Emotional trauma can be generational, passed down from parent to child like a family heirloom. You carry it with you and it’s not even yours.
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To understand the root of all my struggles with mental health, picture a glass of water. It’s sitting on the kitchen counter, glistening with condensation as the ice inside it crackles and melts on a hot summer day. Six years old and all rambunctious and sweaty from running around in the yard, I run into the house to get a drink and, being a hyper kid and bit of a spaz, I knock the glass over and it shatters across the kitchen floor.
Now, if I knock that glass over and my mom is in a good mood, she’ll turn from whatever she’s doing and say, sweet as can be, “Oh honey, it’s okay. Don’t worry about it. We can get another glass.” But if I knock that glass over and she’s in a bad mood, she’ll turn on me and scream, “Look what you did, you little shit! What the fuck is wrong with you?! You fucking idiot!”
That was my mother: rational, kind, and loving—or irrational, volatile, and lashing out in anger at the slightest provocation. Living with her was like living with Jekyll and Hyde, and on any given day, my sisters and I had no idea which way she was going to go, what would set her off, or how far it would escalate. The glass of water could be anything: a fight with my sisters, a bad grade on a test, playing the radio too loud. It could be something supremely important, or something completely trivial; it didn’t matter. We were forever walking on eggshells and dodging trip mines. Throw in her ever-increasing alcohol dependency and the slowly deteriorating codependent relationship with my equally broken and abusive stepdad, and the rest of the script writes itself. It wasn’t unusual to come home to find all of my stepdad’s shit on the front lawn because my mom had decided to throw it out there. It was just as typical to come home and find all my mom’s shit out on the lawn because my stepdad had decided it was his turn to do the same. There was nothing remarkable or special about any of it. Coming home to some kind of emotional Armageddon was like, “Oh, it’s Tuesday.”
My sisters and I were being traumatized, plain and simple. It wasn’t blunt-force physical trauma; we weren’t getting beaten by our parents, thank God, but we were getting psychologically KO’d on a daily basis. For the longest time, I didn’t know that it was abnormal. I assumed that this was how everybody’s parents were, that this was how human beings operated. And because I thought it was normal, I couldn’t see the negative effects it was having, or how those negative effects were accumulating and compounding in my head, year after year after year. Once I became an adult, I couldn’t see the ways in which I still approached every aspect of my life the way I did that glass of water: terrified that anything other than perfection would trigger an onslaught of pain and abuse and rejection.
Still, my mother was not a bad, or evil, person. In fact, she naturally had deep empathy and love for people, and a desire to do good things in the world. But her natural inclinations wound up being overridden all too often because she was a damaged person and, ultimately, a broken person, and when I set out to learn why, to answer the question behind the glass of water, I didn’t have to look too hard to find the culprit; it’s right there in the family tree, in the long history of unwellness that goes back not just to my mom but far into my extended family as well.
If you found yourself suffering from a debilitating condition, like heart disease or breast cancer, what’s one of the first things you would you do? You’d go to your family tree. You’d look back to see where it mostly likely came from in order to narrow down the root causes and the best course of treatment. With the advances in DNA analysis we have now, it’s amazing what science can do. Mental health is no different. The root causes are all there. You just have to go looking for them. Needless to say, not every trauma or condition is linked to family. You may suffer from trauma at work or be in an abusive relationship, but if your story is anything like mine, a lot of your answers are tucked away with the skeletons in the family closet.
Trying to figure out your family history is a journey, and a tough one at that. Getting people to open up about the trauma they’ve endured is not an easy thing to do. People are often unwilling to talk. Or, if they do talk, they’re unwilling to be honest. Everyone is doing their best to frame the past the way they want to see it, which is not necessarily the way that it actually was. Still, you do the best you can. You become a bit of an archaeologist. You search and you dig, and ultimately you piece together facts and form conclusions from the best evidence you can gather. Which is why you start by telling your own story. You regurgitate all the unhealthy patterns and behaviors you witnessed and endured over the years, and that at least gives you a place to start. But the cool thing is that by understanding psychology more, by going to therapy more, by learning about yourself more, you in turn learn so much about your parents and your family—and the world, for that matter.
