On Forgiveness and Liberation from Family and Cultural Trauma

in ThoughtfulDailyPost2 years ago (edited)

*Note: this post is a long and winding road of deeply personal stories of my parents and my childhood experiences. Incidences of abuse and violence are mentioned. It's been a healing and insightful process for me to write this out. So thank you for holding space, to whoever who reads this!

IMG_1822 Large.jpeg

When my parents were married and lived together, I never saw my parents hug unless it was for a photo. And I've never seen them kiss before. In fact, the only ways of connecting and solving problems was through verbal and physical violence. Every morning largely started with a shouting match and the sound of glass breaking.

One of those mornings was particularly memorable. My dad had ruptured his Achilles tendon playing a game of pick up basketball, which required him to use crutches for a while. They had gotten into an argument, which usually consisted of swear words and some of the most toxic blame and shame language you'll ever have to listen to. My parents would often lose their voices after a good fight from how strained their vocal chords were. That day, my mom, who was in one of her manic episodes, decided to hurl his crutches out the second floor window, shattering the glass everywhere. Then, she dragged him downstairs and locked him outside. She threatened me that if I let him in, I would get a beating so bad that I wouldn't be able to walk for the rest of my life. I was 7 years old.

My dad would beat me severely throughout my childhood, sometimes to the point where I would notice blood in my sheets the next morning and I would have a limp in my walk. I would be hit for many different reasons. Shrugging my shoulders when he would ask me a question. Not being able to understand a math lesson after he tried explaining to me. Not finishing my track race in 5th grade because I was so nervous that he was watching me that I started throwing up on the last stretch. Not coming downstairs fast enough when he would announce dinner is ready. Falling asleep after my alarm would go off. Sleeping in my sister's bed when I would be scared of ghosts at night. It was always unpredictable. Even to this day, I still feel remnants of nausea and fear when I hear "Get up against the wall" in my head. He would make me press my hands up against the wall, pull down my pants, spread my legs, and stick my butt out. If I wasn't in the right position right away, he would use that an excuse to hit me more.

Interestingly enough, he never laid a finger on my mom.

IMG_1823 Large.jpeg

Now, you couldn't tell from pictures that this was happening. On the surface, my dad was a procurement manager for Kaiser Permanente, one of the leading health care companies in the country. Despite facing discrimination based on race and his 5'7" height, he rose to the top of the ranks and was even featured in newspapers for creating a game-changing communication and data retrieval system within Kaiser across Northern California. He even retired at age 50. Growing up, he lived in the projects in New York after his parents immigrated from China with literally one suitcase. He grew up with an extremely abusive mother who would beat him with a rolling pin while his dad would stay silent and never intervene. He faced extreme bullying until he started hanging out with the Puerto Ricans and Blacks on the street and eventually was considered the Asian King because no one was able to out-fight him. After high school, he went to University of Pennsylvania with a scholarship for wrestling and track, and got his engineering degree. Then he was drafted into the Vietnam War and was in the Navy. My aunt (his sister) would often tell me that there were certain things he experienced here that would help me understand why he was so angry and violent. Yet like most dysfunctional families, everything operated in secrecy and I still don't know what really happened to my dad there.

My mom was born in Hong Kong. She grew up in a mansion with her extended family, which was made possible by inherited wealth from generations of owning some kind of famous company in Hong Kong that produced important goods (that's all I know at this point). They even had some of the first colored TV's at the time. Yet when her father (my Gong Gong) got polio, her family kicked them out. They believed that they were a curse to the family and that they would bring bad luck to everyone in the house. So, my mom and her parents would live in poverty and struggle after years of privilege and luxury. Her mother would make her go back to the house and beg for money. Yet my mom, rebel that she is, refused to do that after a while and would often run away from home. In my mom's family, there have been many suicides especially amongst males, drug overdoses, and cases of domestic violence. Her brother, my Uncle Tommy, still to this day steals leather jackets, rips them up, and then stands in homeless shelter lines just to look credible enough to get free food. He also stole money from my grandmother countless times, beating her many times in order to find out where she stashed it. The fascinating thing is that he has loads of money in his bank from working in Silicon Valley. Well, that was until he was fired for fraud and theft.

When my mom was about 50 year old, my grandmother broke her hip falling and thought she was going to die. So she confessed to my mom that she was a product of infidelity and that her godfather was her biological father. This helped explain why her whole life, she was treated like the ugly duckling by her siblings, many of them mentally ill. This explained why they had to lie to the US Embassy in Hong Kong, saying that my grandmother was raped in order for them to allow my mom to come to America.

