52 Ancestors Challenge Week 25: "Broken Branch" - Intergenerational healing and mental health

If a "broken branch" has anything to do with estrangement, I guess I'd have to look at my maternal side of my family tree. Generation after generation of my mother's lines have siblings lobbed off the tree and excommunicated for a number of real or imagined transgressions.

My mother does not speak to any of her daughters. Neither of her sisters, my aunts, speak to me. My grandfather's sister excommunicated him for reasons I am unsure of. My mother's maternal grandfather had little to nothing to do with his sister because she married a man who was of Chinese extraction. 

All of these behaviors are completely the opposite of what I see historically on my father's side of my tree. There, in almost every census, some wayward relative is lodging with my direct ancestors; unwed brother-in-laws, cousins, nieces, nephews, cousin's cousin's kids, etc., etc., etc. For awhile, my father housed my mother's niece. I suppose she was his niece too, he certainly considered her his niece, but at the time she lived with us my parents were long divorced. Dad took her in without a second thought.

Now one might think, surely I have followed my father's unquestionable, more loving example or that at the very least that I have acquired some balance between these behaviors in my own life but instead, I feel as though I live at both extremes. Hell, I don't speak to my step-brother from my father's second marriage. I have my reasons. And, yet several of my cousins I count among my very best friends. I am both "Sure, you need help with X, Y and Z, here is my last nickel. Let me drive you there" AND "I've had enough of your bullshit, go fuck yourself." 

Is is because I am a Gemini? Perhaps.

Or is this learned behavior from my upbringing? Could be.

Or something I've inherited in the genes? That, I don't know.

I do know that I am seeing more and more written about intergenerational and transgenerational trauma. Ya think we inherit the damage done to the generations before us? I'm not sure. I tend to lean towards the nurture side of the nature vs. nurture debate. I think we learn how to treat people from the examples around us.

Transgenerational trauma, slightly different from intergenerational drama as I understand it, is a psychological effect caused by a collective traumatic experience suffered by a group of people because of their cultural identity, ethnicity, nationality, or religious identity. The damage carries down through generations as part of the group's collective memory and shared sense of identity. For example, events like the Atlantic Slave Trade, Apartheid in South Africa, the Holocaust, colonization, etc. The list goes on and on and on. Without denial, these experience have had lasting effects on the descendants of those who experienced the event first-hand. 

Intergenerational trauma is the term applied to a single family or individual parent–child relationships, like child abuse may cause intergenerational trauma. 

Whether there is collective trauma, like the Holocaust, or interpersonal trauma, like multi-generational molestation, scientists have begun to study how both direct survivors and members of subsequent generations may develop complex post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSDs). Perhaps trauma is passed down socially through learned behaviors or perhaps, as some claim, it is passed down through stress-induced genetic modifications.

I have read all sorts of things about ancestral work or what one might call ancestral healing work. As I see it, that is a practice of spirituality in which the practitioner seeks guidance from their ancestors and honors them in return for healing between the generations. Yeah, it is a little strange to me, as is blaming my astrological sign for my behavior, though.

However, I have both experienced and witnessed some sort of healing in doing genealogy research; in learning who your ancestors were, how they lived, and the experiences they had.

I have had clients I have worked with who discover through their DNA results that they are adopted or their father is not their biological father, or perhaps that those conditions applied to a parent or grandparent, and upon pronouncement of this fact, the client produces a long, soft but audible "oh" as if it all of a sudden it all makes sense.

For example, I learned through my genealogy research that my great grandfather was schizophrenic. I found it out from his death certificate. He died of a heart attack while he was a patient in a mental asylum. 

Mental illness still has quite the social stigma about it. Maybe that is why my maternal grandpa never told me anything about his father. Discovering that detail made me better understand my grandfather's private nature. Grandpa would probably be upset with me for sharing such details but I really see no shame in it. 

I am not sure if I will reconvene with my grandpa in an afterlife or perhaps his spirit is already truly watching over me or is in my presence right now. If he is, I hope he forgives me for sharing that detail because I certainly forgive him for not sharing it.