I remember the first time someone described for me the idea of inter-generational trauma. The concept that the pain of our parents and our grand parents, and even our great-grands affects us by altering our very DNA. The smooth twisting strands suddenly showing minor splits and fractures, not unlike a zoomed in image of split hairs that we try to pretend don’t exist by piling on huge amounts of conditioner and post-shower products.
We pass those fractures and splits and broken bits onto our offspring, and they then onto their offspring.
Alcoholics create people with other dependencies. Abusers create abusers or people who accept abuse from others.
What about the opposite?
I witnessed today. I stood, and I witnessed the power of the opposite. What happens when two families who have dedicated themselves to our Lord Jesus and to God and to their Faith, who have tons of kids but *love* is the dominating force that directs their parenting – what happens when they join hands in marriage.
It’s powerful. It’s moving. It’s hopeful and hope filled.
For months now, years even, I’ve been quietly observing a beautiful young woman and a beautiful young man do the dance of love. Of finding one another. Of disappearing into secret smiles, of private joys, of shy sharings with those who care for them. Beautiful human beings who were raised in beautiful, stable, loving families.
This isn’t to say perfect – life is never perfect and everyone experiences pain. But pain is not trauma, and a stable family appears to beget stable human beings.
To me they are like the beautiful tropical birds of the Costa Rican cloud forests. Brilliant and rare, exquisitely made. You can’t help but to admire their God-given ability to make one smile and marvel at the life they must live. Again, not perfection, every life, even a bird (perhaps especially a bird) has pain. But like a bird, some families who walk this earth have retained a kind of pipeline to God, a connection, a thread of confirmation that what they believe and how they believe and how they behave will influence and draw upon the rest of the masses of humanity and draw us to them.
I admit. I am drawn. I am puzzled. More than a little lost. More than a little sad. It’s like watching a brilliant dance lit from all sides by the sun… from the edges of the darkened forest. You want to reach out into that sunlight, to feel its warmth, to belong there but so, so fearful that you will be sent back into the darkest of glooms because of your own brokenness.
When I think of beautiful relationships and marriages, I can’t help but think of my own parents. My mother and adoptive father who cherish each other, who love one another quietly, modestly, but ever present. He is always there for her. She could not walk through her day without him.
Without realizing her own actions, my mother is healing our own family’s passed-down trauma.
At my job, we have been working on healing and reconciliation. I’ve barely dipped my toe into the deep waters of questioning and wondering, but some of what happened through a Zoom-linked drum circle still stays with me. For all of my cynicism, I can’t help but to admit to being affected by the lessons and the imagery.
One such lesson was a meditative period wherein we focused on those who came before us. Picture a line backwards into history of your mothers, mothers-mothers, grand-mothers, aunties. Picture a line backwards into history of your fathers, fathers-fathers, grand-fathers, uncles. Hands upon each others shoulders…and they each have a hand on your shoulder as well, for they have formed you. I rejected the lesson at the time. What a lesson, I told myself, I don’t know my father. I don’t know my history. Half of this lesson is wasted, and the other half is also wasted. So many broken threads. Why bother? No one wanted the children that came from them.
And there. Is the lesson to reflect on.
My assumptions about my grandmother who abandoned my mother. My assumptions about my father who horribly abused my mother, kidnapped me, and died on the streets as a homeless and hopeless addict. My assumptions about who created him. My assumptions about who created her. My assumptions, then, about myself and my own failed relationships, the men who hurt me from long before I had any agency for myself and thus removing my ability to ever effectively advocate well for myself… until I had my own children and my mind held up a giant red stop-sign and said…. NO MORE.
My older brother is more generous than I. He has been seeking out our family, trying to repair fractures and find a common thread. He has been teaching me what forgiveness really means. To reach out a hand, with love, to all of those others in our line who are broken. Who are alone. Who are abandoned.
I want for my own sons what I witnessed today. A beautiful bride who looks upon them with shining, unclouded eyes and demands nothing less than equality and love and faithfulness and fidelity. I want my boys to be worthy. I want the brokenness that is poisoning my own blood to stop with me and give my boys a fighting chance at a beautiful and lasting love, such as that witnessed today.
Somehow, I want to heal myself and offer a pathway into a healing journey to others who have lived a life in the shadows, puzzled and skeptical and cynical about the beauty of those who are privileged to have been raised in families who’s inheritance is love. Truly love. For we all should be seeking that light. We all deserve it.
God wants his children back. Even those of us who feel tainted. Even those of us who feel unworthy. Even those of us who inherited generations of pain and brokenness and know no different. We too belong, and marriages so suffused with light and hope as the one I was able to witness today should give all of us hope that we also belong.
Oh. And there’s something totally interesting and weird about being the single, separated/divorced woman wearing a totally whistle-worthy dress. 😉 hahaha.
May God bless you. and keep you. And may your dreams tonight be suffused with His light and His hope so that you waken and find yourself on a pathway of healing.