looking back
“Knowing your generational story firms the ground upon which you stand. It makes your life, your struggles, and triumphs, bigger than your lone existence. It connects you to a grand plotline.”
― Cicely Tyson, "Just as I Am"
Generational Trauma
the family story
Each life is unique and complex in its own right. The span of our experiences is a mix between the mundane and the dramatic; the down-trodden and the inspiring; the stagnant and the energizing. And everybody has a story to tell.
The lives of family members who lived before us were no different. The earliest families of the frontier faced unimaginable hardships, many of which were never recorded or even spoken about. And yet, their stories still exist, as they ultimately led to events of something else, which in turn, led to something else, and eventually, this very moment. Through this continuum of time and space, we enter life as an intricate replica of those who came before us, yet as a newer version and with our own perspectives on life.
When stories go untold, the deeper truth doesn’t dissolve, but instead, continues to flow through the bloodline, determined to make itself known. Using any means possible, a deeply buried truth will eventually rise, often appearing as fate or fortune. When really, it’s just nature.
“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 were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It always seemed to me that I had to…complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished.”
-Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
"If you know where you’re coming from, it is harder for people to stop you from where you’re going."
— Matshona Dhliwayo
unfinished business
Researchers suggest reviewing three generations of family history in order to determine when and how generational traumas may have originated, as well as the deep-rooted patterns we may find ourselves living within.
Sometimes the impact of tragedy is too great to be dealt with in one life time. So its effects ripple through the bloodline as fragments of traumas to be resolved over time.
In the book It Didn’t Start With You, Mark Wolynn writes, “When someone in our family has endured unbearable trauma, or has suffered with immense guilt or grief, the feelings can be overwhelming and can escalate beyond what they can manage and resolve” (p. 22).
When our pain becomes too big, it’s in our nature to avoid it. We decide to keep moving, keep planning, keep earning, keep doing whatever it takes to ignore the pain. Although this is may alleviate the pain of the moment for us as the individual, it also blocks our true and deeper expressions, which unknowingly stunts our healing process.
Pain that is deeply buried will continue to exist within the family story until it can find a pathway for expression and resolution. That expression is found in the generations that follow and can resurface as symptoms that are difficult to explain (Wolynn, p. 23).
A-Ha moment
After I read this part I knew right away that it was me who had been assigned the job of resolving a multitude of traumas in my family line. After all, I was the only one left, and my pain was too great, my circumstances too extreme, for it to be mine alone. I was also reminded that whatever I couldn’t manage would be passed down to my boys, and I was determined to take on as much of that load as possible.
My curiosity peaked and I developed an obsession for hunting down clues or details that would tell me more about the events that were necessary in order to bring me to life.
A Family’s Story
once upon a time, there lived…
a daughter of the Cherokee tribe, kidnapped and thrown into slavery;
the son of a renowned grist mill engineer, who discarded his pregnant mistress;
teachers and missionaries who lived among Cherokee and Iroquois tribes;
Revolutionary war heroes like Capt. William Sumter and Capt. Thomas Carter;
soldiers who fled, fought, or died in the Civil War;
men who crafted the naval ships in Norfolk for WWII;
faithful Baptists by day, who became violent drunks by night;
a handful of daughters who broke social codes and Jim Crow laws;
one whose mother could never forgive her;
an adored woman whose hometown established a day in her honor;
a father who sent his daughters to the workhouse;
a sister who knew her brother’s dark secrets, and would receive shock treatment for hysteria;
a husband who possibly murdered his wife;
and a wife who possibly murdered her husband.
When the wild nature of these stories gathered and swirled in one place, it was right here in my body.
These are the stories of my ancestors.