PERHAPS YOU ARE LIKE ME: WHEN TRAUMA NEEDS TO BE MET

Perhaps you are like me. These days I cry reading the news. Too many (what wouldn’t be too many?) people dying from COVID. People dying from unheard of high temperatures. Buildings falling down in the middle of the night due to lack of care. People being murdered, raped, and otherwise abused, often by those who are meant to be protecting them or upholding the law. Innocent children’s graves being discovered, uncovering massive cultural shadows. People hating or being afraid of other people whom they perceive as different from themselves.

I suspect you are like me. Awakening more and more to our own denial. Our own intergenerational trauma. People kill and deny and project hatred onto other people and the earth because of trauma. I have no doubt about that. Resmaa Menakem calls it “dirty pain,” when we haven’t done our work to process our trauma and instead unconsciously act it out, passing it on to others. (Learn more about dirty pain in relation to “the myth of race” in Menakem’s book, My Grandmother’s Hands.)

The unmarked graves of indigenous children at residential schools in Canada puts intergenerational trauma right in my face. I grew up in Canada, completely ignorant of this important part of my country’s history. I never heard anyone speak of these schools, although the last one didn’t close until the 90s, after I left Canada. This is not about the past. The trauma continues to enact itself through addictive and hurtful behaviors, as Dr. Gabor Maté makes very clear, and indigenous women continue to disappear, with officials taking little notice.

I suspect you are like me. My pain isn’t just mine. It is the pain of generations of ancestors who suffered and lived in the midst of ongoing threat. My body feels that pain. If I allow myself to, I can feel the fear, the terror, the rage, the despair, and the hope and love my ancestors carried. Their actual experiences were never spoken of. They didn’t tell their stories. But their bodies and actions did.

I have met survivors of the camps in Germany who also never spoke about the numbers on their arms, the atrocities committed around them and to them. Those who have been tortured, enslaved, raped, beaten, and abused in so many ways often learn to keep their mouths shut, to forget what is too painful to remember. They then act out their history, often on their children. Hitler’s father reportedly beat him and was drunkenly abusive to his mother in front of him. We have all witnessed the horrendous behavior that followed.

I remember as a student visiting a psychiatric hospital where sexually abused children had to be monitored every moment because little abused boys as young as six or seven would readily abuse the younger children. Twenty years later, a ground-breaking book came out. Out of the Shadows by Patrick Carnes revealed the trauma behind sexual addiction. Trauma is passed down within families but it is also acted out by schools, governments, religious orders and entire cultures.

 

People with black bodies have been treated as subhuman, enslaved, raped, beaten and more by white-bodied Europeans who came from cultures where children were beaten for being children, to be seen but not heard, where those having the wrong form of Christianity were tortured, not to mention (we don’t talk about it…) those with different sexuality or non-Christian beliefs. Hangings were not uncommon and being poor was almost criminal. I have been shocked by reports of how black parents or grandparents have “whupped” their children, just as their slave ancestors were whipped by white masters. Again, you can read about this in My Grandmother’s Hands.

The list could go on. Perhaps this is enough. What is denied or hidden in the shadows persists.

It is Enough!

Perhaps you are like me. It is enough! It is too much. It was too much for our ancestors. Now, finally, it is too much for us. I ask myself as perhaps you ask yourself, “What can I do to help?”

For me, the answer is the work I offer. I spent many years not attending to the news. It felt too negative to be useful. Now that I read it at least once a day, I am perhaps not as currently happy as I used to be, but I suspect I can feel more deeply. I can cry with my heart staying open in the face of yet more unnecessary abuse. I can send metta (loving kindness) to all beings in hopes that it may help. Perhaps I have more understanding now of why I have felt driven to do the work I do.

Acknowledging and Meeting Trauma

All of my work is about acknowledging and learning to be with our trauma. I believe the wounds passed down to us from our ancestors often take root in us during our formative time in the womb as well as in our early years. Little ones in the womb are preparing to enter their mother’s world. Genes are turned on and off epigenetically in relation to her perception and experience of her world as safe and nurturing or threatening and unsupportive. A grandmother’s stress, starvation or other duress, can be recorded in her genes, with their messages passed on to her children and grandchildren.

The mother’s emotional experience also communicates directly to her little one in the womb via biochemicals, contributing to the child’s prenatal sense of safety, love, and nourishment or threat, fear and toxicity.

Fortunately, we have arrived at a time when trauma therapy doesn’t have to be as overwhelming as it used to be. Starting with awareness, we can begin to acknowledge what hurts, within ourselves, within our communities, within our world. With awareness, we can make more conscious choices, including cleaning up our dirty trauma.

In view of the news, which isn’t really so new, I can appreciate even more the importance of supporting those becoming parents in processing their own traumas so as not to pass them down so readily to their children. I hope every birth practitioner can address their own wounds, that every teacher, religious leader, government official, and anyone else who has any influence on anyone can awaken to the essential urgency of doing their own trauma work before they create any more news in a world that is already overwhelmed.

Perhaps once we have acknowledged and met our own deep inner hurts, we can remember that we are actually not so different from each other. Perhaps we can find our way to love one another and our great Mother Earth. Perhaps we can stop perpetuating the pain.

Apparently, in ancient Sparta where all men were expected to be soldiers, babies were examined and bathed in wine instead of water to ensure they were tough enough for their Spartan world. Those deemed weak were abandoned. How we treat our babies affects how they will treat theirs in the future, as well as how they will be with other people. Do we want to live in a Spartan world? Or a world that is open-hearted, loving, and welcoming to whoever we happen to be? What is your vision?

We can learn from our ancestors not only about the pain they endured but also about the resilience that enabled them to survive. We have the potential now to examine more closely who we are and how we can welcome and meet ourselves and each other more fully.