It’s ironic that many of us parents in PLACE have worked to break generational trauma cycles, yet ended up with children who have launched a movement that will almost certainly create its own generational trauma moving forward. Let me be clear: Counselors are not prognosticators. I could be wrong. But consider the following and let me know what you think.
[Trigger warning: Discussions of domestic/family violence and substance abuse ahead.]
PLACE members share all-too-common stories of having been raised with potentially traumatic events occurring, sometimes regularly, even systemically for years. For something like physical abuse between a parent and child, it’s well-known that this sort of behavior can be passed down through generations. The same goes with, say, alcohol abuse. If you grew up with an alcoholic father or mother who only knew that maladaptive response to distress (and to everything else, if we’re being honest), the work of not growing up to behave as was modeled for you is difficult. Furthermore, if you broke out of that pattern, generations after you will owe you a unknown debt of gratitude, for what was deeply problematic in your family system will be unknown to them, as foreign as some alien language. This is the stuff of legacy, and if you’ve pulled that off, remember to be proud of yourself.
However, knowing what not to do doesn’t equate to knowing what to do. If you learned that authoritarian parenting peppered with rage-filled fits of broken dishes and slamming doors scars children, that doesn’t mean you’re automatically an authority on parenting a misbehaving or limits-testing child. How you parented may have been exponentially better than how you were parented, and we both know that we still made mistakes.
A frequent point of our honest, transparent discussions in PLACE is that while we made mistakes, we usually don’t feel as if we made the sort of mistakes that warrant cutting off a parent. Now you, trauma breaker and parent-better-than-your-own, may be newly traumatized, only this time via your child. Understand that in a clinical trauma assessment such as the Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale for DSM-5 (CAPS-5), the first question is “what happened?” Before continuing the assessment, the first criterion focuses on a person’s wellbeing: Was yours jeopardized? Did you witness or learn of someone else’s being jeopardized?
There is a decades-wide age continuum among PLACE participants, and many of us are elderly. Understandably, we likely approached this era of our lives with the safety net of our offspring lending help as our health and other needs necessitated. When your child(ren) cut off contact, your wellbeing moving forward may come into question. We have PLACE members who, by virtue of estrangement, have been diagnosed with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder via a licensed professional (and not a social media personality). The “complex” specifier denotes trauma having occurred over time via a person or circumstance that should have been safe, but instead proved to be dangerous or otherwise counter to expectations of reliability.
Here’s where I need to do my homework: My gut tells me that if an adult child estranges from a parent, the likelihood of their own child(ren) choosing estrangement down the road will increase. I will seek academic research on this topic and share it.
Parents, you may have done the work of not passing trauma to your children via learned violence, neglect, substance abuse, etc, but now these same children have staked new traumatic turf, and are much more likely to experience the tragedy of estrangement themselves. Instead of doing the work to process their needs with us and collaborate on necessary systemic adjustments with parents they’ve since deemed unworthy of knowing, they’ve instead chosen to foment a new brand of generational trauma. Who will step up to break this cycle? A new, terrible legacy may be taking shape before our eyes.