The day that my mom came to America was the day that my grandmother told her, "Hey, we're moving to America." So she left everything behind at 20 years old and moved to Chinatown Oakland, CA with my Popo and Gong Gong. Understandably, my mom was incredibly resentful. The day they arrived, my Uncle Tommy didn't like her attitude and beat her severely to the point where her face was unrecognizable. My mom ran away that night and ended up living on the streets until she met a man named LeeRoy who helped her get a job at Delmonte Farms. She learned how to speak English as she went, including learning how to speak English by dating a bunch of white guys who were enamored by her "exotic" beauty.

IMG_8332.JPG

Her whole life was a series of escaping. She even would later tell me that marrying my dad wasn't out of love, but it was another way to escape her family. She became a flight attendant for United Airlines, until she quit after 9/11 because she didn't feel safe to fly anymore. At least that's what I was told back then.

In fact, it would be years that I would find out that the reason she left United was because she attacked someone on the plane. United sent her on a medical leave and referred her to a psychiatriast, where they diagnosed her with bipolar disorder. It wasn't until I took my first psychology class as a senior in high school that I actually was able to understand why she would behave the way she did. Anytime I brought it up to my dad, he would slap me in the face and say "None of your business. I'll beat the shit out of you if you mention it one more time." Nothing like the good ol' "don't talk about it" as a way to solve problems.

Now, I can actually look back at my childhood and feel a sincere sense of compassion and detachment. Even some appropriate amusement and awe of the dramas that would unfold in that house. At this point on Hive, I've shared a lot of how I've been processing and healing from my past and the abuses that were inflicted on me. I've done a lot to forgive myself and my parents. The first step of forgiveness was befriending and tending to my wounded child, the one that needed to be loved and feel safe. The one that was vulnerable and powerless, and therefore cannot be blamed for what happened. It also meant realizing that my parents were reenacting the traumas that they were given by their parents, and so on.

The second step of forgiveness, is realizing I need to be different too in order to awaken from my own and my family's suffering. I would see myself as a victim, which would create toxic cycles of self-hatred, rage, and shame. Yet not being a victim means that I have influence over how I make meaning of what happens to me, instead of allowing what I can't control to dictate how I show up in the world. I've heard that compassion is clear seeing. The ability to see suffering and violence beyond our defensive reactions. That we don't need to be hard and "unfuckwitable" all the time. Because we might realize that on a deep level, it is their projection of their pain and suffering, and it is not yours to carry. This doesn't mean we allow or justify violence, but that we don't need to react back with violence towards ourselves or others. Shaming ourselves or others, retaliating and dehumanizing serves to continue the cycles of violence. Compassion also requires that we go deeper into the root causes and societal conditions that give rise to violence. As MLK Jr. says, we seek to defeat injustice, not people... as people are just products of what they've learned and most of them don't fully understand why they do what they do. I remember facilitating a circle with a group of boys who had engaged in some form of physical violence and were working with me as an alternative to being put back into juvenile hall. I asked them to reflect on how much time it took from the moment they felt triggered to taking action. Some of them couldn't even process that, and many of them shared that it took less than a second for them to act out. I think the longest time from someone in the circle was 2 seconds. Most of these boys didn't have parents due to them being dead or incarcerated.

As Aurora Levins Morales puts it, "We are a society of people living in a state of post-traumatic shock." Trauma teaches us that we live in a sick society. A society in which toxic social conditions create psychological and physical pain that comes from a sense of violation, helplessness, powerlessness, terror, and rage. Personal and cultural trauma play a crucial role in the violence we see in politics and elite special interests that guide most of the overt and covert corruption we see. As ponerology studies reveal, a small percentage of our society are sociopathic, and they often rise to power and do violent deeds that we "normals" can't even begin to fathom. And yet most, if not all, of these sociopaths came from households that didn't have a secure attachment. So they spend the rest of their lives organizing around power and control.

There is a strong tendency for traumatized people to internalize the experience of powerlessness, and then engage in desperate efforts of self-protection from that place of powerlessness.

This is a psychological and political place from which we are incisively aware of the ways in which we have been victimized and harmed, but from which it can be difficult or impossible to gauge the impact of our enraged behavior upon others, or even to maintain our awareness of the core humanity of others.
-- Steven Wineman, author of Trauma and Nonviolent Social Change

If the right conditions of community, love, and meaning emerge in our lives, some of us might take responsibility and awaken to our own suffering in order to transform it. Trauma can psychologically affect people in ways that help perpetuate domination and oppression OR... understanding trauma can help spark personal and political transformation. Taking responsibility means we get to choose, and I believe that part of our life purpose is to figure out what and how that will look like.

