Learning to Love My Son Better: Easing Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma

Sometimes people will get excited to introduce me to someone and say, I think you will really like her! She reminds me of you. I will smile and nod and know that I will most definitely NOT like this person because I don’t like people that are like me.

I am loud, I want attention, I am bossy and creative and intense, I like to direct and take charge, I am particular and sensitive and when I’m upset you either hear about it or you feel it if I can manage to keep it inside. When I meet other people who have these traits they ANNOY me. They take up too much of MY space. I want them gone so I can direct and have it my way with the loving, flexible and open and much quieter people I have gathered around me. Which why the Universal Sorting Mother of Children laughed when I got pregnant and then turned around and delivered me my first-born son. Who not only has all the traits I have but is also male and so resting on the confidence and cultural shaping of Millenia that makes it even more likely that he DOES get it his way. This same Sorting Mother also laughed in my face when I specifically said I didn’t want to birth a child who I had a bunch of Karma with but just wanted to bring light and positivity to the world. Laughed in my face not in a mean way but in a loving caring way a mother chuckles when her son demands a popsicle after breakfast and instead serves up peanut butter on a rice cracker, a more suitable and nourishing snack for her child, despite his protest.

My son is currently my number one teacher, now that I’ve fired (haha!) I mean ended all my mentoring relationships (therapists, spiritual coaching etc) at the end of 2021 which frankly is the end of an era begun when I was 16, 24 YEARS AGO! Luckily I have gathered a team of incredibly talented supportive folks gifted in early childhood and parenting to guide me though these rocky waters as well as a talented EFT practitioner who is helping me move through the remnants of trauma in my body (how could there still be more after ALL THESE 24+ YEARS OF HEALING, THERAPY, PSYCHODRAMA GROUPS, SHAMANIC SOUL RETRIVALS, RITUAL CIRCLES and more ???) that come up in relation to parenting and my child throwing, kicking, hitting, biting and peeing on everything. Apparently this is normal 4 year old behavior.

I have seen going around in the spiritual/self-help/personal development circles the idea of getting addicted to or obsessed with healing. Like – let’s just stop healing and live our lives already? In my opinion, healing is the same thing as growing. And as I tell my patients, if you are looking to arrive at a place where things are just easy and you are happy without challenges, you definitely manifested on the wrong plane of existence because it just doesn’t work like that here on Earth. Which is why I REALLY don’t like the idea of Enlightenment, AKA spiritual snake oil, but that’s a whole other article/book. Maybe what people are saying is that we need to stop healing meaning we need to stop believing that we can become HEALED and live in that place, just like we can’t stop growing and just be GROWN – until we are dead of course! Or at least then we can take a snack break – popcicle time!

So, back to my son. Who is teaching me – probably more accurate to say – forcing me, through my love for him and desire to be a good parent – to (grow!) work on controlling how I express my anger at home which is something I’ve gotten away with not doing for 40 years. Or you could say, if you were me after I spoke to Meaghan (the early childhood expert who I am consulting with) something that how I was parented is leading to challenges with my son. Meaning, when my son hits his little sister (my daughter) in the head, it brings up a lot for me that I wasn’t aware of that just comes out of me – a fear and a harshness that is a combination of my mother seeing me as a monster when I was hitting my little sister at 2 and my high school boyfriend, who did things like grab me and push me up against the wall and speak angrily to my face (which I was able to find underneath the experience through the magic of EFT). When I lunge at my son and am angry in stopping pushing his little sister, I am literally in a moment of intergenerational transmission of trauma though consciously in my “good intention.” My good intention is - I don’t want him to learn that’s okay to hit someone – he’s going to be a man someday. I want him to be kind, careful, especially with women’s bodies. I don’t want my daughter to feel like kind and then abusive treatment is okay from men. I want to control him so he doesn’t hurt himself and others and our nice house. But I am stopping him in a way that mimics what I’m telling him isn’t okay - angrily and forcefully with his body. Talk about being hypocritical!

I was ambivalent about having children until I had an intuitive reading in which the Intuitive told me that I had made a promise to myself just before I turned twenty – and asked what was it? I immediately flashed to an early therapy session with my first real impactful therapist Alan and saying to him – I’m here for my daughter, so the pain of my family doesn’t get passed down to her. Right then, it all shifted. An appointment to freeze my eggs so I’d have more time to decide became an appointment to start the process of getting pregnant with my wife. And when she was born, five years later - after my son was 3 - I was sure that I had arrived. That I was HEALED ENOUGH to be her mother and mother her well. That becoming a therapist – a compromise I made with my artist self – was worth it because it had led me to this place, a place of good enough mothering.

Which is why my disappointment and sadness that I still have work to do, that sometimes I yell in front of my kids and I know that’s not good for them, or I’m harsh with my son and he is hitting and kicking and spitting and maybe that’s all my fault was deep deep deep my friends. In my most recent consultation about what my son needs I learned that his outbursts are at times signs of hunger and otherwise creative energy that needs help being redirected. I learned that diffusing his anger rather than overpowering it with mine is the solution. I learned that he and I – so similar – we need the same thing. That my responses to him come out of the same bad responses to me. That neither of us are bad. That neither of us are monsters. This week, armed with the confidence that my son is not a grown man, but a 4 year old boy and this hitting is normal. And armed with the fact that it is especially normal for parents of boys to get worried this aggression is going to lead to deeply socially challenging behavior - I have been able when my son hits and kicks to say, Let’s give your hands something good to do, and then I lead him to wash dishes, help with cooking, carry wood.

When my wife came home the other day in a way that was deeply triggering for me and I was angry and hot in front of the kids, I was able to eventually go outside and start furiously shoveling the snow and ice on our walk. Giving my anger and energy somewhere constructive to go. Now I know that the daughter I was showing up in therapy for - the one I wanted to save from this intergenerational transmission of trauma - is me. And my kids, hopefully they can just be my kids.