I wish more than anything that I’d had someone in my life when I was younger to help guide me and heal myself. Nearly all of our collective woes on earth can be traced back to the broken hearts and minds of people.
With my mother’s story, the evidence I have to go on is largely anecdotal. She didn’t leave a paper trail. She never once went to a therapist, never once sought any kind of help or treatment for her problems, except when she was ordered to by the court to avoid jail time. So there’s no formal diagnosis, no medical file full of patient notes and assessments. But after talking to multiple therapists now about my own issues, telling them the basic scenarios about what my mom was like, the near-unanimous conclusion is that my mom was a classic borderline personality with narcissistic tendencies, meaning her personality and demeanor could change on a dime and she had to be right all the time. There’s some conjecture that she was bipolar as well, but there’s no way of knowing that for sure without a proper diagnosis.
Of course, any attempt to map out the trauma in your family tree will bring you quickly to the question of nature versus nurture. Were we born this way, or was something done to us? My understanding is that the mood swings that come with being bipolar are rooted in biology, in hormones and genetics. Being a borderline personality, on the other hand, is a condition spawned by trauma and abuse. Trying to tease out the difference between the two can be difficult. How much of this generational relay race is genetic, and how much of it is learned behavior that we take on by growing up in proximity to unhealthy people?
I personally believe that trauma from our nurture quite literally reprograms our nature, even chromosomally.
Scientifically, we know that at least some of it is nature. We know that there are certain chromosomes and the way they line up and how they switch on and off can affect your body and your emotions in all number of ways. We also know that your environment, and a traumatic environment in particular, can have a profound effect on the physical development of the brain, activating different genes and shaping different neural pathways, exacerbating preexisting genetic issues, and ingraining unhealthy behaviors that can take a lifetime to correct.
And I will say, after all the learning I’ve done, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. It is both nature and nurture. That said, my personal feelings about what caused my mother’s problems—as well as my problems and the problems of the vast majority of people on earth—lean toward nurture. Perhaps I’m biased that way because of what I’ve been through. Perhaps I’m biased that way because I’m a person who wants to believe in solutions, and if the problem is how we nurture each other, then that means we have the power to do better. And if we have the power to help each other, to love each other, to help heal each other, then we can do it right now. And maybe I want to believe that if someone had been able to do those things for my mother, if someone had been able to halt the cycle of generational abuse before it inflicted so much damage on her, then maybe, just maybe, she wouldn’t have died alone on her bathroom floor, never knowing how much her friends and family truly loved her.
My mother was born Susan Marie Hoctor in 1950 in St. Louis, Missouri. She was the oldest of five, with two sisters, Sally and Sandy, and two brothers, Tim and Mike—five children born in seven years to one of those big Catholic families that used to pop them out like that back then. My maternal grandfather, Grandpa Ed, was a psychiatrist, ironically, and when my mom was young, he moved the family to Ventura, California, so he could take a job at Camarillo State Hospital, which had one of the preeminent psych wards on the West Coast. Grandpa Ed was super smart, well educated, and successful.
Then there was Grandma Pat.
The Grandma Pat stories are legendary. I mean, she was a tyrant, a ballbuster extraordinaire, strictly and oppressively Catholic but also extremely volatile, always yelling and screaming and abusing in one form or another. One story that my mom and her siblings used to tell all the time was about when my mom was twelve and the family was driving across the country. My mom was being more mouthy than Grandma Pat felt was proper, so as they passed by some truck stop in the middle of nowhere, Grandma Pat kicked her out of the car and left her there, for a half an hour, a twelve-year-old girl at a truck stop, by herself, surrounded by strangers, just to teach her a lesson.
