It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle by Mark Wolynn

Author:Mark Wolynn [Wolynn, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-04-26T06:00:00+00:00

Family Pain, Family Silence

Gretchen, whom you met earlier in this book, carried the anxious feelings of her grandmother, the lone survivor of a family who perished at Auschwitz. Unable to fully receive the gift of having survived the Holocaust, Gretchen’s grandmother walked through life like a ghost, while her children and grandchildren walked on eggshells around her so as not to distress her further.

Talking about her dead family was not a conversation you could have with her. Her eyes would glaze over and the color in her cheeks would fade. It was best to leave her memories vaulted. Perhaps Grandmother felt an unconscious desire to die like the rest of her family. Two generations later, Gretchen would inherit these feelings and carry an image of wanting to be incinerated like her grandmother’s family.

Gretchen’s Core Language: “I’m going to vaporize myself. My body will incinerate in seconds.”

Once she recognized that she had been entangled with her grandmother’s trauma, Gretchen finally had a context within which to understand the feelings she carried. I invited her to close her eyes and visualize being cradled by her grandmother and all the Jewish family members she’d never known. In the experience of that comforting image, Gretchen reported feeling peaceful—a feeling she said had been unfamiliar to her. She realized that her wish to incinerate herself was connected to the relatives who literally had been incinerated. In that moment, the impulse to kill herself dissipated; she no longer felt the need to die.

While Gretchen was identified with her grandmother, she also may have been identified with the murderers who killed her grandmother’s family. By killing herself, Gretchen would have been unconsciously reenacting the aggression of the killers. Such identifications with perpetrators are not unusual and need to be considered when violent behaviors are observed in family members in later generations.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.