Intergenerational trauma and healing – a journey our millennial souls signed up for? Definitely.

Ever notice us millennials and subsequent generations are experiencing depression at what seems like an alarming rate? Apparently, the average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950s. Besides the fact that the statistics literally say the level of anxiety and depression is at an all-time high, at a younger age, I realized many of my friends were struggling with those disorders. If not depression or anxiety, it had the character of PTSD or bipolar disorder, or just struggling with self-confidence and self-esteem and not feeling good enough.

It’s interesting looking at this generationally. Why are we more depressed and anxious? Are we? Or is it just expressed more? Well, I believe it’s a bit of both.

This whole theory actually dawned on me one day when some of my high school friends were in town. We were sitting around my dad’s living room and visiting, the tv on in the background with sports news playing. My dad pondered to my peers and I, “I don’t know what it is these days but [sports] players seem to get injured so much more. All the time in fact. For any little thing they seem like they go down and have an injury”.

It took me a couple days, or maybe weeks to think on why this might be. And to assess why I felt some sort of shade for my generation based on my dad’s comment. I couldn’t figure why the statement had stuck with me.

My own pondering led me to a download. It’s not that bones aren’t as strong these days…or maybe they aren’t as a matter a fact when we consider a carrot has an nth of the nutrients and vitamins it did in 1953... but I digress. I believe our sensitivities are heightened and suppressing ourselves, our pain, and our desires has become too much of a burden to bear for one more generation. Millennials and for sure Generation Z are more likely to move from a place of intuition and there’s an innate calling in our generations to realize that being our most authentic selves is the most important thing we can do. Our generation has a strong sense that we need to notice pain when it occurs and heal before hurting ourselves more. We recognize the benefit to healing and the need for rest to do so, albeit we are likely to be anxious about taking that necessary rest or voicing that pain in the first place because of the productivity, work expectations and silencing pain that previous generations emphasized as important by their actions.

Elders often have a lot to say about the millennial generation. We are ‘entitled’, ‘don’t have strong work ethic’, ‘non-committal’, and ‘want to do the least work possible’. We’ve all heard “everyone’s so sensitive these days”. Within all those statements and the statement my dad made, there lies an insinuation of weakness and laziness amongst our generations. It comes off as a “why don’t they toughen up” mentality. It’s a mentality that led me for many years to believe my heightened sensitivity and feelings were a hindrance and a weakness rather than the strength and power I know it to be these days. Something I was still struggling with at the moment he made that comment to my friends and I. Something that led me to unlocking this knowledge, an ah-ha moment, a download from spirit – It is this generations’ gift and responsibility, a burden and a privilege, to be able to feel, acknowledge, rest, and heal subsequent and past generations.

A professional football player ignores an injury and keeps playing on an injured knee and they may blow it out before they reach the 2nd year of their contract. It could mean a complete loss of lively-hood to not address a bodily injury. What do you need for an injury first and foremost? Rest so the body can mend itself and have the energy to send to the affected body part. You have to acknowledge the injury and the pain that arises for you before working to heal the area. Just like that professional football player, Millennials are acknowledging or feeling that there's something injured within us and we're being called to address the injury.

Some of the things the baby-boomer generation says about us is true, but this isn’t the negative they make it out to be once we harness the power behind these claims. Millennials are more sensitive if by that you mean far less tolerant of jokes that personally attack minority groups and the disenfranchised. Less likely to stay quiet about being or feeling disrespected. We are less likely to stay at the job we hate, even changing jobs, majors, or careers multiple times. Less likely to stay with a relationship that no longer feels good for us, regardless of the circumstances. And while there is an argument for why all these things can be negative, it also is the key. The key to finding balance in this world. Yes, commitment is good but not when what or to whom you are committed to is detrimental to your health and wellbeing. Historically, it has not been something most Black people have had the space, means or privilege to do – take care of themselves, honor their needs, and prioritize joy.

