Trauma Across the Generations
When I was six years-old, I thought I had made a shocking discovery. Upon cutting my finger with an sharp object I have no recollection of and seeing drops of blood appear on my skin, I theorized that the human body had blood all over it. From the top of your head to the tip of your toes, blood moved across it for some reason. Three years later, in third-grade science class, I looked at a textbook illustration of the circulatory system. It took me back to my hypothesis that something inside us allowed for the distribution of blood throughout our bodies. I was proud of my inquisitive mind, but disappointed that someone already figured it all out ages ago.
I am narrating this anecdote merely to illustrate that sometimes we come up with explanations for phenomenons that have already been meticulously documented for years. Just like the circulatory system, the idea of intergenerational trauma — the passing down of trauma from one generation in a family to the next one — appeared like a breakthrough to me. Later, however, I read psychological and philosophical inquiries that corroborated my suspicion: it is possible for unresolved trauma to travel from grandparents to parents to grandchildren.
My father doesn’t talk often about his childhood, but some of the few stories he has shared are quite poignant. In addition to material hardship, like not being able to afford new shoes for gym class or having to abandon his studies to help his father and siblings work their plot of land, he remembers the sharp silence that invaded his household when his mother died of cancer when he was barely eight years-old, leaving behind twelve children, half of them minors. He recalls an absence of grief and an unemotional father who kept his feelings to himself and barely spoke to his children for decades to come. This attitude was not simply an individual way of dealing with his wive’s death — my grandfather was alive at a time when the patriarchy was stricter about men displaying emotions and showing any signs of weaknesses to people they had authority over, like their children.
On the other side of the family, my mother had to deal with a father that was mostly absent, gone to work for long periods in seasonal agriculture in California. When he was present, however, he was just as cold and distant to her as my paternal grandfather was to her father. My mother at least found love and affection in my grandmother, a woman who had to raise twelve children mostly by her own, often improvising when the money earned abroad that her husband sent wasn’t enough to afford groceries. A woman, by the way. who similarly had as a child gone through long periods without seeing her biological parents because they were working in the city.
My parents are much better at communicating with their children, and, asides from a couple of years when my dad also held seasonal jobs abroad, they were there for us all the time. However, their trauma stayed with them — I feel it when my dad struggled to express his emotions as he was dealing with intense depression and anxiety; I feel it when my mom speaks of feeling inadequate because her father never valued her as father should. I feel it on me when I hesitate to tell them important information about myself for fear of rejection — an unfounded fear, most likely, but one that thrives nonetheless. I feel it on me when instead of scheduling a therapy appointment I type about the heavy hesitation and distance that have persevered in our family for a very long time. The ability of feelings to travel across time periods and human beings so seamlessly had me wondering if this could have somehow been avoided, perhaps…
