The Cycle of Trauma & Violence
America – Land of the Not So Free, Home of the Not So Brave
Today is the day I experienced the biggest mass shooting in Maine and the largest one so far this year. The event was not far from my home, and as I write this, the suspect is still at large. This, after just a few months ago where a double homicide occurred 250m down the street from where I live. Three children were sitting in the back seat of a car and a man came up to the car and shot both their parents who were sitting in the front seat.
My feelings range from sadness and grief because I feel helpless to do anything about it. To anger and disgust with American society and culture as these murderous gun shootings have hit so close to my home. All the while, gun control laws have yet to be put into effect and all the American leaders have to offer are their thoughts and prayers, rather than policy and change.
Where does all this violence come from? Did the Cold War following World War 2 between democracy and communism turn into a terror war after 9/11? Why would someone actually follow through with a mass killing in normal everyday society where people are only trying to live their lives? And why would people in powerful government leadership choose war against another country, people, religion?
I realize these are big questions to ask with many possible answers. It just feels like the country I was brought up in and benefitted from is letting me down. I’m not feeling like being American means the home of the free and the land of the brave anymore.
Violence From Trauma Perpetuates Violence
Not many of us escape growing up without experiencing some sort of trauma. I even have a resistance to using that word. Because I associate it with things like military veterans, incest, being beaten by a parent and not things like emotional abuse, shaming, and missing the mark of our culture’s version of masculinity. Whichever it is, not many of us grew up in households whose parents did their internal and psychological work, so they didn’t pass on the generational traumas from the past.
Each man (woman) is a link, spanning a lifetime of all the images and traditions about masculinity(femininity) inherited from past generations and imparting—or inflicting—their own retelling of the events and tales on those whose paths they cross. Unresolved emotions of shame, grandiosity, depression, and others, often passes from one parent to their offspring, despite the parent’s best intentions, like a toxic, unacknowledged legacy. Conversely, when a person transforms the internalized discourse of violence, they do more than relieve their own depression. They break the pattern, interrupting the path of generationally inherited pains and emotions. Preventing them from being transmitted to the next generation. Recovery transforms legacies.
We have been trained to be good soldiers, to tough it out, and to swallow our emotions. To take the “dark path”, the grueling work of healing from these passed down events, is the courageous and brave path that not a lot of people are willing to take. Facing the reality of our pain, now,will keep it from being passed on to our children and allow for more compassionate and loving relationships. Because, don’t we want the legacy of physical and/or psychological violence to stop?
The Shadow of Masculine Invulnerability
One of the ironies around masculinity is that the very forces that help perpetuate the cycle of violence, keeps us from seeing it. Men are taught not to be vulnerable. To rise above the pain. To suck it up. Whoever is being brought down by pain and emotion will likely be seen… by himself, family, friends, and even mental health providers, as shameful. The potentially hidden issues of this kept secret of unexpressed pain are where many of the challenges lie in men’s lives. The problems society typically sees as issues: alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence, intimacy failure, and self-sabotage in physical care and professional careers… are mostly male issues.
A societal culture where cultivation of a stance of invulnerability exists will rob relationships of a wisdom — that people actually connect better when they expose their weaknesses. A vital part of intimacy is inviting the listener in by opening up and expressing one’s own points of vulnerability. To the degree to which we learn to “be strong” and to devalue weakness, compassion toward frailty not just in ourselves but also in those around us may be limited or even condescending. In this and many other ways, the loss of expressivity and the loss of vulnerability inevitably lead to diminished connection with others.
The Breadwinner, Caretaker and Performance Based Self-Esteem
The roles of men and women have changed greatly in our society in the last 100 years. The structural changes brought about by the industrial revolution changed the shape of the family unit. During previous times of family farms and cottage industries, households were organized equally around the tasks that served everyone’s well-being—cooking, education, tending the ill—and the production tasks needed for food production and clothing. There was no real distinction between family caretaking and family production. Philosophical role distinctions did exist—women were the tender souls most suited to care for the ill, and men were the physical ones to do the heavy lifting —in practical terms, the activities of men and women, adults, and children, even family members routinely overlapped. The daily life of the household was marked by enormous fluidity in roles.
As the industrial revolution took off, men moved to the growing urban areas. It was at this point where a great division began. Women and men began to engage in a deal, unconscious and pervasive, men agreed—for their and their family’s well-being—to relinquish many of their deepest emotional needs to devote themselves to competition at work. Women agreed to abandon many of their deepest achievement needs to devote themselves to the care of everything else, including their working husbands. The men became the breadwinners and the women became the caretakers and the cheerleaders in the family.
If relationship division and dynamics were then based on caretaking and breadwinning and men could not find his self-esteem in money, power or prestige, the caretaking work of the woman essentially doubled. Traumatized and emotionally depressed men have typically become angry, rageful, abusive, and violent. While the women turn inward and tend to blame themselves. And until things got really bad, the women would seldomly make a stand. Societies socially engrained proclivity where women avoid confrontation often provided a situation where her man’s deteriorating self-esteem and relational dysfunction may flourish and grow.
Getting Personal: Generational Traumas Hand-Me-Downs
I have witnessed my own family’s generational trauma being passed down from generation to generation. Sometimes I feel I am fortunate that there was no physical violence or sexual abuse in my family. However, abuse and trauma show up in a myriad of ways and not one is better or worse than the other. Without addressing how these behaviors and patterns effected our own life’s protective mechanisms, we will continue to perpetuate the same expressions into our own relationships and to our children.
The matriarchs on my mother’s side of the family enforced that you must follow societal norms and passed down the message you will never be good enough to their children. The patriarchs on my father’s side of the family succumbed to passivity, avoidance, deflection, and alcoholism to deal with negative emotions concerning relationships and life events. These messages and behaviors did not get addressed by individuals. Which then got passed down to their children as well. I am a recipient of these emotional abusive expressions through both, the generations and genders.
