I've been thinking about this one, and the rippling effect of both trauma and healing. I hope my impact on the world causes more healing than trauma.

text reads:

Dad, we've been talking about family trauma and recovery recently, and you wrote me a song about the day I was born.

And it was a beautiful song but I still feel like we're strangers, like part of you never got to know me after that day.

I had a dream that we experience healing as nonlinear because we experience time as linear, but that healing actually happens in moments that ripple outward, spreading across what we call "time" in both directions and also across everything else.

And I woke up wondering if the me that needed you when you weren't there can hear you singing this song now, and be healed back then.

(here's the song): https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=589970479155000&set=a.304268177725233

"In the hearts of millions of Jews there is a sanctuary in which they carry their grief in intimate solitude. Many events in Jewish history are too terrible to be believed, but nothing in Jewish history too terrible to have happened. After the war, the Jews rose from the nightmare to find that it had not been a nightmare after all. It had been a reality. The Jews were fearfully depleted in manpower. There would be 27 million, not 14 million, Jews alive today but for the Holocaust [Population circa 1984; the 2023 number is viewed as ~16 million]. Is it any wonder that Jews have a profound scepticism about the stability of civilization, that they have an obsessive anxiety about their own physical security, that in any appraisal of their destiny they make provision for the worst? And that they remember? They remember not only the crimes of the Nazis but also the apathy and neglect of much of the rest of the world--the governments and churches that passed by on the other side, the nations that closed their gates so that refugees from the Holocaust could not enter."

Heritage: Civilization and the Jews by Abba Eban

Things from my notes app: 4/20/21

I feel like I’m living in the shadow of your death

that’s only magnified now that I know what really happened

you probably laid down on that same couch we used to sleep across from each other

Sleeping pills & muscle relaxers weighing heavy in your body

But you left a note

Blaming my mother and sister

I don’t think you meant it

I think you wanted to push them away,

so it would hurt less when you left.

But I still feel haunted

In the way I see your face in the mirror

But hear my mother’s voice from my mouth

I feel haunted by the echoes of pain you felt flooding my own veins

The same disorder we share, and the traumatic memory of our DNA

Where do you end as my father and myself as my identity begin?

How much of this is sickness?

How much of this is trauma?

How much of it is me?

How doomed am I to repeat these same mistakes?

I think this is a hard question that I personally think "maybe" for because I think the most evident traumas that are so obviously present don't completely have "generation" cycles. Like soils. I guess you have layers and those all have impacts on each other but I don't know if you can consider it "intergenerational" the same way we consider it in living beings. I do think that there is trauma still lingering, I just don't know how to qualify it as "intergenerational," yknow? I mean this absolutely isn't a topic I'm studying so there's a lot I could be missing, and I'd looove to learn where I went wrong if I did!!

Ah but what is a generation? Really?

Are we being living-thing biased?

In one way the answer is definitely yes - there’s a thick layer of iridium at the crash time in stratigraphic columns around the world

We’ve inherited something, as a planet

Could we also have inherited epigenetic modification?

reading a day of fallen night and you know which historical figure I genuinely think is incredibly tragic? galian berethnet. he didn't think he was living a lie. he had no idea. and when he found out the truth, he banished his abuser and ended his own life, and now either a sanctified version of his horrific abuse or a scathing view of him as a liar and a thief are how people know him. god, what a fucking legacy. his offer to cleolind (or what we know of it) wasn't fair or equitable or good, but he didn't deserve what he received.

