Graphic by Gill Kwok
Content notice: Discussion of abuse, rape and intergenerational trauma.
Author’s note: Colby Jeannine Fortin is a Title IX Consent and Bystander Intervention Educator and has two years of rape crisis counseling experience. They are now a licensed sexual assault crisis counselor in California. This article is an op-ed and is not intended to be professional psychological advice.
I believe I was around six when I found out my mother was a survivor of intimate partner violence. Her mother told me. I must have been around 12 when my mother told me she was a survivor of date rape. I remember the words date rape specifically. Rape sat ironlike on my tiny tongue. While I can recall the look on my maternal grandmother’s and mother’s faces, I cannot pinpoint the exact age or date at which I first received this information. These events are amorphous, suspended loosely in time.
Upon the unearthing of these stories, I was angry at the imparted burden. I was upset my maternal figures had failed to tell me sooner that the world was home to folks with intentions to hurt those I love, and possibly to hurt me, too. I viewed my mother as my best friend, and it was as if she had deviously kept a playground secret. I may have yelled at her. In reflection, I was a child reacting to horrid and hard information; however, I now feel only tremendous empathy for my mother.
This is the type of information that transcends age. When mulling over this history, I am suddenly pulled into my six-year-old self, and at six, I was tugged into premature adulthood, understanding harm in ways a child never should. I imagine my 42-year-old mother slipping into her 20-year-old self when she tells her daughter that an English ex-husband broke her ribs and she flew home to the States the next day. To her, there is a triumph at the end of the story: “I did not stay.”
“I did not stay.”
Conversations I wish had been saved for a later date radically changed my perception of safety and survivorship. I often found myself reliving the horrors of my maternal family members. I’ve learned lessons from their discretionary transparency, what they shared when boys and men were out of sight and sound. Stories passed down to me have acted as a guide to protect myself from wolves. Do not marry a wolf with a small drinking problem because it only gets worse. Do not move in with a wolf when you are a child in foster care. When the wolf strikes the first time, if humanly possible, leave. When the wolf hits you, the throwing of a heel is innovative self-defense. These imperfect lessons are my other lives.
At first, I felt alone with these stories, like the wounds of wolves on the women of my life were a burden to shoulder in shame and solitude. I now know many of my childhood friends carry similar tales of wolves. Many of my peers have their own stories passed along in private conversations or buried within a lifetime. I once wondered why we had never talked about them. They have come to be some of the most commonly heard stories in my life. Rape culture is like an unbearable top 40 song.
Hooks and melodies of my maternal survival guide chime when I meet men. They bang in the wind to warn of storms to come. Sometimes, it’s a phantom noise, ungrounded in the current time or situation. In other instances, it is a blinding red warning sign even the spirits can see.
I believe carrying our family’s stories of survival and survivorship into a new world can be turned into a gift to give our loved ones and ancestors.
For a long time, I had a guttural feeling that the existence of family histories, some unknown, altered my being in a predetermined sense. I am in no way a neurologist, and I balance a level of disdain and affinity for psychology. Despite this, I know that intergenerational trauma has been linked to expression alterations in glucocorticoid and immune-related genes. Most of that jargon goes over my average-height head. What I am more interested in is the impact of this genetic altering. According to a 2020 study, “Offspring of trauma survivors are more likely to develop PTSD, mood, and anxiety disorders and demonstrate endocrine and molecular alterations compared to controls.” The stories of my family are likely quite literally woven into the fabric of my being. I find solace in this validation of my fears and insights. I believe it allows me to carry their stories of survivorship into a new dawn.
Upon further research, you may believe, like me, that my body, our bodies, may have absorbed generations of abuse before birth. While a six-year-old does not need to know the crack of their mother’s ribs, I believe carrying our family’s stories of survival and survivorship into a new world can be turned into a gift to give our loved ones and ancestors.
So, how do we evolve these stories of wolves? How can we make something new of the maternal survival guide, a product of patriarchy’s violence? Your trauma and the trauma of those before you deserve gentle handling in this transformation. Gentleness is essential radicalism in a world prone to such abuse. From nonprofessional experience, I propose that healing starts by telling our stories in supportive spaces. Maybe your path will resemble mine:
You choose to talk to your family to understand their experiences further, to varying degrees of success. You make peace with what you know and what you may never know, respecting what your loved ones would prefer to keep private. For example, my mother has never told me her abusers’ names. You share these stories in confidence with a therapist or other licensed mental health professional, then maybe a trusted partner, mentor or friend. Perhaps you find community, or perhaps you learn that those who care for you will not turn you away when they know about the stories of wolves you once shouldered in solitude.
You may begin to journal or create art about your own experiences in comparison and tandem to those stories embedded in your lineage. You refine and exert the owning of your inherited experiences. This stage is where I saw a transformation in how I viewed my bestowed maternal survival guide. Somewhere along the process of mindfully unearthing these stories, you take control of their path and very being. They transform from repressed stories of wolves into something viable to create life and joy. I felt a sudden alteration of the very matter of my family’s history of abuse. My perspective shifted, and these stories of wolves turned into seedlings, ready to birth new life.
Somewhere along the process of mindfully unearthing these stories, you take control of their path and very being.
Slowly, these unearthed stories of harm, once too far underground to reach, to be cared for with sun and water or perhaps in inhospitable soil altogether, can be uprooted, replanted. You can move them, destigmatize them, if you choose. We can claim visible space for our stories, plowing them out in our new world. We can let resilient wildflowers burst through the fields, unafraid of what creatures lurk in the night. You care for these sproutings with therapy, cathartic work, water and good meals. They begin to blossom, and you find yourself in blossom too; perhaps you take up work supporting survivors. You could volunteer at a crisis center or find ways to actively address harm and trauma in the communities in which you reside. Maybe you become a resource to your friends and loved ones working through similar trauma. With time and work, you become the person helping those where you once were, continuing to break cycles of abuse.
Once a family secret of violence, then set to be suppressed and learned from in secrecy, becomes a garden. I do not call stories and experiences of harm metaphorical seedlings as they are dangerous when romanticized. Instead, I’d argue that giving survivors and descendants of trauma the ability to morph these stories into something new and of use to them is a pillar of empowerment and agency. These many seeds you have cared for are fruits of the emotional labor of processing trauma. With this transformation, abusers begin to lose power. Within generations, you have started the process of defying the imposed secrecy and stigma of abuse, both of which serve to protect abusers. This process will look different for everyone who decides to embark on working through intergenerational trauma, whether that trauma is rooted in gender, race, religion, class or likely multiple of the above.
Regardless of your personal experiences and journey, I believe it is imperative that we communally and individually reflect and contemplate if 2021 could be the year to turn our stories of wolves into gardens — to do the work to transform our narratives of trauma. In 2020, we were forced to learn strength and survival skills. I have hope that the following year will offer us the opportunity to implement our strength towards healing, something we all deserve. Furthermore, I hope we find each other, seeking community, as we work to create and plant gardens out of intergenerational trauma we’ve endured.