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.
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