How Generational Trauma Compounds Child and Intimate Partner Abuse

Note: this essay is Part 2 of a 5-part series I wrote over a period of years prior to Election Day 2024. In Part 1, I described my personal experiences being groomed and the factors that continue to allow it to happen. Here, I go into the role of generational trauma in child and intimate partner abuse. Part 3 describes the failures of the "stranger danger" education I grew up with. Part 4 considers how our "hero" narratives keep us from solving the problem of (or healing from) child abuse. Finally, Part 5 offers some thoughts on how healing our own traumas could help us protect younger generations.

The first nonconsensual encounter I remember experiencing with an adult man was one of those moments we all somehow learn to brush off as “not a big deal.”

A family member’s father-in-law and an evangelical pastor, this man did nothing more than drape his arm across my 11-year-old shoulders as we walked from one room to another.

Yet all I wanted was to get away. The pressure on my shoulders felt unbearable, not so much because of its weight as the way it steered me. I thought about ducking down and away from the arm, but I was afraid it would be rude.

After all, we were at a family gathering, in full view of dozens of other adults: those who said they loved me, and those who barely knew me.

No one rang any alarm bells because I didn’t ring any alarm bells. This man, whom the other adults respected, hadn’t actually done anything inappropriate. His fingers had not brushed against my budding breast, nor my backside when he finally relieved me of his arm.

Nor had he said anything creepy at all. He’d merely pointed out his adult daughter on the other side of the room and told me she was his “little girl.” So how could I explain feeling so revolted?

Healthier modeling might, of course, have enabled me to speak up sooner, louder, more publicly. But even at 11, I imagine some part of me must have recognized the dynamics in play.

The experience seemed to solidify a message I must have encountered multiple times by then: unless applied to a school assignment or some other appropriate box, neither my intuition nor my imagination could be trusted to lead to anything but trouble.

The visit felt almost like a ritual, a symbolic blending of families. Tension hummed underneath the gathering between my New York Irish Catholic family and the Southern Baptists who joined us. Neither family believed the other’s values ideal for their children, but both had temporarily sacrificed their views for the sake of their newly married children. No one wanted to rock the boat.

In generations past, speaking out against influential men could have disastrous consequences for the female doing the speaking: involuntary commitment to an insane asylum, say, or being burned at the stake. There’s a reason remaining small, silent, and unnoticeable is a survival strategy.

The concept of epigenetics suggests that the fear of catastrophic consequences go far beyond your mother’s or grandmother’s personal traumas; that in fact, traumas are linked through the ages.

Perhaps that was why the echoes of these consequences played out in the reaction I imagined from my mother if I did “make a scene”: she’d only, I imagined, tell everyone that I was just making things up to get attention. Later, in private, she might tell me to be less histrionic.

The implication would be that my “overactive imagination” might peg our family as somehow inferior. I needed to reflect well on my parents and extended family. So I counted my blessings when this man finally removed his arm and focused on other adults.

Ironically, my mother wasn’t entirely wrong. I did seek adult attention, and a fair amount of it. Throughout my school career, my grades and conscientiousness and diligence reflected my desire to prove I wasn’t just some dumb (talkative, loud, stubborn) kid, but that I had intellect and perceptiveness and even wit. I wanted badly to prove I had a place in the adult world, that I could be trusted to know what it was. It wasn’t so much “attention” I was seeking as respect.

None of those were things this man knew or inferred when he draped his arm over my shoulders. Instead, it was as if he’d found a convenient piece of furniture he felt entitled to rest on.

The experience seemed to solidify a message I must have encountered multiple times by then: unless applied to a school assignment or some other appropriate box, neither my intuition nor my imagination could be trusted to lead to anything but trouble.

It’s a contradiction many women are familiar with. On the one hand, our intuitions are important to keep us out of harm’s way when it comes to imagining our fate at the hands of serial killers and men with the moral standards of a horny alleycat.

On the other hand, having fulfilled our obligation to remain respectable for our husbands to do with as they wish, our intuition-fueled imaginations should be relegated to the kitchen and bedroom. (Maybe also interior decorating and school fundraisers, if these activities didn’t capture too much of our attention.)

In other words, our survival — marriage, and marriageability — depended on our desirability. We could be neither “goods” we had allowed other men to damage, nor creatives whose expression might either distract us from our “true” lives’ purpose… or outshine the man destined to take care of us.

That finding a man to “take care of” me might actually be code for “keep me in line” never entered my mind, largely because I was busy believing I needed to be kept in line.

My grandmother knew this first hand.

Her first husband, a U.S. Navy sailor, abandoned his family when my mother was just a toddler. I never found out why, but given that it was the end of World War II, likely it was PTSD-related. Whatever he’d experienced while deployed, he took with him to California, clear on the other side of the country.

I have no idea whether my grandmother felt supported by her family for a circumstance that wasn’t her fault, or blamed and shamed for making a poor choice of mate — or whether it simply didn’t matter.

In those days, a time when single motherhood was exponentially more difficult to pull off, a good Irish Catholic girl like my grandmother, caught between one of the worst rocks and hard places imaginable, just needed to find another husband.

She did, ultimately. The man I grew up knowing as my grandfather married my grandmother, adopted my mother, and by all accounts, treated her like his four biological children.

