A parent’s abandonment has nothing to do with us : some reflections on carried multi-generational trauma

I thought of this idea this morning listening to a programme about someone who had a father who survived terrible trauma in Eastern Europe and went on to use addictions to cope and was emotionally avoidant and unavailable to the son. The son is now a pastor and works with others, and the question asked by the interviewers (there were two) was this, “Have you forgiven your father?” This question made me baulk somewhat as it was clear that the father was suffering through no fault of his own, just trying his best to cope not that skilfully with past trauma and that trauma was passed onto his son. Like many fathers of that time he did not speak of his experiences, Australian comedian Magda Szubanksi tells a similar story about her father who survived the resistance in her memoir Reckoning, as well as her quest to draw out the truth so to understand her own feelings and responses and her father more deeply.

It really made me think a lot about our own self centred view as children. How we interpret a parents inability to be there as possible due to something about us, we may be unaware of the losses, conflicts or struggles of our parents. We may carry great hurt, wounding and feelings of emptiness into later life. We may become addicts ourselves, hiding or avidly expressing emotional ‘neediness’. We may decide to pursue a path of ’emotional detachment’ something I was discussing with my therapist this morning.

However the truth is that as social animals with feeling hearts and bodies we are wired for attachment from the get go. Lack of bodily bonding with our mothers, skin to skin was something I raised in a post on the abandonment depression a few years back. This issue of connection and flow from child to parent along the generational line is also something multi-generational healing expert Mark Wolynn deals with in depth in his book It Didn’t Start With You : How Inherited Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How To End the Cycle.

Wolynn cites how he pursued a path of spirituality and emotional detachment in various ashrams until he woke up to the knowing that he had to go back home and seek to rebond with his mother. He then found out about the hidden trauma and ruptures in his mother’s life and was able to devise a system of healing through asking questions of client of their own parent’s trauma history shared and buried, obscured or gone mute.

Mark claims that the flow of love energy between a parent and achild can be broken or blocked along the line and that then leaves a task for the next generation. He cites the case of young man Jesse who woke up on his 19th birthday feeling cold and trembling with a great feelings of anxiety streaming throughout his body. When Mark questioned and explored the family history it turned out that Jesse had an uncle who fell while doing maintenance work on power lines in the dead of winter in Canada. He was found face down dead in the snow a short time later. After he died the family never spoke of him after, due to the pain and trauma but Jesse absorbed and carried inter-cellularly the trauma passed down. Jesse could have been unlucky enough to visit a psychiatrist who asked nothing about his father’s family’s past and been labelled with an anxiety or bi polar (which are not causes only symptoms of carried trauma). He was lucky instead to find his way to Mark Wolynn who was able to unravel the hidden threads of the family story.

Hearing the story this morning about the man and thinking of the question “where you able to forgive?” it struck me as fairly shallow in one way, how is a parent to blame for what happened to them? These days we take for granted the ability to process and question and explore the past influences and anti-cedents of our history but our parent’s generation (I was born in the 1960s BTW) did not have this luxury.

I actually cried in the car on the way home from therapy today after hearing this interview. I though of the pain caused to me by parents who tried their best to love but whose attention was often diverted. In the end it was up to me seek my own answers and the reasons why I too began to turn away from feeling safe in relationships and towards substances from my mid teens onward until the age of 31. Addiction recovery did not help me with the attachment wounds, in fact in the rooms and through friendships in AA many of them continued with others who struggle with their own wounds. I am glad I left after 10 years to pursue therapy which has helped as has reading widely and being lucky enough to have had many years of sobriety spent with my own mother after 1993 when I got sober talking to her about her own past emotional history.

Like my father I also went over to the other side of the world with my ex husband. I felt the deep soul connection to the land of my ancestors The United Kingdom and I travelled back and forth getting injured there again after my marriage finally hit the rocks in 2004. As I explore the role of trauma and emotional unavailability in other lives and families I see similar threads and what I see is that when we get stuck on issues of blame and forgiveness we really miss the point. Most of us act out of our history. This is not to say we should not take responsibility for, nor own our actions but it is to say that sometimes prior to growth in consciousness we don’t always seem to have that much control over them. Sometimes there is more to be learned from hurting and being hurt. And we must always work the best we can, when we can to keep the flow of love/healing energy moving forward through exchange. Having gone into isolation for so many years due to fear and overwhelm I know how damaging it is.

The deeper question is for me now is more about how open are we to reconciliation and to deepening understanding? Often the hidden root of things is not all that clear. Its important to Keep An Open Mind and to ask a lot of questions. It is also very vital to be able to be able to suspend judgement and be open to the capacity to wonder how life is and has been for others. What have they lived through? Where did they have to block or shut down in order to survive? What love was shown to them? What frustration of their true self did they suffer? And where in our family history did emotional cuts offs or unresolved trauma make fissues? We can also work to become more conscious of how we react out of misunderstanding that the cause of things often has very little to do with us and lays somewhere else far back in a past or in experiences we do not always have information about.