Trauma is inherited. You and I are still processing the pains of our forebearers. The pogroms and famines and wars and alcoholism and infidelity and sexual trauma and paper-cuts and bear attacks and everything else that everyone that came before you experienced is being processed in you and me as we type and read this. The only question is, how much of it can you, will you shield your children from (if you have children). Nineteen percent? Ninety-nine percent? Zero?
Spoiler alert, if you are secretly thinking “….thank God I never had children, it dies with me”, well, no, if you ever had friends and siblings growing up, you unwittingly offloaded some of that onto them. But don’t feel too bad, they did the same too! I guess it is all connected after all.
Ninety-nine percent? Really? I theorize perfectly empirically and without any basis at all that the normal range is somewhere in the ⅓ to ⅔ range, with an upper limit of let’s say 88.8 bar percent (bar means repeating to infinity if you are not a math geek like me). Why 88.88888….%? Of course, why not, but also because eight is a perfect number in some cultures and it is 8/9ths which is 2^3/3^2 which seems pretty cool. Oh yeah, and class of ‘88 rules!
I am processing my grandfather’s trauma of being kicked out of the house when he was thirteen and had to grow up super fast leading to an early death. Also mixed in there is the nearly decade of separation my great-grandmother endured from her husband as the drama of poverty and who knows what else played out with her in America with their first born and he still back in “the old country”. Vietnam, check. Alcoholism, sure, don’t we all have that in our family. Trauma, abuse. I even throw in some of my own like being mugged at gunpoint at 14th St. NYC only a few years after some other unstable person drawing a gun on me while I was on a date walking along the beach. How much of all this is my daughter now processing? Was I closer to the ⅓ or the ⅔ theoretical continuum? I know that without ever being said she knows I have tried hard to drive it towards that larger number. I have been transparent about my own mental health journey.
Why can’t we all be open about this? Why is only high blood pressure or type I diabetes allowed to be brought out into the daylight? I think there are three kinds of people, those that have done therapy, those that are committed to never do and those that have not really considered it. We all would benefit. We all would. I further theorize that it would be cost effective to do so. Productivity and creativity would sky-rocket, stacks of money would be saved on weapons and security gates and policing and disease management.
You either build schools or you build prisons. Similarly you either invest in therapy or pay for a lifetime for not having done so.
Hold yourself accountable, but do so with grace, humility, curiosity, and wonder. Communicate, speak up for what you need. Model the behavior you want to see. Volunteer at a local foodbank. I just sent off an email to the development coordinator at our local foodbank inquiring how to volunteer. Be the change. Spread the message. Spread the love to combat the trauma.