In the past several years, I've engaged in tough and deeply unsettling conversations with my parents where I've shared my experiences growing up with them. Of course they didn't get it, but I wasn't expecting them to. It was more for me, to step out of being the powerless victim in my own eyes. And I was grateful that we set up a space where they heard me, even if they couldn't bring themselves to apologizing or acknowledging the harm due to their own shame. Although I've never had a therapist in my life, I've done lots of work that has deeply mattered to my healing. From self-care rituals, hobbies, meaningful work, moving through conflict with others, griefwork, anger management, and having inspiring people in my life, I am reclaiming my wholeness more and more. Finding our wholeness means embracing the light and dark in our lives. Being able to co-exist and accept all the different parts of ourselves. I think this serves as an attractor to the good, and a protectant for when things get tough. And somehow, I think my parents can sense this in me the more I relax into myself.

I will conclude this long post with a film made by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. It's a beautiful glimpse into what it means to be human. This is one of several volumes on Youtube that he's created, all free to the public. And every time I watch it, it takes my breath away. It's a perfect example of how the arts can awaken a slumbering humanity.

What is it that makes us human? Is it that we love, that we fight? That we laugh? Cry? Our curiosity ? The quest for discovery? Driven by these questions, filmmaker and artist Yann Arthus-Bertrand spent three years collecting real-life stories from 2,000 women and men in 60 countries. Working with a dedicated team of translators, journalists and cameramen, Yann captures deeply personal and emotional accounts of topics that unite us all; struggles with poverty, war, homophobia, and the future of our planet mixed with moments of love and happiness.

Sort:  

Girl. I applaud you. I have read this and I have a lot of appreciation for what you have shared.

Very interesting to notice than some men who beat their kids lay no finger on the mother right? I did research and noticed that many of those men have trauma and anger issues about their mothers. And generational trauma confirms how they can't beat their mother and they have the emotional need to respect the wife as to not beat her , they discard that anger on the kids. Later in life , if the child becomes an adult and does not process trauma, they end up discarding anger onto their partners. Subconsciously they try to punish their mother. Many are clueless about this though.I have read so many books and I was blown away to put the pieces of the puzzle together and understand that violent abusive men have an issue with their mothers and in fact they are helpless obedient little boys emotionally while they turn into monsters towards the helpless. It is fascinating yet very few men realize where the anger comes from. A son watching their father beat them up has no idea that the grandmother is the issue and they accumulate anger on the mother who does nothing. This little boy grows up and learned that how he should cope with anger is through beating, just like his father did unto him. It is amazing how generational trauma is passed down. If men would be taught how to finally speak up in front of theie mothers a lot of wifes or children would stop getting verbally, physically and emotionally abused as the problem must be solved from the root.

Mental health was not such a big deal for our parents back in their days. Only now we can realize if some have been suffering of mental issues. This does not excuse theie behaviour but it can help your healing.

It was very brave of you to share this.It shows that you are on your path to healing. If you can process and heal from family trauma then you will attract the right partner and not repeat mistakes. Because having such a childhood can prime any woman to believe that love is pain.
I admire your healing journey, I hope it will inspire more to liberate themselves from the shackles of a troubled childhood. God bless you🤗

Wow, thank you for such a thoughtful and sincere reply. I appreciate your insight into the traumas that men can have with their mothers, and the need to shed light into our unconscious and why we feel and do the things we do. I especially feel after reading your post, that young males need more positive male role models. Often times, women are the ones that tend to find themselves in a counseling or mental health support role. Having men in these positions can greatly guide many of the lost males out there.

And thank you for your affirming words. I am no longer afraid of my past and what happened. It was healing to confirm that when I wrote this blog, and even moreso with your comment! They say that the more you talk about your shame, the less control it has over you. Much love!

I agree that we need more men in counselling positions the young men need support. I also think the older men still have a chance to recover if they are open. At any age we can change. I am happy for you, to heal the soul is such a valuable thing to accomplish🤗

You need a lot of courage to write about your life.
You are a very brave woman and I love your dance.

It's hard to find the words after reading your story. I just hope you could find balance in your life and find happiness. Take care of yourself.

Intense stuff. Thanks for sharing. I trust that you're finding all of the love and acceptance you need. And horay for breaking cycles of violence.

Yes, Mark. I'm finding love and acceptance AND I'm actively creating love and acceptance in my life with my thoughts, actions and choices. Taking responsibility for what's mine to carry. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

I especially applaud you for breaking that cycle of abuse. You are a brave woman.

This is so moving. Thank you for sharing your story so vulnerably. Looking at your family photo, who would have guessed the beatings behind the closed door? You and your sister were so young. It's heartbreaking.