In pure judgmental, “their generation vs. ours” fashion, it occurred to me at once all the problems of their generation and the ways they’ve lead us to a series of habits and beliefs we need to unlearn in order to thrive. Most of the baby boomer generation had a “suck it up” mentality. Let’s consider the masculine identity that was formed then and perhaps eons ago – big, strong, silent type. Hard work. The idea that boys weren’t supposed to cry and the notion that emotions other than anger were not socially acceptable. If you can’t cry when you’re hurt, it means you need to shove down the feelings, mask the pain and .. oh ... continue on in spite of. “Shake it off” is something I heard from my dad often in my youth if I caught the basketball wrong and it bent my finger back. In spite of whatever ailed you, you shook it off, and continued to get shit done. There was very little time to lick your wounds. That is where they came from. And for all intents and purposes, almost feels like a culture based on survival rather than a culture that intends or had the chance to thrive.

The combination of Black history and torture/disenfranchisement in this country plus that toxic masculinity deeply effects women of the generation before us as well. Many of us saw our mothers or grandmothers putting aside feelings because the man in their life wasn’t going to cater to those feelings or they didn’t have a man in their life to help out and they had shit to do. Like raise a family, provide for that family, make sure the family survived, perhaps cater to your man if you had one because this world sure didn’t cater to Black men back then. Women in generations prior were encouraged to fall in line, stay quiet, slim, pretty, and not make waves – essentially the women had to suck it up! Put up with all the shit. Allow infidelity, being ignored, being abused emotionally or even physically, if the man provided financially. In my maternal grandmother’s case, it was my grandfather dying in a car crash that left her widowed with 4 children to take care of by herself. Talk about having to go into survival mode… “It’s just what you did” and “You do what you have to do” I can hear the femme ancestors saying now.

As I told my dad the first of my two points a week later, that his generation stuffed down their feelings and are a bunch of repressed rageaholics that suppress their emotions through work, anger, drugs and alcohol, he sat and did a slight nod and had a pensive look as if he was considering the idea. I’ve always loved his ability to separate emotion from a topic to be able to have a rich and engaging discussion. I’ve also bemoaned this aspect of him as in my childhood and presently in my softer moments, it often left me regarding him as void of emotion or disconnected. Alas, some of that very separation, when I look at my own family dynamics has led to the ability to have appropriate open conversation with my dad that does not have to be destructive for us to have real talk.

So, yes, it does mean our parents and past generations have repressed trauma, anger issues, addiction issues to cope with the bottled-up emotions. Many do not talk about feelings and have put on a “strong” front/mask in their generation. People often have symptoms of unreleased energy or our body’s call to slow down in the form of stomach aches, headaches, tightening chests, exhaustion – also some of the physical effects of anxiety, grief, depression. We were designed to feel imbalances in the body but past generations had to disconnect from some of those feelings just to survive and continue on. That eventual disconnect from their feelings and their bodies, to even tolerate the trauma and troublesome feelings being stuffed down means a disconnect from illness actually because created in the body. When heavy feelings like trauma, grief, sadness, anger are stuffed down instead of being let out and expressed, they become toxic, unreleased energy. We will talk about the chakra systems in future posts. But know that we are all energetic beings and to hold in toxic energy will certainly have an effect on us as a whole – physically, emotionally, and spiritually. When energy becomes stagnate it festers. Festers to the point where it can mutate our cells (re: cancers) and cause us to become ill. Many of our ancestors kept secrets and had horrible things happen to them that they actively pushed down and blocked out or that they never told anyone about. At least not family...

That’s the thing about family secrets is they don’t stay secret. The trauma and behaviors from those secrets sunk deep into our ancestors’ bones and blood and now those heavy secrets run through our blood and lay in our bones. Secrets we don’t logically know but we feel those secrets and that pain oh so deeply these days. It presents as depression, anxiety that you’re unsure the source of, it presents as perfectionism or loneliness, it presents as rejecting help from others, it presents as inability to communicate ones needs or even identify one's own needs as important or healthy, it presents as codependency, it presents as isolation & loneliness, it presents as replayed habits of our ancestors that lead us into similar toxic relationships or troublesome life circumstances.

