Trigger Warning: In this piece I will be discussing experiences of sexual and physical violence. Please be warned and take care of yourself.
A couple of months ago I had two experiences in quick succession, which led me to appreciate the generational healing my family has practice for at least half a century. Generational healing I would define as physical, emotional, and spiritual practice with the goal of leaving the next generation better equipped to address the hardships of living within capitalism than current or previous generations. It is when we take anger management classes in order to yell at our kids less; it is when we address our histories of abuse cause we know violence is a cycle we want to stop; it is when we go to therapy to learn about feelings we were always taught to keep berried so we can teach our youth to honor their emotions. Most, if not all, healing work has implications for the generations to come. My purpose is not to distinguish between different kinds of healing, but instead to look at the ways that the work I have been able to do has built upon and been made possible by the therapeutic practices my parents engaged in.
This is not to say they were perfect parents or completely interrupted the cycles of violence they were raised in. I can still remember the storms of rage (as I like to call them) my father would fly into, often times for completely ridiculous things (I was once thrown out of our car in winter for farting). One of my brothers and I were subjected to similar cycles of sexual violence my parents spent so much of their lives working to undue.
Sometime around 1988-89, my brother (age 6-7) and I (age 4-5) followed an older boy (age 13-14) from our mosque to a near by park where he molested us. Some days later I told my older brother about the incident, a clever end-around the older boy’s threats that if we told “our parents” he would beat us up. What ensued was the hot-mess of sexual violence within tight-knit religious communities. The older boy was believed to be lacking in “responsibility” and was put in charge of all the other children during our weekly prayers that my brother and I continued to attend. This was the situation until my family finally moved across the country some two or three years later. (The dates are confused because I do not have direct memory of this incident and the stories I’ve been told vary in timeline.)
While watching the Perks of Being a Wallflower, a couple of months ago with a date I was triggered back into the emotional-physical distress of this experience. Towards the end of the movie, the main character, Charlie (an emotionally troubled high school freshman misfit), is making out with his good friend and secret love, Sam. During this first-kiss experience for Charlie, Sam rubs his inner thigh triggering memories of molestation that Charlie had not remembered until that moment. In the ensuing breakdown and recovery we learn that Charlie’s deceased and beloved aunt, molested him as a young boy.
As a survivor of childhood sexual violence, watching this was a deeply triggering experience for me. I felt my stomach clench, my consciousness felt pulled up out of my body, and my eyes began to water as my muscles tightened. I felt like I not only knew what Charlie was feeling, but living it with him. As someone who does not remember my molestation, I am often triggered by physically intimate moments without forewarning and usually have trouble “turning off the thoughts” (an expression of Charlie’s.)
Getting triggered is never fun, being triggered on a date with a new romantic interest is really quite distressing. However, because of the multi-generational healing work my family and I have done I was able to recognize these feelings for what they were (a trigger response), practice self-grounding exercises, and seek supportive physical contact from my date. These allowed me to continue the date in an engaged and emotionally present state instead of burying my emotions and pretending to feel something I did not.
This is not to say that the triggered state disappeared, in fact the next morning I woke up definitely in emotional distress. In response I continued to practice healthy behavior made possible by generational healing. I called my mom, who was able to engage in emotionally comforting dialogue about her child (me) while being reminded of my molest as a child and the harmful affects that has had on my life. This is not an easy thing to do for a mother, especially at eight in the morning. However, because of the psychological work she has done she was able to provide this supportive and healing function for me.
After our conversation I did some journaling about feeling deep emotional pain and how frustrating it is to be so easily “nocked off’ my game. Journaling about our emotions and our lives has been in my family at least since my father’s 20’s. When I was 9 years old, my mother helped me start my first journal, writing down my dreams and discussing their meanings with me.
Finally I had a cathartic cry, allowing myself to externalize and acknowledge deeply felt feelings of pain and distress. Although none of this “cured” me of my emotions, nor does it mean I will not be triggered by similar events in the future, they did allow me to get on with my life in an emotionally “healthy” state.
Emotions were made important and worthy of consideration through the hard work of my parents who have been going to therapy and/or engaged in spiritual practice since the 1960’s. This is not trivial nor is it work that is generally accepted and promoted in mainstream society/culture. In fact, due to its challenges of traditional power structures and cycles of violence (misogyny, male [domestic] violence, substance abuse to name a few) these are practices that are often much maligned and stigmatized. Only in the last 10-20 years has going to therapy become a relatively socially acceptable practice (it is still often a sign of “something wrong with you,” evoking shame.) My ability to even admit my feelings much less have the emotional maturity to dialogue with myself enough to transition from a place of distress to catharsis is a direct result of my parents’ self-healing efforts.
The second event took place a few weeks later. That morning I was on my way to a strategic-planning meeting for the organization I was working for, when a man approached me to borrow my cell-phone to make a call. I gave him my phone which he did use to make a call and then a short-time later he began to walk away. I followed him, asking for my phone back, at which point the man attempted to run away. After a brief chase, in which it became clear he was not going to out run me, he turned around to confront me, asking me, “what are you going to do about it,” clearly challenging me to fight him. My masculine socialization screamed for me to do just that. However, having just heard of a friend who was stabbed and nearly died after fighting with a mugger (over a phone), I made the choice not to.
Clearly masculinity was not the only dynamic at play and my decision reflects a high degree of class privilege I have (I knew I could afford another phone). However, I do not believe that my father could have made a similar choice at my age or at the very least it would have been considerably harder and fraught with much more self-shaming than it was for me. For my father, it would have been very difficult for him not to see this as a challenge to his sense of self as a man socialized to protect himself and his loved ones with violence. I, on the other hand, was able to see this as a self-affirming experience that, although traumatic and charged with self-shaming (for I too was socialized male), was a sign of my families efforts to undue the cycles of violence inherent in US mainstream definitions of manhood.
Through acknowledging and addressing traumatic and trigger events I experience not only the healing work I have done, but the work my parents and past generations in my family have done. I was able to resist the normative responses called for by male socialization, find support from loved ones, and deal with my emotions so as to be able to continue to live my life without the need to suppress or self-medicate. These represent powerful changes in how people in my family define “healthy” living and I am grateful to my parents for making it possible.
