were for years. Maybe I just refuse to see anything other than the good parts of people so I am always proving to myself that I have made a good decision and that I am safe. Maybe I am the problem. Maybe....

Who really knows though. It could be any of these things or all of them. Every relationship is 2 sided. I can only control my side of things. I can control how I act, and react, and how I choose to treat them and myself. I can choose to analyze what I feel went wrong and grow from a hard experience. I can choose to see what was good, and how this relationship helped me and benefitted me, even if its ending is painful. There was still some good, even if I don't fully know the intentions of the other person. I have learned and been taught and made changes that have helped me become a better person because of this relationship. Now that I am choosing to walk away, I am also learning from the pain, and making changes that will benefit myself and the people I choose to stay in contact with going forward. There is always something to learn. 

Making the choice to leave a toxic relationship, whether a friendship or a romantic relationship, is a courageous act of self-love. It is scary to step out onto that ledge for the first time and to actually stay away. I always thought that the leaving part is the hardest, but I am finding that "staying away" after you have left is much more difficult. That is where resiliency comes in. Leaving in a moment of courage, or frustration gives you a boost to do what needs to be done, but that boost doesn't last. It's during those calm, quiet moments of reflection that really test your strength and courage. Resiliency is built up in those moments when your nervous system and brain are saying "Oh shit! I messed up. I overreacted. Things weren't really as bad as I imagined them to be. I need to apologize and fix this. ect...." The continuous choosing of ourselves over the other person in these moments is what will build resilience and self-love. The constant thoughts of questioning ourselves get a little quieter every time we are successful in staying away and choosing ourselves. The constant need for reassurance, acceptance, and validation from that other person slowly starts to fade. Reassurance, acceptance, and validation from ourselves start to become enough and all that we need. That magnetic pull we feel, that is our brain trying to get us back to the level of toxicity we were existing in with this person because that is what we are used to, slowly starts to lose power. With every small battle like this that we win, we are one step closer and it gets easier to win the war.

It is exhausting, life feels heavy, and this path is full of anger, frustration, depression, and sadness. Never underestimate the powerful connection that comes from having a good friend in your life. Give yourself grace in these moments. Validate yourself, and acknowledge how hard it is to lose people you cared about. Losing connections like this changes us in ways that will stay with us forever. One cannot simply get over it and move on. You have to find a new path and a new way of existing in the world. It just takes time.