Caring for
each other should be the first instinct of family members. We live in such proximity to each other, and bringing people together in a family is precisely in order to provide support, meet basic needs, expand joy and creativity, and go through the challenges and possibilities of life with trusted others. Given the advantages of all this, harm beyond the most accidental kind should be rare in families, right?
So, why do family members hurt each other so regularly? In some ways, this question covers a lot of what my clients are asking for help with. Their parents hurt them, or other adults in the family hurt them, or their siblings hurt them. Additionally, they come asking about the hurt they’ve done – to siblings, partners and their own children.
They come with these questions because the impact of this hurt extends far into the future. The toxic stress that family members put each other under leads to debilitating physical and mental health problems. This impact of past injury in the present is the reason why my clients have knocked on my door, often with enormous desperation. So, why is this so persistent?
There are many reasons, including systemic oppressions like racism, sexism, and homo- and transphobia. And, in this article, I want to talk about another source of persistent family injury that is often quite hidden: war.
Wars impact families in the most intense ways – as refugees, as combat soldiers, and as “collateral damage.” Clients regularly come to me with baffling patterns of constant injury between family members over generations, and often we find the origin in the family’s experience of war (particularly if we expand the understanding of war to include ongoing violence like the Native American genocide, colonialism, and American slavery).
A few recent examples from my clients (details are changed to protect confidentiality):
- A client had an abusive and absent father. He had been able to find a certain amount of peace through understanding that his father’s mother had been even more savagely abusive than his father had. As we continued, we could feel the entire family’s focus on this grandmother’s evilness. Then, we included the Nazis and Jewish victims who were part of this family’s history. As soon as we included the Nazis, the energy of blame at the grandmother stopped – we could see the original violation, its effect on the family, and see how it was being continued in the individual’s treatment of each other.
- Another client had parents who continuously fought with each other, which was harmful to each other and terrifying to their children. Both parents had been small children in Germany during World War II. When we acknowledged the war trauma both had gone through, the persistent compulsion to “fight” with each other relaxed, and the client and her siblings could also relax.
- I worked with a couple who loved each other, but were fighting too much. We discovered that her family’s lineage belonged to the Chinese Nationalists who escaped to Taiwan. His family’s lineage belonged to the Chinese Communists. These two segments of China fought a terrible war, family against family, with millions of deaths, and for some, the loss of their country. When we honored these lineages, the couple found it easier to find resolutions to their present-day conflicts. (I often find that couples seem to be attracted to each other, and get into fights, as a result of their lineages being enemies a generation or two back.)
- Finally, a client whose family was from Vietnam had a mother who was overly strict and unkind. When we could honor the way that her ancestors endured decades of war by focusing on the bare needs of survival, a new softness could enter the family.
The stories of clients offers hundreds of other examples of the lingering affects of war in families generations after it has taken place. These events have an explosive impact on the fate of the family, and unconsciously we continue to honor those experiences through the conflict we experience in the present-day, long after the events are over, with people whom we love.
When we can find a different and better way to honor these events and the suffering they caused, we have a better chance of being able to release old injuries, and both giving and receiving more congruent love in the future.
What might have been the impacts of war on your family? How do you find ways to honor that history? Please share your stories, thoughts and questions on my blog below, so that we can all benefit from our shared growth….
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