What 2018 Taught Me About Healing From Family Trauma

Healing from Parental Traumatic Stress Disorder or Generational Trauma.

 

“Trauma can interfere with this reset( parasympathetic activity, sometimes called rest and digest, and the opposite of fight or flight response,) to baseline. PTSD may be viewed as a disorder in which the nervous system gets stuck in fight or flight response. Days, weeks, or even years after the trauma we remain stressed and hypervigilant. We are unable to relax, to sleep well, or to experience positive emotion…We walk through our days like characters in a horror film-tense, vigilant, consciously and subconsciously scanning the shadows for what we fear could emerge from them at any time.”

                        Daniel Mintie, LCSW & Julie K. Staples, PH.D -Reclaiming Life after Trauma

Late 2017 I declared 2018 as the year of my kick-ass life. I spent a shit ton of money on business coaching and dove into 2018 ready to be the boss I always knew I could be. I even announced to anyone listening that I would hit six figures in my business that year and changed my passwords to six-figure boss or some rendition of that. My coach, a half Asian, half-German woman who made a fortune off personal training businesses and building systems, taught me how to build a business framework and gave me a deep appreciation for automation. And I worked like a dog creating a business from the ground up because I had gone full-time freelance and super try hard. My business never took off.

By May this year, I had to take on a low paying call center job that sucked the life out of me and a job teaching ESL. You see, 2018 was not about upleveling my financial situation, the Universe had a different upleveling in mind. In the pursuit of prosperity, I had skipped a few important lessons about myself that were to be revealed in a raw and face down on the bathroom floor weeping fashion I have since come to learn as the universe’s way of getting my attention. 2018 was to be my kick-ass year indeed, and the ass to be repeatedly punted was my own. Instead of gaining six-figures in the bank, I was to be brought to the sixth level hell where I would face my demons and begin my true and purposeful healing.

I spent the entire 2018 from January to December in tears. I cannot honestly recall if there was a day that went by in which I didn’t cry. It was as if all the tears I had swallowed down with cheap wine and false bravado for the last 5 years, had finally gathered enough momentum to come pouring out of me, whether I intended for them to escape or not. I remember one particular incident in which I was having a normal conversation with my then boss by zoom and the tears started. At first, I was a tad embarrassed, but I switched the camera off and claimed technical difficulties. Soon after that though, the tears came out in such a torrent that I was incapable of speech and found myself gasping for air. The thing is, I can’t even remember what the conversation was about, but I knew it didn’t warrant the reaction I was having.

I also spent 2018 cutting most of the people I was surrounded by, out of my life. You see, throughout the years, as I got lonely, I’d pick up an acquaintance here and a guy friend there. I’d teach them it was okay to treat me badly and then I’d go back into hermit mode after losing my temper and my power. They’d stay away for a while, I’d hold space for them and then eventually they’d pop back up like nothing happened and we’d continue our warped little tribute to diminishing returns. At the same time, I was busy jumping through hoops to try to avoid my ex’s evil attacks on both me and the kids.  While bending over backward to be the good little family member, meditating, mantra chanting, positively affirming social media persona, all while drinking until I blacked out or crying myself to sleep. The thing is, it wasn’t like I hadn’t reached out to people for help, but whenever I broke down, the people around me got scared, distant and fearful of my overwhelming anguish. I had spent so long trying to appear alright that the sudden downward spiral was not something they were able or willing to handle.

 

By August,  I realized how truly alone I was, despite all the people around me. And one weekend after a bout of family drama that sent me panting on my bed, clutching my chest in fear of having a heart attack, I decided things had to change. I started by taking a sobering look at everyone in my life and began a process of debridement- removal of dead tissue. It had always been easy for me to make temporary incisions, removing acquaintances and friends for a time, but I would leave room for microorganisms, a text, an email, a phone call, to infect the site and so the infection would persist.