Walk with me for a while.

ghost /ɡōst/ noun

an apparition of a dead person which is believed to appear or become manifest to the living, typically as a nebulous image."the building is haunted by the ghost of a monk" [oxford languages via google]

epigenetics /ˌepəjənˈediks/ noun

the study of changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression rather than alteration of the genetic code itself. [oxford languages via google]

"Epigenetics can be thought of as a very specific sort of memory." "-most memories involve the [nervous system] storing experiences by altering connections between cells" [1]

"In a post mortem study on humans, Individuals [who died of natural causes] showed [altered] methylation in key areas of the hippocampus than those who died by suicide and those who died by suicide with a history of child abuse." [1]

"decreased levels of glucocorticoid receptor mRNA, as well as mRNA transcripts bearing the glucocorticoid receptor 1F splice variant and increased cytosine methylation of an NR3C1 promoter. Patch-methylated NR3C1 promoter constructs that mimicked the methylation state in samples from abused suicide victims showed decreased NGFI-A transcription factor binding and NGFI-A–inducible gene transcription" [2]

"muliebrity

if you’re raised with an angry man in your house, there will always be an angry man in your house. you will find him even when he is not there. and if one day you find that there is no angry man in your house— well, you will go find one and invite him in!" [3]

I don't know what to say about all this other than that it feels true. I've recently discovered that I don't feel things the way other people do. I have been slowly poking at what that means- feelings are something physical, a sensation in the body, like hot or cold. Some people actually get hot from emotion!

"Sympathy: I know how you feel Empathy: I feel how you feel Compassion: is there anything I can do to help?" [4]

I've leaned on compassion hard- to the point of annoyance, until I learned to ask questions before offering to help them solve the problem. But back to ghosts. Experiences change a person like a sculptor shapes clay. The creation of life from clay is a popular theme that appears throughout multiple cultures.[5]

Clay, before it is fired, can be mixed, shaped, dried, rewet, and formed again completely. It can be a hundred different things with no evidence of that in the final, fired version. Ceramics are "fired" (heated in a kiln) to different levels. Bisque means that bone-dry clay (greenware) has been fired once,at Cone 4-8, most commonly 6. Have you ever tried to exorcise a cup? Once fired, the ceramics can never return to its original state. You can smash it, you can grind it up into a fine powder. You can use ceramic powder as a metal coating, in filters;

"crushed fired clay ceramic-lime mortars are considered to be ideal for use in the restoration and conservation of ancient monuments and historic structures since they are fully compatible with the weak and porous traditional building materials" [6]

The jump from "fucked up cup" to ideal material for restoring historic structures seems too on the nose for me, as a ceramics artist who went on to restore monuments for a while. So we've got dna/clay and methylation/firing/trauma/memory/ghosts. There are ghosts of shitty cups in the cracks of restored buildings. I think of the tourists walking through, rubbing their hands on the walls and slowly corroding the monument with their acidic hand oils. Do some of the ghosts haunting me, that held my hands as I formed the wet clay, linger on their fingers when they leave? Can I put this down? Can someone else help me carry it? What is an artist but a ghost factory? I am making the ghosts, the ghosts are making me. It's an oroborous situation. I have GOT to get that snake some proper nutrition.

I had something else to say, but I forgot. My therapist tells me it's a way our nervous system protects itself from painful activation unable to be resolved.

Trauma changes the way our body functions, past emotional reactions, down to individual gene function. The war, the concentration camp, the abusive abused man, the abused child, like stacks of rocks placed on a grave in hopes of keeping the entombed inside. And yet, the undead rise! Moving strangely, covered in dirt, and stinking up the whole bus, we shuffle among the living. Some of us undetected! Most of us, well, we've got limbs falling off. We don't act right. So you're dead, but you really want to live. You go find yourself an exorcist, a physical therapist, a specialist who thinks they know what your problem is and has a strict regimen on how to fix you. Some things work, some things don't. You're still dead, but your skin is rotting less these days. Some days you wish Victor Frankenstein was real, someone with enough hubris to cut you up and zap you to life. But, you have to be what you want to see in the world. You're used to playing all the parts. You search for any information that can help you patch the function of your genes, behaviors and beliefs that will loch and dam the waterfall of your experience. You start believing in ghosts, and it's about time, since you've been haunted all your life. Try not to let it progress to possession, exorcists are really expensive.