This is what the theory of intergenerational trauma is about. That each generation is carrying the hurts and unhealed pains of all the ancestors before us. That what happened to our mothers and fathers and their mothers is part of our pain, part of our trauma, part of our DNA make-up, part of our brain wiring and circuitry of what to expect in this world. They inform our limiting beliefs without us having quite realized that where our parents and grandparents have been, so have some of the cells in our very bodies. Cells hold memories. Cells hold beliefs and intentions. Cells hold patterns.

What I’m, saying is, there is a strong generational healing shift that is happening and being Black or brown means many more layers of difficulty to this healing because of institutionalized racism and the traumatic history of many of our previous ancestors. Black and brown people need to do the most work to break out of these unhelpful patterns and situations.

These patterns that have been thrusted upon us and down from generation to generation. Here we see the impact of what people are referring to as “generational curses”.

“High blood pressure and diabetes just runs in the family” Does it? Or does everyone get it because they have the same eating habits, thought patterns, and toxic ways of non-communicating so they eat their feelings instead.......

The science here is pretty straightforward now, too. A developmental biologist and leader in the field of Epigenetics*, Dr. Bruce Lipton, reported that DNA is the cause of only 1% of disease. The other 99% is caused by your programming aka your beliefs. He presented data that states in a study of cancer and biological children vs adopted children, the adoptive children got cancer at the same rate as the biological children of the family. Different DNA, but shared beliefs, patterns, habits, overall environment! The conclusion is that if you change your programming & thus the environment, you change the outcome of the illness or overall mold that’s been created for you.

Our bodies are made up of cells. If you put healthy cells in an unhealthy environment, they will mutate and become unhealthy as well. Trauma, stress, depression and the body’s physiological responses that happen during these experiences or memories effects the body on a cellular level. There's a lot of technical information we could go into about cortisol, the vagus nerve, adrenal fatigue, fight and flight, unhealthy environments etc etc. But the bottom line is trauma is carried in the genes as well as has a damaging effect on the body itself when experienced. We know the effects of trauma is passed down at least a total of three generations. A visual of this is to think of a person who can conceive or give birth. They hold within them all the eggs they will have for their entire life at birth. Additionally, those eggs were created while they were in the uterus of their mother. So if you are a human here on earth reading this, you lived not only in your mother’s stomach but also in the stomach of your grandmother. Which means, directly, your health was informed by your grandmother, her feelings, trauma, habits, and history up until your parent was born. Then your health was informed by your mother’s feelings, trauma, practices, habits and history until you were born.

But here’s the spiritual tea to this. If trauma is in the cells, in one's genes and perpetuated in the actual behavioral patterns of the person as well…think of nature leading to how you get nurtured… there is no way that it stops at the 3rd generation and is miraculously non-existent. A generation must take on the conscious effort to heal said past intergenerational trauma, so that they don’t pass it down 3 MORE generations. Most in our lineage have not taken on that healing before now because the environment was not ripe to do so. They were too busy fighting constantly for basic human rights and to be treated as a person to take time to look at their feelings and connect with their bodies. So it is on us. To be clear, many of us are battling the unresolved trauma that existed in our ancestors 7-8 generations ago... Which means we are still clearing trauma from our people being enslaved. Still clearing trauma of genocide and war and torture. Talk about heaviness that we don't know where it's coming from...