All of Grandma Pat’s kids are around the same age, share the same DNA, grew up in the same insanely disruptive home, and struggle with the consequences. To this day I’m not sure any of them have fully reckoned with it. Nobody’s sure why Grandma Pat was such a tyrant, because supposedly her mom and dad were quite kind, but part of it might have had something to do with the fact that Grandpa Ed was gay. He lived his whole life in the closet, hiding it from his family, because of how difficult it was for a gay man to live openly in those times. He and Grandma Pat had five kids, and they slept together probably five times. Grandma Pat used to come home and find him socializing late into the night with other men, having drinks. Ignorance is bliss and she didn’t want to believe it, so for a while Grandpa Ed was just considered eccentric and cosmopolitan. But eventually she caught him red-handed and the façade of the marriage crumbled around them. Grandma Pat was stuck raising the kids by herself for eight years until she remarried, but I think the whole experience unhinged her a bit, as I imagine it would with anyone.
I didn’t know my Grandpa Ed at all. He moved up to Santa Maria after that. The only time I can remember visiting him was when he was living with his “roommate” Buzz. Not his boyfriend, his roommate—a very Bert-and-Ernie type of situation. Then, when I was around seven or so, I came home one day and there was a box with all this random stuff in it, board games and VHS tapes and this cool robot that had a controller with a walkie-talkie so you could move it around and talk out of its speaker. It was like Christmas morning!
“What’s all this?!” I asked.
“Your grandfather died,” my mom said, “and he gave you all that.”
“Great!”
I wasn’t even fazed. It’s sad, but I genuinely didn’t know the man, and I had no comprehension of what had happened. I only learned the details much later, that after years of struggling with his own mental health issues, he drank NyQuil for three weeks straight until it killed him.
If there’s one thing that everyone in our family agrees on, it’s that my mom was the smartest, prettiest, and most charismatic of the bunch. She graduated from high school in 1968, and she could have done anything she wanted. She could have had a successful business or run for governor. She had that power in her; that much was undeniable. But being an eighteen-year-old girl fleeing an abusive home in Southern California in the late sixties, it was practically preordained that she become a hippie. So that’s what she did. She left Ventura for a quick stint at a Santa Barbara City College, then dropped out, moved to Los Angeles, and never went back to finish.
Trauma may be generational, but so is enlightenment. We have such an amazing opportunity to break down the chains of abuse, the chains of trauma, the chains of shame and fear and insecurity and ignorance and lack of understanding and all of it.
At the time, the whole hippie-Jesus movement was taking off, so my mom started gravitating toward that, rejecting the dogma and stigma of the Catholicism she’d grown up with her whole life. After a few years of bouncing around Southern California embracing her hippie-Jesus self, my mom started going to a church out in the San Fernando Valley called Church of the Living Word. It was there in 1976 that she met my dad, the new lead singer in the worship band, who’d recently moved to LA after eight years in the Air Force. My dad was this hunky, six-foot-three seventies dude with long hair and a big Grizzly Adams beard. But while my dad had the outward appearance of this burly, bearded man’s man, inside he was mostly a nerdy, insecure kid dealing with generational trauma of his own (which we’ll get to later on).
Ultimately, my parents were two broken people who grabbed onto each other to feel less broken, with predictable results. “I was just a simple Indiana boy who got caught up in the California cyclone who was your mother,” my dad always says, and boy he ain’t lying.
The tragic irony is that my mother became this free-spirited hippie because she wanted to rebel against the life she’d grown up with. She wanted to do better and be better than Grandma Pat. But trauma, if unacknowledged and untreated, will always get passed on. And because my mother had never done the work to understand and heal the abuse she’d grown up with, she fell right back into acting out the script she knew. She rejected a home with a domineering, abusive mother and a passive, emotionally cloistered father, only to run away and re-create that exact scenario for herself and her children.
Second verse, same as the first.