This time, I made the cuts more precise, more deliberate and I made the incisions deeper. This time, I not only removed nonessential appendages, low paying jobs, fuckboys who hung around wasting my energy, and toxic friendships but I also went inside and attended to the vital organs that were inflamed. I removed the toxic family members who directly and indirectly continued the trauma they had been gifted from generations of pain and further explored the deep veins of infection held in stasis by denial.

So by September, I was alone, completely alone. Only this time, it was by my choice and it held a purpose behind it. Facing the fact that neither of my parents had wanted children and the resentment they held toward us was the hardest psychological battle. You see, I had spent so long telling myself that if I just made something of myself, made enough money, became more than just a baby machine, they could love me. I was wrong. Neither parent had faced their own trauma, and neither knew how to love. Slowly, they had been equally withering away with time, breaking under the weight of their own demons, needing help and desperately siphoning energy from the children they could not provide with any warmth or true healing. In the process, they had created so much anger and resentment, so much divisiveness and hatred between the children they sired, that the only language we understood was the pain we inflicted on each other, our offsprings and ourselves.

Removing the temporary sutures of their recent and fragile declarations of love from my scarred, contaminated heart, I watched as pieces of rotten flesh painfully pulled away and the poison slowly drained out. This was the most harrowing of the procedures and at times, I’d black out from the fear and pain, certain that death had come to take me from my miserable existence. Only to wake up the next day, a touch sore but healing none the less.

They say time heals all wounds. I disagree. Time heals the wounds we tend to and the ones left to fester eventually kill us. Through deep inner work with a different kind of coach, I was able to see how much pain I held trapped in my body and especially around my womb. I was shocked at the shame I carried around my greatest achievement, that of motherhood. I learned how my lack of self-value was tied to a statement my father used to say to us often, that essentially reduced us to as useless as dead human organisms, worth nothing but a trip to the garbage bin. As well, I saw how I undervalued myself and invited others to do the same because I had internalized the sentiment. I learned how the mother-daughter dynamic of jealousy and resentment had caused discord in my own body and how eventually the negative energy would have manifested as cancer in either my ovaries, cervix or breasts.

I thought 2018 would be different and oh was it ever. I was poised to be a leader, but as Viola Davis said in her awards acceptance speech, ” I cannot lead from bullshit.” I did not make six figures this year, I never even came close. But what I did create was a safe space for myself, in which I could allow the truth of my life to be evident to me, and walk with boldness through the horror and the joy, toward my healing. My dad once selfishly said to me, when I tried talking to him about the effects of the longterm trauma, ” I guess it was all bad, I never did anything good for you.”  and I recognized his pain under the manipulative guise of anger, so I refused to respond to it. But if I were to respond today, with the benefit of hindsight, I would say: ” You know Dad, in your journey through the pain inflicted upon your own soul, you taught me how to feel. You taught me how to be strong and fight back and how to be caustic and uncaring, which at times was the only defense I had, from the cruelties I attracted.  You taught me the value of parenting because I never wanted my children to feel the pain you inflicted on my person and my psyche. I know you didn’t know any better Dad, and I don’t hold these things against you. But I cannot remain silent any longer. I chose you to be my father, before coming into this realm, because there is a purpose I must fulfill that is greater than all this. And you played your part well, so thank you for that. Now though, I must heal the pain and do the work I was created to do. And, if in the process, I can help you, or anyone else in my family to release the terror trapped in our DNA, then I would have done my work well also.”

Now, it’s December 2018, and I don’t cry as much as I did a few months back. I am still in solitude, which is necessary for my healing. And I have a long way to go before I can say I have completely forgiven the wrongs I perceive to have been done to me. I no longer wake up drenched in cold sweat, my body overheating and heart pounding against my chest from a terrifying dream that’s plagued me since childhood. And I finally understand the value of the road I have traveled up to this point and why I chose the path I did before materializing in this reality. I will continue my spiritual journey to a place of peace and joy. And I hope in the process, I will have lessened the impact of the trauma on my children and subsequently on the generations to follow them, and given them a road to a more peaceful daily existence.

With love,

N.