After sharing my thoughts so blatantly with my dad and what I later assessed as maybe a bit harshly because of my own feelings about his narrowed sensitivities, I thought about it again. The thing about us millennials and Gen Z-ers is that many of us are entitled. Here I am, he gave me opportunity, he gave me travel, he paid for it all with his work ethic and his ‘toughen up’ mentality. He had a family to provide for. And boy did he ever provide for us. He wasn’t able to give me all the soft words of encouragement I desired from him at times growing up, but I knew he loved me and desired the best for me. Desired a beautiful life for me which he diligently laid the groundwork for. I was able to say he didn’t understand depression (which he didn’t to be fair, on an emotional level or an empathetic level) at the same time that I was able to take time off of work to understand and work with my own grief and depression after my mother’s passing. This was not the first time in my life that I didn’t have to scrape to survive or be forced to carry on as if nothing had happened when i was devastated or felt broken. I was afforded this luxury, of having a place to always stay (even if I didn’t ever want to return to live with my parents) and parents who made sure I would need for nothing. I was downright comfortable even in the times we were ‘broke’ or financially struggling when I was growing up. And my parents made that so. They cultivated it to be so. They worked and strived and broke their backs so that I could have the experience of self-actualization. So that I could sit and feel my feelings. Understand them and dive deep into those feelings and habits and practices. Realize that it isn’t beneficial to break myself and people please so that others may survive because no one thrives in that scenario. To realize for myself that if I am thriving and firing on all cylinders I am in fact way more efficient, intentional, and abundant and able to give others a much better experience of myself – in turn, giving them way more than they would have received of me if I was making it work, “sucking it up” or “just surviving”.

So I stopped somewhere days later and came back to share the second of my two points with my dad; that the only way I am able to have the opportunities, space and freedom to pick and choose how to follow my passions is because of the way they did things. While they may have stifled their pain – and in essence, their voice in some ways- they are a generation of hard workers who did what they had to do to survive, procreate (shoutout to the ancestors for doing all they could to stay alive long enough to have us and grow us as long as they could, as best they could) and to build better for their children and hopefully their grandchildren in ways they couldn't see. They conquered the obstacles set up against them and that had been designed for them to fail. And they persevered in the ways they knew how. To give us every opportunity that they may or may not have had. While we don't and won't subscribe to all the ways in which they got where they got, we also reap the benefits of their choices and perseverance. I believe a similar phenomenon is very much felt in the children of immigrants... A deep appreciation for what their parents endured and sacrificed to grant them opportunities as well as an immense pressure to not f*ck up said opportunities.

I am blessed to say this was my experience. My parents and parent’s parents were successful in giving their children opportunities so that they could succeed and strive for more. They didn’t grow up wealthy and there was struggle at times… But they were comfortable on both sides. There was courage and encouragement to go for different experiences and lofty goals and an expectation to work hard and succeed at whatever they chose. There were some solid values and opportunities passed on. It was then up to that child to take that opportunity that they had received and run with it. Both my parents laid for me a very solid and beautiful foundation on which to thrive despite their own personal struggles or histories. So as I look back on times where I was struggling significantly with my purpose and my mental health, I can’t completely fault my dad for being hurt himself that I was depressed and for not understanding my depression when he felt he had given his all to give me a beautiful life.

I can’t fault the generations before us for not understanding us and our sensitives because they didn’t have the same choices to nurture their inner emotions. They didn’t have the same safety of speaking on their activism and their opinions overtly. They didn’t have the same opportunities to be sensitive and vocal about their feelings and pains. Those of us that had parents involved in Civil Rights movements may be in awe of their boldness but have we actually stopped to realize their acknowledgement that they may have to pay the ultimate cost for speaking up during that time period? I am aware we don’t always feel safe and may not always be safe when protesting and yet, the difference between today's perceived safety when protesting or speaking up as a Black or Brown person vs the perceived safety of attending the march from Selma to Montgomery as a Black person in 1965 still does not quite compare.

