Facing Intergenerational Trauma

The first time I truly recall becoming conscious of intergenerational trauma, was listening to my Pog (grandmother) talk about all the things she could never forgive her mother for; for abusing her, for marrying her off at such a young age and taking the whole family and leaving to another village without a word, and for not treating her grandson like her own blood. “How could she do those things as a mom? My mom never knew how to love us. I can never forgive her. I will never be like her.” 

Sitting there as she pieced fragments of her childhood as if they were clear as day, I had realized, my grandmother was not just my grandmother, she was a whole person, a child, someone’s daughter, a woman, much before I ever existed. I was a mere scratch on the surface of her life. I know nothing about her, who she truly is, besides the vulnerable elder she appears as now. 

And ironically, the way she felt about her mother, is the very way my father feels about her. And as much as I love my father, appreciate, honor, and would never trade him, I feel very similar pains and resentment towards him too. 

It did not come full circle for me until this summer, when my grandmother had hurt my father deeply in a way that father had just weeks before, hurt me. For the first time, I saw my father make the connection himself, and apologized to me for his actions. That after having experienced it himself in tenfold, how awful that must have felt. That he was not going to continue a behavior painted by his mother. 

Since then, I have witnessed my father’s own awakening to intergenerational trauma, although he may not have the vocabulary for it. I have witnessed what intergenerational trauma is, how it seeps in our everyday lives, and how we really are just unhealed people, hurting one another as we try to love as best as we know how to.

They say there comes a point where every child starts to see their parents as humans. For both my father and I, that time is now. 

I am an imperfect daughter, a child who could never make up for the sacrifice, love, safety, quality, and intentional upbringing my parents have provided me. I will always be short of worthiness in comparison to them. So I write these words from a place of love and humility of what life has been teaching me.

Our parents can still be the best, the greatest, most loving, most sacrificing, and yet in their own ways, still have hurt or traumatized us. Simply because they are human. Because they were once someone’s child too. They are human, a soul who has walked through life trying to maneuver hurtful events as well. Because life is just a big story cloth of people crossing paths at different points of their life, different places in their healing, leaving marks on one another. 

We have much more in common with our parents and grandparents than we may think. Essentially, we are living the extensions of one another’s life. A repeat of similar chapters, a ripple effect. We only know better based on what they were able to learn, and what they have yet to learn or heal is our next generation’s mission.

For some reason, I didn’t think intergenerational trauma would pertain so much to me. But there is no way to do the inner work to heal one’s self, without tracing back and understanding the intergenerational trauma in your family.

Learning why your parents are the way they are, how they were raised, what obstacles they faced, and how they consciously or subconsciously internalized the cards they were dealt with, will teach you so much about your dynamics with them; how to depersonalize their behavior, and why you are the way you are as well. And how to forgive yourself, for all the ways you could not understand others, and yourself. You will come to see your parents (and people), in a distinctively new light; you will see them as hurt children, as confused, trying their best to survive and solve pain for themselves in the ways they know how. You will understand that they are just teaching you the best definition of life they were able to find, and that although they are your parents, they too, do not have all the answers, and did not have all the space and time to grow and heal before you. They too, have deep fears that cripple them and cause them to act in certain ways and make certain choices.

When you come to have this new view of your parents, you will come to have a new view of yourself, and how you’ve interpreted the world. You will struggle with shifting the blame between yourself and your parents, just to conclude that no one is to blame. Because no one can be blamed. No generation before us, knew better, to even purposely hurt is in these ways. Only we, the current generation, have the power to hold the most knowledge and use it to change.

For a long time, I wanted to kill these toxic parts of me. But I now realize that killing these parts of me, would be erasing my family’s history, their existence, and how we came to be. The very things I hate about myself, are the very things my father hates about himself too. None of us want these hurtful and harmful habits, to suffer the same patterns over and over, and get stuck in a cycle we did not choose to be born into. The one and only choice we have, is to end the cycle; to put a different variable in the formula so we can come out with a different result. 

We cannot control, change and heal others. But we can control, change and heal ourselves. And that is the very thing that changes the formula of intergenerational trauma. Once you shift your piece of the toxic dynamic in your family, you can and will make an impact in some way. It takes so much internal digging, practice, honesty, determination, and forgiveness. It’s probably one of the loneliest and scariest things you can choose to take on. And I see why many don’t do it, why we live our whole lives in avoidance. Because it’s comfortable and familiar, even when it’s painful. Because it requires us to confront our deepest fears, and to be compassionate in holding space for the fears of others as well.

But if you are taking on that task of being the cycle breaker, know it is a brave thing. It is probably the bravest thing you can do. Because to change that world, it starts in your home. Home is where we are most influential, positively and negatively. It’s how our perception of the world is created.

So be brave. Because healing is so much bigger than ourselves. Maybe we can take the pain, but our future children do not deserve that. 

One of my greatest dreams is to be a mom. With any other dream, I’ve always been confident that with hard work and consistency, I could do it. But this is the one dream that may or may not happen even if I gave it my all. 

So if I was ever blessed, I would want to do my best.

I realize how much it would really take to be the mom I dreamed to be. It will take so much more inner work and healing to change the history of my family, to heal our generational trauma as much as I can, so my future children will have less scars bled on them. 

I want them to know that mom did her best to change the world for them; so they wouldn’t have to grow up with the same battles.

And if the day I become a mom never comes, I still know I fought hard in this lifetime. By working hard everyday to be a better version of myself, and even in the moments I relapse, that I can trust myself and know the authentic me is here to stay. To find freedom within my own body, to experience life through my soul, and to learn to love myself and people through the formulas they were created by. Understanding that all of us operate from a core of fear and desires, planted and shaped by intergenerational trauma, from things we chose and didn’t choose, we would realize that we are all a lot more similar than different. Our ingredients to feeling loved and safe may be different, but at the core, we just all want to be happy, loved, and enough. 

Including our parents.