My mother, nonetheless, has spoken of feeling like the black sheep of the family.

In part that’s because of her only partially shared genetic makeup. She was also, however, the only one of her siblings to experience the double whammy of being abandoned in different ways, by both parents, at an age too young for her to have understood.

For her, speaking up about this abandonment — however temporary it was — could have refocused my grandmother’s attention on her, effectively undermining my grandmother’s efforts to access socially acceptable survival resources.

Thus it’s easy for me to believe that while my grandmother herself may not have blamed me if I’d chosen to speak up at the family gathering, my mother placed a higher value on knowing how to keep my mouth shut and not make waves.

Born just the year after women gained access to banking in their own names, I could never have had the perspective to grok how fitting in and not making waves had been so ingrained in women’s survival.

Dismantling these stories is necessary because society has entered an era in which the nuclear family is no longer viable.

I saw only shades of it in my own mother’s conflict between the 1960s counterculture in which she came of age, and the conservative family values she espoused.

To her, hearing that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” must have sounded like rank invalidation of the choices she’d made by what she’d learned were necessity.

So at the same time that she wanted to be able to drive, hold a job, and have a credit card, my mother did not vocally champion my right to have an abortion or the ability to purchase my own property without needing a man to co-sign any of my loans. 

Indeed, when I purchased my first car, my father co-signed my auto loan. Unspoken message: Having a job, a car, and a bank account seemed more like temporary, necessary evils on my way to finding and attracting a husband… preferably an older, established one.

Such as one I might meet at a party, where allowing him to drape his arm over my shoulder might, in some future place and time, mean the difference between being taken care of, and living a life of ruin.

That finding a man to “take care of” me might actually be code for “keep me in line” never entered my mind, largely because I was busy believing I needed to be kept in line. Proving I wasn’t just some dumb (talkative, loud, stubborn) kid implied those qualities were fundamental character flaws standing between me and some future provider.

In this way, learning to fit in and not make waves might have been considered a form of “practice” for adult womanhood. We paper over our needs, preferences, and sense of autonomy when we learn they’re antithetical to our survival.

“Conform or be cast out,” as the lyrics from the 1982 Rush song “Subdivisions” go, a holdover belief from previous generations who survived one or more world wars, the Great Depression, famine, and immigration by doing the best they could to fit in.

Thus trying to learn to be quieter and more compliant seemed, at a level too deep for me to name, linked to my creative and imaginative, “too wild” self. That I might possibly be able to take care of myself wasn’t a concept I ever remember discussing.

For one, there was my childhood desire to earn a living as a writer. This goal was quickly dismissed as more imaginary than one of my made-up stories. 

Indeed, I imagine my progenitors’ suspicion of imagination and creativity was also a matter of survival. My Irish and German, fishing and farming, immigrant ancestors likely witnessed how creative “daydreaming” could lead to the kinds of mistakes that could literally get people killed or maimed… or simply, dying in poverty and leaving families destitute.

To these ancestors, a reliable factory job would’ve been something to be thankful for in the face of unpredictable weather patterns or fishing stock and thus the prospect of starvation. Any creative pursuits would thus have been deemed “unrealistic” — unless, of course, they led to a better widget or a more efficient way of producing them.

Yet laying aside natural creative pursuits meant so many generations learned to put up, shut up and even be proud of their “resilience,” even as the PTSD from all they’d survived went undiagnosed and alcoholism and violence ran rampant in their communities.

It’s possible my view is warped by growing up as an undiagnosed neurodivergent child. I internalized the idea of being flawed at a time when “weird” meant “unacceptable” and bullying was viewed as normal childhood behavior, if not preparation for modern adult life. 

I am in the process of slowly dismantling the stories I brought with me from childhood. Yet, at a time when it’s harder than I ever recall to earn a solid living, I find myself daily beating back the old ideas that I’m too stupid and incompetent to manage adult life.

The fear of ruin and starvation takes shape now when I do something as basic as mess up an amount on a check I’ve written. My creative talent has been how I earned an income for nearly my whole career. Yet now, it feels as if going “all in” on my writing and my dreams makes me unworthy of stability, like I’m the slow kid in the back of the class who hasn’t caught up on how to figure out life.

Even as I stubbornly cling to the idea of “the right job for me,” my parents’ voices whisper to me that it doesn’t exist. They give me two choices: “Settle for a survival job, because that’s what we did” (or more accurately, “because we never got to follow our dreams either”). 

Or, in the wake of divorce — whose ruinous outcome was hammered into me from an early age — I need to find another man to take care of me.

Dismantling these stories is necessary because society has entered an era in which the nuclear family is no longer viable. Greedflation combined with stagnant wages and healthcare needs have driven multiple generations of people to live together. Climate change and war drive mass migrations.

The instability from these developments makes us all more vulnerable to abuse by predatory people, both individuals and businesses. Thus increasingly, it is communities, not individuals, that we need to be able to partner with to get our needs met.

Part of healing my generational trauma means learning not just to identify safe people with whom to work, play, and live; but also learning to speak up and speak loud when I feel unsafe. Therapists call this “reparenting” my inner 11-year-old, enabling her at long last to escape the weight of an unwelcome arm.

I call it, finally, growing up and learning to trust my own intuition, use my own words, and thrive in the kind of healthy community my ancestors might once have dreamed of.

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