It’s interesting to me that so many Black millennials still subscribe to the idea that depression and mental health isn’t a Black problem. This is certainly an archaic judgement that hinders us and alienates all the Black people that have very specifically and strongly felt the effects of depression even if they could not identify it as such. Because in not identifying there being a significant need, we hinder our own access to resources. If you think about it, enslaved Africans had to be depressed, most of our OG ancestors HAD TO BE depressed y’all… by clinical standards. Think of their circumstances, think of what they went through… But within clinical depression are a lot of ways that depression manifests. For some, depression looks like not getting out of the bed for weeks at a time and for others it looks highly functional and like a smiling face while silently suffering. When one has no option to stay in a bed for even a day to stop and sulk and cry and understand and heal, they will “suck it up” and keep going 'in spite of'. Because that choice has been taken. Many of our ancestors were living in survival mode for so long that it became part of them. Part of us. Their struggle, their pain, their depression or suppressed emotions, fears, and unhealed traumas moved into us. At the same time, it is a privilege, to experience depression when one can rest and heal. It is what has been gifted to a large part of our generation and will be gifted to an even larger part of Gen z-ers. You can see how the next generations are more open, more fluid, you can see how their energy will change the world. That’s in us. A chance to slow down, heal, and live a life of joy and passion and not just subscribing to “that’s the way things are”. When we experience such a life, a life our ancestors could only dream of – we heal them because they get to live that life through us. They beam with pride at how far we have come and where we can invent up to go.

So if our grandmothers have affected our health, well-being, mindsets, and spirit, I want you to know, you are doing the same for your children and your grandchildren and onwards when you heal or just alike, when you continuously engage in harmful practices, habits, and mindsets. I want you to know that while you carry all the unhealed trauma of the mothers and fathers in your ancestry, you also carry their wisdom and guidance in your blood, bones, and spirit as well.

Where do we begin after knowing that we are a key to healing backwards and forwards?

There are definitely some key components.

Rest. Feel. Release. Forgiveness. Lean into your sensitivity. Set boundaries. Ask questions about what feels most authentic to our being. Follow our passion & our joy. Lessen our toxic load overall.

In our blog we will go over the components listed above and many more. But let's for the moment expound upon "rest". Perhaps one of the most significant keys to unlocking everything else. The term “rest” may seem so lightweight or even trite when talking about trauma, depression, anger and injury. But rest in the way I’m using it signifies a “mindfulness”, which is a component of healing being taught by many of today’s therapists. It is also a form of meditation. Rest captures a timeframe. Mindfulness is giving yourself the time to picture what it will feel and look like when that injured component is healthy. Mindfulness allows you to reconnect your spirit and your body and listen to the ways in which your body speaks to you and shares its needs. By Wikipedia’s term …. “a mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique”.

Rest so that we can heal. Rest so that we can identify where and what the pain stems from. Rest so that we may create and innovate. Rest provides us with the opportunity to slow down so that we can FEEL instead of numbing out with work and productivity. Because all our ancestor’s pain didn’t just disappear. It didn’t evaporate. It literally lives on in us. It became my duty to rest because all the mothers before me really did not receive that privilege.

The irony is that we feel such a duty to do well with the opportunities that our parents and their parents afforded us, that we go mad with anxiety and perpetuate this thought that we are not doing enough if we take rest. If we aren’t constantly being “productive”, we may view this as not doing or being enough. The gag is, rest is of the utmost importance to our healing and to changing the patterns that have kept us in depression and wrestling with anxiety. Rest, especially resting as a Black or Brown person, is a form of rebellion in our Capitalist society that values profit and productivity over the health and well-being of a nation. Rest so that you may fully observe the power that is innate within you. When we rest and clear out the noise, we find peace and the inner wisdom and healing that has also been passed down generationally.

Let us honor the generations before and after us by resting, acknowledging and changing unhelpful patterns and habits, by healing, and by thriving.

[Pictured from left to right, up to down are: my maternal grandparents; my paternal grandparents; school pictures of my maternal grandparents; my mom with her siblings and her mom; my beautiful late mother and my dad; my mom standing next to one of our old cars; my mom and dad with my dad's siblings, my dad's mom, his niece, and brother in-law.]

Thanks for sharing this healing space with me. Can't wait for the next piece.

- Gdejoie <3

*Epigenetics - the study of how we co-create our world and health through expressing and not expressing certain traits in our DNA. Brings new light to being "predisposed" to physical or mental health illnesses. We will share a whole post about this next on the blog and steps you can take to limit expression of the harmful genetic traits/DNA