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I do not mean for this post to be a morbid one, only an informative one. In looking at the power than unresolved trauma has to follow in families on down the generations I want to write about two discoveries I have made regarding important MEN in my family tree that have to do with the ‘missing’ children, the dead ones, whose initial ‘being in the world’ no doubt impacted the entire lives of these MEN, albeit perhaps invisibly.
Perhaps it is simply my own limited range of thinking and vision that alerts me to the possibility that it is NOT so much the stories that are told in a family — as few or as many as there may be or have been — that truly matters most. It seems more likely to me that it is the stories that are NOT told that are the ones that contain the storms of intergenerational unresolved trauma that can combine to impact future generations in traumatic ways that TRULY MATTER.
Those of us living today receive the benefit of medical advancements that have lessened or eliminated especially the risk of premature death for infants and children. It was not too many generations past that the continued life of one’s offspring could be counted on.
There are schools of thought that suggest that modern efforts toward the protection of children did not come into play until the survival of children was more likely to happen than it did in the past. Before medical advancements came along to help protect the life of people from diseases we can now prevent and treat, so many parents lost their little ones that a sort of emotional (and affectionate) vacuum existed to lessen the profound grief that losing one’s infants and children had on parents in the past.
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It was not unusual in the past for infants and children to be treated as possession-objects rather than as human beings with needs, feelings and rights of their own. In order to more fully understand how we, as early infant-child abuse survivors experienced the ongoing trauma that DID come down to us from our family’s past history, we need to gather for ourselves as much information as we can about the possible CONTEXT that is NOT told in the stories that belong to and within our family tree.
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I contrast to what I am writing here don’t consider myself especially interested in a genealogical search for my ancestral connections. Yet at the same time I have devoted many, many hundreds of hours to transcribing the writings of my mother, even of her mother, letters of my father as these words filtered down over time into my possession.
I only through accident have come across two streams of information that directly apply to my words here today.
The first piece of information relates to the contextual history of my own father. The stories told within my family of origin always included the fact that my father was an ‘unwanted’ child that arrived late among his siblings. We were told that his sister (unwillingly) was given responsibility for his care when he was young and ‘raised him’.
Much later when I was an adult over 30 my father told me that during his childhood his mother ‘never left the house unless she had to go to the store’ and ‘never had company come to her home’. This information gives me a sense of the context of my grandmother’s depression and/or sadness that I am quite certain PROFOUNDLY affected my father’s infant-child development.
It has only been in the past few months since my daughter began gathering family records to connect herself to my father’s mother who was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution that an important NEW piece of information arrived about the context of my father’s family. Included on my father’s birth certificate is the fact that there were FOUR children born living while only THREE were living as my father was born.
A MISSING CHILD among my father’s siblings.
This fact was NEVER mentioned in spoken words at any time that I know of, and yet is SUCH an important one that it has rearranged and changed everything I know about myself, as the daughter of a man who never stood up to his abusive wife, who never ONCE intervened to protect me or any of my siblings from my mother’s insanity and abuse.
I know enough to understand that the grief of losing a child affected my father’s parents — and siblings — and within the bigger picture, the enlarged context of my family of origin — that missing child affected me.
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This past weekend I had a woman come visit me overnight who has been a friend of mine for 30 years. She lives in Annapolis but was in Arizona visiting her sick brother and popped on down to visit me. My friend has been deeply involved in researching her family tree, and generously spent time online showing me information that can be accessed on my own family history.
I chose to have her look into my mother’s father’s ancestral line. While she couldn’t go back very far, what was found is fascinating.
And NOTHING that we found was EVER mentioned in story by my mother whose parents divorced in 1930 when my mother was five. My mother’s mother remained angry and embittered, full of hatred for her ex husband until her death. She forced her hatred into my mother so that my mother ‘disowned’ her father and never saw him again past about the year 1932.
My mother’s father’s side of the family tree was amputated and erased from the spoken history of our family, but the effects of even this bitterness and the family trauma it was connected to DID affect not only my mother, but also impacted me, and through me, my offspring.