One of my earliest memories confronting these generational traumas was when I was about 6 years old. I can feel the anxiety I had when I knew I had to talk to my mother about her anger. I could not understand why I was brought into this world if mostly what I was doing was making my mother upset and angry. I was a little boy. My father was distant, emotionally unavailable, passive and did not stick up for me. He never confronted my mother about her anger and its repercussions. I remember him typically coming home after my mother so he could avoid all the drama he could, just like his own father did. When I was 11, most of my friends, including myself, were molested in the local high school locker room during the evening community open swim. When I told my parents about this, neither one did anything to protect me. It was then I realized I had to take care of myself because my parents would not.
My mother became the head of the household because my father had a hard time keeping a job and making a consistent income. She carries much resentment towards my father for this. She emasculated and verbally demeaned him openly to me. As if I was supposed to be taking her side. Being loyal to her and to the family was a cliche repeated like a needle on a broken vinyl record. I was too young to understand how my mother’s resentment was getting played out. What I did know was that a daily occurrence became anticipating my mother’s arrival home from work and wondering what thing would set her off yelling and screaming before she soothed herself with a couple glasses of wine.
There were a couple of things that became daily habits. To numb myself from the feelings of never being enough for my mother and the search for acceptance for who I am as a person and a man in the world. I numbed my emotions with daily marijuana use. When I became old enough I began chasing of women, turning them into my mother so I could feel the acceptance from the female form that I was lacking. These soothing habits distanced myself from my emotions as I experienced the rage, anger and screaming by my mother while my father stood by and did nothing.
It was the beginning of my marriage where I began looking at my own soothing habits and protective behaviors that were brought into my adulthood from these events of my childhood. My wife came from as much a tumultuous family as I did. Full of alcohol abuse, abandonment, and neglect. It was in my early 30’s where I began to learn and see how these generational traumas were passed down in my family and into me. My anger was getting the best of me, controlling me, and I had no idea what was going on. The generational trauma was passed down into me. I was determined to attempt to have a healthy relationship with myself and with others by facing these demons.
Lack of Connection, Empathy and Compassion
Any core issue that we have to face comes from family of origin issues growing up. When we experience a lack of empathy, connection and compassion from a parent growing up we develop unconscious mechanisms that shield us from the pain. My mother laid guilt trip after guilt trip on my brother and I. While my father was mostly absent and emotionally unavailable. I picked up my mother’s fighting approach to deal with family issues while my brother embraced my father’s avoidant tactic.
People who experience trauma from a lack of empathy and compassion, which is most of us do, will need help learning how to cherish ourselves and, ultimately, cherishing each other. There is an internalized dynamic of violence that sometimes will turn inward against ourselves when the feelings of our traumatic past are not acknowledged. And the violence of our expressed emotions can turn outward as an act of aggression when our unresolved traumatic issues are vulnerably open and apparent. When we decide to face into our issues and past traumas we must turn both inward, towards increased maturity, self-regulation AND outward to learn about increasing our relational skill.
Beginning to heal evokes the heart of valuing, caring for and sustaining… the relationship towards ourselves, towards others we are in relationship with, and even to care for the world itself.
Prone To Impose Our Pain
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
– James Baldwin
To the degree someone relies upon defensive patterns to numb and ward off their traumatic history determines the degree of abusiveness, or irresponsibility, towards others. It’s difficult, or impossible, to care for someone else’s needs because the energy is all going towards maintaining those defensive patterns. Even when the culture is established on performance-based esteem, these defensive patterns can be so compulsive, they get in the way of our functioning at work, connecting with people, and our love relationships.
I’ve seen this play out in my own immediate family and my extended family. One abandoning and manipulating parent trying to mold their children into something they are not. While the other parent remains absent and unavailable to both the relationship and their children. The generational trauma has kept perpetuating across three generations. There is no wonder while I have not had children. Out of my own relational fears.
I never thought it might be possible to have a fearless relationship. Without fear of intimacy, suffocation, loss, enmeshment, hurt, boredom, without fear of speaking my truth, without fear of change, without fear of the future, without fear of conflict, and even without fear of other people.
The opposite of fear is acceptance. And that is what any fears need to be replaced with. Not other people’s or societal values or dichotomies. A commitment solely to nurturing, supporting, and honoring three important entities in our lives: the two people in a relationship, and the relationship itself. No matter what it takes or however people will change.
Stopping The Cycle
It only takes one courageous person at a time to stop the cycle of silent suffering and sacrifice.
We are born innocent, pure, beautiful, honest, and in a state of oneness with each moment. As we grow up, our caregivers and others load us with baggage. Some of us keep accumulating more and more baggage until we become burdened by all the weight, trapped in beliefs and behaviors that keep us stuck. This is one of the reasons we have the problems we do in this highly competitive capitalistic country of ours.
In the family system, childrenare taught to be obedient to their parents, that mother/father is always right, and that they must be loyal and make sacrifices for the parents to whom they owe their entire existence. This philosophy transferrers to how the government demands loyalty, obedience, and sacrifice, until you have a nation of people violating their internal value system for the homeland. Functional parenting is the secret to world peace. And the only way to make functional parents, is to heal our individual psychological wounds with the same urgency that we heal physical wounds.
Healing these psychological wounds of the family and/or past traumas is not something we are educated about. Some of us keep walking around perpetuating and operating out of unconscious past traumas. The cycle never stops until we make the courageous effort to stop the cycle of pain and suffering.
The real purpose of life is to divest ourselves of all the baggage from the past. To become light and pure again.
THIS, is true freedom… by discovering our unique self and being true to ourselves.
