Intergenerational Trauma
“If you ignore the past, you jeopardize your future.”
Are people, even those who cause us pain, doing the best they can? After I started my quarter-life crisis and was going through immense psychological distress, I couldn’t figure out who was to blame. Why was it that so many people were broken and suffering and why doesn’t God help us? Why are there so many evil people in society? Why are we all so shallow? Is there hope for the marginalized? Why are there good people dying while evil people thrive? I spent a year and a half feeling quite sad and angry about the world and humanity. At first, I was angry at myself, then I was angry at my parents, then I was angry at God. I started to think about the past, how I got to where I was and why I was the way I was. I had recently started studying psychology and learned about trauma and how it alters our brains and bodies and thought about whether there were aspects of my childhood that affected me in ways that I was not consciously aware of.
One memory I reflected on was from when I was 7 years old. My dad treated me as a toddler far longer than healthy. He would put me in a baby high chair to eat so that I wouldn’t get up and walk around during dinner time. On most nights, my mom did not eat dinner with us, because she didn’t like being around my dad, but sometimes, she came out. She knew that it was not good for me to be in a high chair at 7 years old, so she tried to get me out. My dad began throwing a hissy fit and came over to argue as to why it was necessary. He got in my mom’s face and my mom pushed him aside a little to try and get around him. He didn’t like that, not one bit… He shoved her and a fight ensued. They bounced off the wall and chairs and my dad rammed my mom into a wooden shelf, injuring her neck. She scratched him with her nails and he threw her onto the ground and got on top of her with his fist raised above her fuming, breathing heavily with hatred in his eyes, threatening to smash her face with his fist. My brother stood up while crying and yelled, “STOP!!!!”, as he threw a crumpled napkin toward their direction, the only thing he could do. I started crying too. My mom went back to her room to hide per usual and we spent the rest of the night watching TV with my dad, who had a wet towel to soak up the blood coming from cuts behind his ear from my mom’s nails. In my family, we never talked about things and we never got apologies. We just watched TV and moved on.
My mom called the police the next day and soon after, they sent over a social worker to assess the situation. They sat me down with this random guy and my parents left the room. He asked a few questions and then he asked me, “Who do you love more, your mom or your dad?” I didn’t know how to answer the question and started crying. No one was there to help me process these things or tell me what was going on.
My dad, while a nice person, was seriously narcissistic and so he saw me as an extension of himself, so we had no boundaries. He would come into the bathroom when I was showering and look at me even into middle school. He was painfully oblivious to how he affected others and how others perceived him. He had a need to control his environment and the people around him. He was the type of person who would call you an idiot for doing something, but when he did the same thing himself, he would say, “Oops.” He was the type of person who would ask you if you wanted more food and when you said, “No”, he would put it on your plate anyway. He was the type of person who would touch you when you didn’t want to be touched where you didn’t want to be touched. When he was angry, he usually would yell, but sometimes, he would grab you or shake you or squeeze your arm until it bruised or spank you or threaten to hit you. My father treated me like a baby for my entire life. Because he and my mother had a terrible marriage, he used me as his object of affection instead. He literally called me, “baby” until I was 13, even when my friends were around which would piss me off. I would try to ignore him so that he would get the hint and use my name, but instead, he would continue calling me “baby”. “Baby. Baby. Baby!” and then get angry that I wasn’t responding, “Baby, come here!” It wasn’t until his friend told him that he shouldn’t be calling me that at 13 years old that he stopped. I also had to sleep in the same bed with my dad until I was 13 years old. When I was in elementary school, sometimes my back would be itchy and so I asked him to scratch it, but instead, he would rub my back sensually and imagine that I was a woman. My father had the temperament of an adolescent, a child trapped in an adult life. He would blow up at the smallest things and yell, “God dammit!!” all the time. He had ridiculous road rage and would spit on other people’s cars and would angrily scream at the top of his lungs at little league games. He would call my mom a stupid bitch or say, “Your mother is so fucked in the head.” Who says that to a child? He would say that he married the wrong woman and that he couldn’t stand her, unable to see that he was the repulsive one. He would say, “Don’t be like your mother,” but in my head I would be thinking, “I’d much rather be like her than like you.” I told myself that I would never become like my dad and virtually never got angry and suppressed my anger and care to an unhealthy degree, adopting a “hakuna matata”/“it’s chill”, careless attitude toward everything. This caused me to underestimate risks and navigate life in a reckless fashion in my adulthood.