[1] Transgenerational Trauma: The Role of Epigenetics

[2] Epigenetic regulation of the glucocorticoid receptor in human brain associates with childhood abuse

[3] Cut

[4] Quote from seananmcguire's dad

[5] Wikipedia: Creation of life from clay

[6] Use of crushed fired clay ceramics in the production of mortars

Ppl think I’m exaggerating when I say I came out the womb hating men and I’m literally not being hyperbolic in the slightest I have never liked or trusted those ppl. Hackles immediately raised. Only ever liked 2 men and it’s my dad and my brother’s godfather everyone else…instant distrust you gotta prove yourself through a number of trials

the dark forest's curse is about generational trauma. To Me.

An interesting piece of trivia in Donald R. Hickey's book The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict: the last US veteran died in 1905, nearly a century after the conflict ended, and the last US pensioner (a daughter of a War of 1812 veteran) died in 1946. A child of a War of 1812 veteran was alive after the Second World War! It reminded me of the time a granddaughter of an American Revolutionary War veteran appeared on a 1961 television programme.

The last surviving child of an American Civil War veteran died in 2020, aged 90—child, not grandchild. I looked up the last living child of an enslaved Black American, because I know one was alive into the 2020s—Daniel Smith died only last month, in October 2022!

There is just something about having these seemingly distant eras so closely connected to living memory that feels eerie. Considering that we know that trauma can be passed on through epigenetic changes—documented in descendants of Union prisoners of war in the American Civil War—how far removed are we from the pain of our ancestors?

On Generational Trauma: Forging a New Legacy

I hold agony that doesn't feel like my own. A part of me feels if I could solve this mystery, I'd find a lasting sense of peace. It's a longing that leads me to explore generational trauma - a hurt that transcends time, leaving a quiet, yet painful scar.

Learn how generational trauma is passed down and discover the path to breaking the cycle, forging a legacy of resilience. I share a piece of my family’s story with you to demonstrate a tale of resilience and healing that transcends time and generations. An Eternal Pain We had another death in the family recently. It wasn’t the first tragic death, and it won’t be the last in my bloodline. My…

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EPIGENETICS AND LIVING WATERS: The Impermanence of Trauma

Trauma isn’t some lasting thing that gets to define us for the rest of our lives right. It certainly isn’t the gateway into the generational curses your local fear mongers sold you. Yehoshua spoke of a living water throughout his teachings because life is fluid. Nothing is fixed or permanent. Rock with me as we take the journey within.

Maria Lassnig Self-portraits

"We’re just starting to understand that just because you’re born with a certain set of genes, you’re not in a biologic prison as a result of those genes — that changes can be made to how those genes function, that can help.

And maybe some changes are more likely to occur than others, and some genes are more flexible than other genes, but the idea is a very simple idea, and you hear it from people all the time. People say, when something cataclysmic happens to them, “I’m not the same person. I’ve been changed. I am not the same person that I was.”

And we have to start asking ourselves, well, what do they mean by that? Of course, they’re the same person. They have the same DNA, don’t they? They do. And what I think it means is that the environmental influence has been so overwhelming that it has forced a major constitutional change, an enduring transformation. And epigenetics gives us the language and the science to be able to start unpacking that"

– Rachel Yehuda, from The On Being Podcast, How Trauma and Resilience Cross Generations

For knowledge to be passed down through generations (like Monarch butterflies) or for inter-generational trauma, is it important to be physically present at the moment of someone’s death? Especially an elder family member?

Is there a reason to be present when someone dies?

There are belief systems that believe being present at the moment of death is important for various reasons.

It’s called Epigenetics. 

Intergenerational Transmission Of Trauma Effects: Putative Role Of Epigenetic Mechanisms

How Awareness of Epigenetics and Generational Trauma Can Inform Therapy

Oz

Wow. So like, shitty, abusive parents and having an inheritable neuro disorder really do go hand-in-hand

For anyone who keeps second-guessing if it's *only* C-PTSD or a combination of other things along with it, yeah...

Why do you think your caregivers were abusive? Is there also a long history of clearly undiagnosed mental and developmental disorders?

I do think my parents are pretty normal considering their life experiences…like, my dad has an inability to be considerate of other people’s feelings and that was not emotionally safe or healthy for me growing up, but he was also a child soldier so I think we gotta grade on a curve-