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We could find no information further back than the 1881 Canadian Census, and moving forward to the 1900 United States Census.
Perhaps because my friend is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church she immediately noted that my mother’s father’s father (my great grandfather) had listed himself as a member of the Universalist Church on the 1881 census. His father was listed as born in England, his mother as born in France and French speaking. We could not find the name of either one of these ancestors of mine.
We did find that the first Canadian Universalist (Unitarian) church was started in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canaca in 1937, and that my great grandfather was born there in 1845. (His wife was also born there). These people immigrated to the Boston, MA area in 1882 and by the 1900 census were listing three children: Ada (23) who I know nothing about, her brothers Howard (11) and Charles (9). Charles became my mother’s father.
ALSO included in the census information is the fact that there were FIVE dead children probably between Ada and Howard. No matter what happened to them, that is a LOT OF GRIEF AND TRAUMA that I never heard anyone ever say anything about.
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What this tells me in simple fact is that my mother’s father was the youngest child in his family as was my father in his. I know enough to suspect that the silent, invisible grief in BOTH of these families affected these MEN — right on down the line.
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The other piece of information about my great grandfather’s connection to the Universalist Church in Nova Scotia has provided an avenue for continued ancestral search because according to my friend’s online search that church still has all of its records. I have emailed them asking for help. I would like to know if my unknown great great grandparents were involved in the founding of this first church in Canada.
I am also intrigued with the unique religious affiliation that these ancestors of mine had outside of the ‘mainstream’ of Christian culture. Learning this piece of information rearranged how I think about free-thinking self and my own very free-thinking children. That all of these ancestors, all the way back to the French ones (I hope to find my great grandmother’s maiden name from the marriage records of the church in Halifax), were NEVER mentioned by my mother is a clear sign to me that just as there are road signs to unresolved trauma within families carried in the death of children, there are also road signs to unresolved trauma carried within other family history that is encased within silence.
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I do not believe that severe infant-child abuse EVER EVER simply pops up within a family out of nowhere. If there is abuse, it came from somewhere and is a part of a much bigger picture of trauma and is part of a much larger context that we MUST find as much information about as we possibly can to further our own healing process.
It might seem like nonsense within our culture to put the emphasis that I do personally on the need for severe infant-child abuse survivors to go back through any safe way they can to gather ANY and ALL POSSIBLE INFORMATION about family history so that our understanding about how unresolved trauma FROM THE PAST directly impacted what happened to us can be broadened.
Trauma does NOT easily resolve itself in silence — not when it happened and not as it passes down through the generations.
I also believe that blaming and shaming the perpetrators of abuse is NOT helpful to gathering the kind of contextual information that we need to know. If, as I suspect, trauma does not resolve itself until somebody, somewhere at sometime LEARNS what the trauma has to teach, we need to learn as much as we can about what the signals/signs/symptoms of unresolved trauma are.
Finding that there are amputated branches from the family tree, such as there are in mine, and finding that we had ancestors that died as babies and children so that the unresolved trauma of grief passed down the generations and no doubt affected our parents IS NOT MEANINGLESS TIDBITS OF INFORMATION.
Every bit of unresolved trauma from ‘back there’ found its way, sometimes in trickles, sometimes in roaring rivers, into the ocean of sadness, violence, confusion, loss and rage that fed the traumatic abuse that happened to us. The more we can know about these histories, the more we can find, hear, tell and learn from the stories (especially in the silent ones carried within families), the more coherent our OWN life story and our telling of our own life narrative will become.
Because the inability to tell a coherent life narrative is the number one sign of an adult insecure attachment system-disorder, it is critically important that we find and use anything we can find that helps us make sense out of trauma. We can make progress this way in smoothing out the pathway that leads through us from the past into the future.
Our individual participation in this ‘smoothing out’ process, gained through knowledge that leads to understanding and compassion, will increasing contribute SOOTHING healing and equally soothing calmness for our own self and for all those we are in contact with as we work to put trauma to rest.
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Stop the Storm 
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