My father took out his anger on my mother and my brother for his life not turning out the way he wanted it to. Given that my brother was the recipient of so much of my dad’s anger and bitterness and because my dad favored me over my brother, my brother was often mean to me and I cried a lot. Growing up as an Feeler in a household full of Thinkers made this even worse. The people in my household didn’t know how to process emotions healthily. We didn’t know how to hold space for each other or articulate how we were feeling. We didn’t know how to set boundaries. All we knew was anger and telling people what to do and giving unsolicited, unhelpful advice. There was never curiosity, only presumption and judgment. Living in an environment like this created toxic stress and that contributed to a troubled trajectory. I got into scuffles at school or did other rebellious things and was suspended from school more than 5 times from 4th grade to 8th grade, barely escaping expulsion—thank you, Jason Kurtenbach, for advocating for me! I put myself in various dangerous situations, e.g. falling asleep on the freeway and nearly driving into concrete barriers on the freeway a few times in high school and young adulthood and had a tendency to get into relationships with people who were toxic. My psyche was broken when I joined college and I was vulnerable. I joined a borderline cult and became a religious zealot. While it did help me find faith and purpose, it also caused me to develop extreme black-and-white thinking and guilt and shame and to become judgmental toward myself and others. I experienced many failures since and it has taken so many years to re-orient myself to the real world. I was not consciously aware of the degree to which my childhood was determining my present reality. I felt misunderstood, but the truth was that I didn’t understand myself, just like my dad never did.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate –Jung
There are so many things etched in my very being that I know not of. My mom is an INTP and also neurodivergent. When she was growing up, her mom would sometimes tell her to be more like her sister who was a model student. My mom always felt inferior. My mom wasn’t very good at communicating and she was quiet. People wanted her to talk more and be more expressive and social. Her mom and the nuns (she grew up going to a Catholic school in Japan) would berate her for not talking. Being different is hard and there were many hard and traumatic experiences that my mom went through after moving to America.
Before her lifetime, her parents had fled China when Mao took over, because they were aligned with the Republic of China. They had their share of issues too. My grandfather, Daniel, made bad financial decisions and couldn’t pay his debts. My mom has a vivid memory of creditors sending people over to their house to take all of their stuff away. She has a hard time letting go of possessions, even ones that should be thrown away.
My father isn’t the way he is for no reason. His dad would sometimes beat their mom when he was drunk and my dad and his brother would try to protect her. He was manipulative and controlling and and egotistical and had egregious anger issues as well.
There are ripples from the past etched into my DNA. They influence my every thought, my every decision, all of my attachments, emotions and my sense of self. This is what identity is, a culmination of all who have come before you and all that they have ever experienced, concentrated in one locale in the universe, your body.
The past is never dead. It's not even past. – William Faulkner
Sometimes, the people in my family saw my dad as monstrous, but monsters are really just small children trying to rewrite their past. We fear what we do not understand and recognizing that the real problem might be intergenerational trauma helps us to be less afraid and instead engage in meaningful dialogue with people who we are afraid of or who have hurt us. It allows us to transition from blaming toward collective responsibility. If we identify the real problem, we can plan a path forward together in truth and love. Curiosity > Judgment. My dad had a deeply broken ego and couldn’t take responsibility for his own mistakes. Was his behavior totally unacceptable, inexcusable, and sinful? Yes. Despite that, I believe my dad did the best with what he had. He tried to give us the best life possible and supported my brother and me in the best way he knew how. What else can we ask of people other than that they are trying their best? Are people, even those who cause us pain, doing the best they can? Yes, they are.