Letters to My Granddaughter #4 — The Trauma
Granddaughter, I fear I’ll pass down to you the trauma of living in my time… here’s how to deconstruct it.
I’m hearing a lot about trauma. For the first time in my life, it seems like it’s coming out in the open. That’s a good thing… but that conspiracy realist in me grows suspicious.
What is trauma? There are many definitions. Merriam-Webster offers a comprehensive definition for my purposes: I quote their dictionary:
“1. a: an injury (such as a wound) to living tissue caused by an extrinsic agent
b: a disordered psychic or behavioral state resulting from severe mental or emotional stress or physical injury
c: an emotional upset
2: an agent, force, or mechanism that causes trauma.”
Let’s start with the Greek root word, “wound.” The original definition applies more to 1a. Certainly, physical injury can be traumatic. And without a doubt, many of us living as humans in the present day are dealing with 1c, emotional upset. Both are valid and I don’t intend to discount them.
However, 1b and 2 are the definitions I find most interesting. Especially number 2.
These days, I’m cultivating a multi-generational perspective on trauma. From the research I’ve done and my life experience, it looks like each generation starts out with an imprint of ancestral trauma, especially from the grandparents and parents. Then, those children and emerging adults suffer through key events that imprint a generational trauma on top of it. Now they’re triple-traumatized. They imprint the trauma on their children. And on and on it goes.
Gen Z, Generation Z, or iGen — the internet generation — are the labels placed on my generation. My parents were Gen X, an educated generation that lived through intense socioeconomic instability and change. Their parents were Baby Boomers, referring to the wave of births that came after the Great Depression and World War II.
What were my grandparents’ traumas? My grandfather on my mother’s side fought in World War II. He was part of the attacks on Japan, the ones no one talks about or celebrates. Not only did he murder more human beings than he could remember, on orders from his superiors, he also witnessed the death of many friends. He never recovered from the trauma. While his alcoholism and violent outbursts only damaged his own body and the family’s property, the psychological impact devastated his wife and children. No one in the family ever felt safe. My maternal grandmother never admitted it, but I suspect she suffered sexual abuse. The weird relationship with sexuality she passed on to my mother could only result from that kind of trauma. I know little about my father’s parents, because he left us when I was five, and we never saw him or his lineage again.
My mother not only suffered from the trauma of growing up with traumatized parents, she also faced periods of great hardship. Raising me as a single parent was more than she could deal with. She never had another relationship or remarried and had only a handful of friends. Her relationship to relationships was deeply distorted. Mother was the stoic, individualistic type. She did what it took to survive, no matter the cost to her own soul or to me. I was on my own and she was never there for me. The way my mother created safety for us was to earn money. She was always in school, always studying and learning more to advance her career. She built a mote of material and financial security around us.
To fill the void in my life, I followed her example as a learner. I also did all the things that unsupervised young people in my generation did. I spent an obsessive amount of time on the internet and playing games on my phone. As a teenager, raves, drugs, back-ally violence, and closed-door rape were all a part of the lifestyle I found myself caught up in.
My family’s unresolved trauma and my own defined me. I built a complex and mysterious subconscious identity around the trauma, rooted in a psychology of fragmentation where my ego construct did whatever it took to protect me from re-experiencing that trauma. I became hyper-active, hyper-rational, hyper-vigilant, hyper-achieving, and hyper-independent to protect myself from becoming a victim again. When I was younger, I chose traumatized friends. We found solace in our community of fellow trauma sufferers. To numb out the fear and the pain, we took in whatever we could get our hands on. Our favorite addictions: adrenalin, drugs, entertainment, food, sex, social media… and, in my case, conspiracy theory.
It took me most of my life to understand what happened to me and to untangle it. Respect and thanks to my girl Elisabeth Hoekstra and her life-changing work on the “Bio-Hack Your Best Life” podcast. I wouldn’t be writing this article without that amazing resource.
So, back to definition #2 that I started with. What do I see and feel now? I’m convinced there is a force causing the trauma. It’s been causing the trauma throughout human history and “pre” history. The force impacts us on two dimensions to maintain its authority. And only a few of us see it. They have tricked everyone else into thinking that we are responsible for this.
Granddaughter, if it turned out that you inherited my trauma: I’m sorry, I love you, please forgive me, thank you. I’m doing everything I know how to do and using every resource at my disposal to deal with it. It’s so hard. I know I’m doing my best to break the cycle. Every generation does. I hope my efforts help to set your spirit free.
Lydia Taylor is a fictional character from a forthcoming novel series by Author Jeffrey Griffith.
