The Myth of Normal 31

most often in the family of origin. “When I go back and look at my sons’ lives, I understand that there was a lot of trauma,” she explained. “I was living with them, so I was part of that. I was a single parent from the time they were two and three until I remarried, when they were six and seven. I understand that how I lived, what I was doing, what I knew and what I didn’t know, affected them.” After the birth father abandoned the family early, a stepfather abused the boys both physically and emotionally. “I was very lonely and scared and feeling trapped,” Helen recalled. That she would lack the gut-sense not to choose such men and that she would not assert herself and protect her sons in the face of abuse were themselves the marks of trauma sustained in Helen’s own childhood. Apart from being physically hit on her bare bottom by her father up until age ten, Helen endured emotional torment. “I was ashamed a lot for my feelings as a child,” she recalled. “I was very sensitive, and I cried a lot.” Trauma is in most cases multigenerational. The chain of transmission goes from parent to child, stretching from the past into the future. We pass on to our offspring what we haven’t resolved in ourselves. The home becomes a place where we unwittingly re-create, as I did, scenarios reminiscent of those that wounded us when we were small. “Traumas affect mothers and mothering and fathers and fathering and husbanding and wifeing,” the family constellations therapist Mark Wolynn told me. “The repeated traumas continue to proliferate from that—as a result, they never get healed.” Wolynn is the author of the aptly titled It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle. Trauma may even affect gene activity across generations, as we will see. [*] It is no surprise, then, that Helen’s eldest grandchild has faced problems with substance use and behavior and learning difficulties. Because of all she has learned and despite her unfathomable losses, she is able to be present for him much more warmly and effectively than she ever could be for her own sons. Note, too, the absence of self-judgment in Helen’s description of the situation: she speaks of “understanding” rather than castigating herself for what she didn’t—nay, couldn’t—understand way back when. The act of