Today at church we celebrated All Saints Day. If you didn't grow up in a liturgical tradition, this is a day dedicated to remembering saints from ancient times, modern saints and personal saints (people in your life you've lost and miss). This is subjective in the sense that unless you're Catholic, sainthood is arbitrated at will, at least in our church. To give you an example, the apostles, Trayvon Martin and Glennon Doyle (don't worry, she's still alive) were all mentioned in my church this morning.
I say this because the music chosen gave me a Little Women vibe (hymns that make me think of generations past) and resonated in a deeper way than usual for me because my parents were just here visiting. We talked about generational change while they were here, our family's history and current events, as we often do. And while I enjoyed my exchanges with my Republican dad filled with questions and curiosity, I was struck again by how in large part, my parents generation and their parents generation, have not often gone to personal therapy. My parents are older than most because I am their youngest, but my friends whose parents are closer to them in age say the same thing. I can only think of two friends of an older generation than me who've undergone personal therapy.
I don't say this to criticize necessarily, but it came upon me in church this morning, this idea of legacy trauma. And I feel it's important to note that I am speaking from a place of privilege, that my life as it stands right now is not fighting for itself tooth and nail. So I have the luxury of reflection, growth and change that perhaps other demographics are not able to have at this time because they are fighting for their very lives in this country. For instance, the black American experience of legacy trauma is going to look wildly different than mine and play out in a different timeline than my own. And that's just another way that things are different for us.
In generations not far in the past, wars were being fought for years on end, with the entire country changing and adapting to support those efforts. I know we participate in wars now and I don't mean to minimize that. But I don't see it the same way I see the "greatest generation" participating in World War 2. Almost everything that could change in the country did with rationing and women going to work and communication being so scarce. So perhaps when women were trying to feed their kids and they didn't know if not receiving a letter from their husband for three months was because the mail got delayed or because he was dead, it's understandable why they didn't go to therapy. And therapy has evolved so much since then.
While therapy didn't happen much, trauma still did, in a myriad of ways. It's almost because of the trauma that the therapy didn't happen. When you're fighting for your life, sometimes you just don't have the resources or energy to reflect and do your work. Because your daily life is too much work already. And I hate to say that because it seems like I'm saying therapy is a luxury and something that you only do when your life isn't too hard and in my experience, it's a privilege, yes, but incredibly hard, engaging, painful work. It should be encouraged, always. I guess what I mean is, when you're in a fight or flight or freeze state, it's not always possible to try to set that down and think and feel. Sometimes setting down those instincts gets us killed.
However, I see hitting the snooze button on our work having the potential to become generational baggage. And in my millennial experience, my generation is the first to do this work en masse. I can't tell you how many of my friends are motivated to process their trauma so as to save their children from being as greatly affected by it as they would be if their mama didn't do her work. When we act out of unprocessed trauma, we tend to hurt people. It sucks. Hurting our children is an inevitable painful reality for me to hold, but if I can help my daughters not take on my shit, I'm gonna do that work. And many of my friends are in the same boat. And so we're working to set boundaries, make space for our feelings, validate ourselves and speak our truth. It is hard and sometimes filled with shame and pain and awkward as hell.
But I couldn't help but think today sitting in my sacred church space that the generations we were honoring before us from Biblical heroes to modern day, that these brave sojourners were cheering us on. Like the "great cloud of witnesses" from Hebrews, we have a cheering section of generations before us who did hard things and got on with their lives full of pain and hardship without giving themselves the space to fall apart. I know it's a luxury we have as this generation and I know I'm speaking from privilege because many other groups of people are not in this position. But the work has been passed down to us. Are we going to take it on? Are we going to do the work of unpacking that generational suitcase or are we going to hit snooze and hand it off to our children? I'm telling you, the work is more arduous than you can anticipate and I'm not on the other side of this, knowing how or if I've spared my children anything. And our entire motivation for doing our emotional work can't be for the next generation. Interrupting patterns has to be about us first. The generational benefit, I'm hoping, will be huge. But the present benefit is motivation enough and our work is never really done if we aren't doing it first because we love ourselves. Perhaps this is our sacred work, this big ole pile of knots to untie, this legacy of hardship and fear and shame. It sounds awful, I know. I feel like this post was meant to be bolstering and is instead turning into a giant bummer. I want to frame this work as an opportunity. An opportunity to reap the benefits that generations past weren't able to reap. There is so much beauty in the pain. Why run? Instead of feeling chased by the ghosts of the past, what would it look like if we ran towards them?