The other day I put out a tweet making a case for how I believe parents can pass the healing they have undergone on to their children. I’d like to elaborate on this thought. A person once told me that they were afraid that, because they had experienced abuse in their life, they were afraid that they themselves might become abusive in the future, towards their spouse or their children, and that this is something that they guard carefully against. I cannot say whether or not that fear was warranted, but the implications of that fear have bothered me for a long time. While I find the determination not to propagate one’s trauma beyond one’s self to be truly admirable, the implication that the solution is to guard others against yourself is something I cannot accept.
I believe strongly that emotional communion is one of the great needs of humanity, and that one of the greatest gifts you can give to another person is the pure, unadulterated expression of who you are. It is one of life’s greatest honors to receive such a gift from another person, to have such expression reciprocated. It is an awful thing when someone believes that the entirety of their being is something that must not be shared with others, no matter the reason.
The Quandary
If we accept that as being the case, what then is the solution? How is someone who has been so grievously wounded to avoid passing on said wound, while also giving themselves fully to those that they love? I believe that first the person in question must heal themselves, learn to love themselves once again. The essence of trauma is not that we have been hurt, no matter how badly. It is that it changes the way we conceive of ourselves. A traumatized person is so thoroughly victimized that it cripples them. Victimhood becomes part of their identity; a perpetually nagging sense that they are no longer whole, that they are forever diminished for what happened to them.
Healing from your trauma requires you to know yourself to be whole again, to know that, even if the scars from your experience will be with you forever, they do not make you any less human, any less yourself, than you were before. You are whole, and you are beautiful. The only being who can deny this truth is yourself. The path towards such healing is long and hard. It is a spiritual journey all its own, and beyond the scope of this essay. Instead, I argue for the necessity of such healing. It is not only crucial for the person who needs to be healed, but also for their children, their lineage and legacy.
Generational Karma
Children are not born into a family at random. If you believe in souls, and in karma, then you know this. There is a line of karma that runs through a family, a collective lesson that each individual is learning. This applies to many sorts of karmic lessons, but for trauma in particular, it isn’t simply that it is perpetuated down the generations in a vicious, cruel cycle of pain. The souls born into that family are there to learn the lessons of that family’s trauma. This is part of life. “There is no light without shade”, as it is often said. To take it a step further, you could even say that the souls born into a family already bear the trauma of the family. Their individual karma and the family’s karma are aligned.
But, as I said in my tweet, if trauma is something that can be passed down and inherited from father to daughter, mother to son, grandparent to grandchild, can we not pass down the healing of this trauma? If you heal from your pain, can you not teach your child, who already bears the same wound, to heal too?
Consider also what happens if you do guard your children from your trauma. Humans need to be able to feel each other, soul to soul, with no barriers in between us. This is what it means to give love. You may be holding back for love of someone else, but they will only feel that you have denied them communion, that serenity which we all seek. That leaves a mark, and on children especially that mark will become a scar of their own. Guarding your children from your trauma will just inflict it on them in a different form.
The Legacy You Leave
Ultimately, this challenge is about the insidious nature of fear. Fear of love, of giving it and receiving it. Because if we are to open up to love, then we must own our scars, our deficiencies and weaknesses. Own them in front of the people whose opinions matter the most to us. We must be vulnerable. And this is very hard to do when you have been taught and conditioned to believe that these things are failings. Which, of course, is precisely what trauma and victimization does to a person. It convinces them that they are a failure. That there is some terrible, sinful insufficiency in their being that they can never atone for.
Remember the origin of the term victim: “A living creature slain and offered as a sacrifice during a religious rite”. The victim is the excess, the scapegoat, the deadwood that must be burned away so that life can continue, so that the essence can maintain itself. By the very fact of your continuing existence, you are proving that you are not a sacrifice. You are not a victim. Not unless you believe yourself to be. But in order to believe that, you must believe in your essential value as a person. That you are the essence that is maintaining itself, rather than the excess that is being cut away. You must know the truth of this, the truth of who you are. And when you do, then you can acknowledge that you are no failure. Is this not the knowledge that you would want to pass down to your child, the legacy you would want them to inherit? Instead of passing along the fears that burden you, you can pass on love and courage.
The purification of your experience sanctifies the innocence of your child.