Into the Wilderness: Story 47
When you grow up in a family with rage, the violence festers inside you. It fuses with your genes, a biological link now passable to future generations.
I know this because I am the angry daughter of a furious man. I have borne a child who simmers and seethes; anger is a heavy clone leached alongside her. Rage has been her comfort practically since birth. At 5 months, she began fist-clenched tantrums, her precious face scrunched and red. She wanted something I couldn’t deliver. No one could.
Intergenerational trauma occurs when the consequences of psychological and emotional trauma are transmitted from one generation to the next. Transmission does not only mean nurture- i.e., the way a trauma survivor interacts in the physical world with descendants. It also has epigenetic components.
Simply put, epigenetics studies alterations in gene expression that do not alter the actual DNA sequence. These changes are expressed through behavior and can be passed from one generation to another. Science now knows that life-altering experiences, such as trauma, mutate genes creating inheritable features by future generations. In studies of survivors of genocides- such as the Holocaust and Rwanda genocide- descendants convey the emotional and psychological consequences of ancestors, such as greater incidence of depression, challenges with attachment and bonding and propensity for adverse life experiences. Science supports a causal, rather than consequential, relationship between parental trauma and generational outcomes.
Trauma actually damages the brain’s frontal cortex, responsible for reasoning, self- regulation, decision-making, planning and emotional expression. Damage is the key word. The brain’s ability to perform the functions it was developed to perform becomes more problematic for trauma survivors. This challenge is seen in children, grandchildren and so on.
Here’s what’s even more fascinating. Both mother AND father can pass on these changes. Sperm carries trauma markers just as a women’s ova does. If a mother experiences trauma while a fetus is in utero, the baby’s own brain is affected too. There’s so much ground breaking research in this area. I encourage you to explore it.
What does this mean? Trauma is not a singular occurrence. Trauma’s imprint continues impacting not only the survivor but their progeny. Think of this the next time you hear about war atrocities, school shootings and other forms of violence. Such incidents set off epigenetic chains of events lasting decades, if not centuries.
My father’s primary emotional expression was anger. This anger masked despair, depression, frustration and so many other emotions I never saw my father display. Anger was the stand in for most emotions. He was either in a good mood or he was angry. He had plenty to be sad and angry about when he was a boy. His alcoholic father abandoned his mother and him to build the Panama Canal. His father was gone for years. His mother personified the word “marm,” solely supporting her son by teaching elementary school. She was terrifying, standing enormous and broad-shouldered at 5’11” in her sturdy teacher’s loafers. Her broad bosom cast a shadow and her bun was pulled so tightly from her face that her eyebrows looked in perpetual surprise.
My dad’s parents believed in “spare the rod, spoil the child.” His mother disciplined with a wooden paddle, so I think my father became the high-performing son of a demanding mother. He graduated high school and college early with engineering degrees and married a women his mother liked. They bore 4 boys in 4 years and then his wife abandoned all of them. His mother never released the imagined perfect life. It was a mirage of time past.
Before he was 30, my father had divorced and deposited his motherless children with their grandmother. He had left for another state to begin a glorious career and marry the woman of his dreams, my mother. He was a rising leader, becoming a company president by 38. His position and his marriage lasted for more than 35 years. He eventually left the job to own his own companies and support my mother until she died at the age of 54. After her death, he never looked at another woman, though he had many clamoring for his attention. His love of my mother redeemed him.
His love of my mother muffled the sound of slaps and whips with belts and hand that we grew up with. This is the act of transmitting trauma like a virile virus. As the most rebellious child and the most traditional-seeming daughter, I experienced a this pain more than my siblings. I felt his anger and pushed against it like high tide on a sea wall: I had hoped to wash it away. Instead, the sea wall stood and my waves were flushed back into the ocean vastness.
How I fought the rages. I absorbed and repelled it, knowing how wrong it was and knowing I would end it. I did. I stood less than 3 feet from him, the belt in his had and told him, “it won’t work, you can beat me over and over and I’ll still do it until you see hitting doesn’t work.” He never whipped me again.
I knew he was doing what he had learned. The rage wasn’t toward me. It was from the absent father and domineering mother, both of whom instilled self loathing and inheritable trauma in my father. Those mutated genes joined and split to form me- a new life carrying their brokenness.
I broke the chain. I never hit my daughters. I tried always to listen and help rather than rage. Sometimes I raged with words. That was just as bad. I always apologized. And started over. Healing is an eternal wheel.
And yet… the chinks are in one of my daughters. I am teaching her – or trying to- that we can carry anger not our own. I am teaching her that we may not always know why we are angry, but we can do the work to find out, and we can heal anyway. We still have time. I am no longer the angry daughter of a raging father. I am a nematode regrowing the broken parts, regenerating genes of hope.
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