Transgenerational Trauma

A frame that goes in the expressive arts therapy direction is to take a piece of your family’s transgenerational trauma and make an art-container to help transmute and work through it.

Family trauma topics are dense, nightmarish and hard to hold, so we usually keep them split off and frozen until we are ready to dissolve them, which won’t happen until the healing force in us is strong to overcome, surround and embrace the darkness attached to the trauma.

Sooner or later, the life force rising up in us will reclaim these pieces within us, metabolize and digest them in order to heal, process and move on, for our own sakes and out of love for our families.

Process play is the perfect alchemy for reanimating dead parts of us, revitalizing trauma pockets within us to rejoin the rest of the living tissue of our ancestral body.

Here is an example from me, addressing the aftermath of World War II as played out in the generation of 68ers. It’s painful, but it helped.

My invitation to you: if you have a piece of transgenerational trauma that you would like to transform, which feels ready, make an art piece that contains, holds and honors it. Remember that the process may be painful, and give yourself extra time, space, support, and lowered expectations for the process.

You don’t mean it, you can’t help it. Five little children, and one by one, you ate them. One by one, you burned us, one by one we were burned by the sun. And then you tilled us in the ground, where we make that sound, muffled and dark.

1957 in white cotton undershirt. You are a tow-head, and your feelings are easily hurt. You read that book and get a close look at the devil inside, who took six million lives.

You don’t mean it all. You don’t mean it all.

Long brown legs, yellow eyes. You take my father by surprise. But you can’t contain the whole history of pain, so you swallow him live, to feed those insides.

Leave the country, get divorced. Give me a haircut just like yours. A little blonde shag, and then you meet the yellow man, who says he’ll share his land with you. We’ll till it together.

You don’t mean it all. You don’t mean it all.

You can’t help it, you don’t mean it. Five little babies, and you demean them. One by one, you raised us, one by one we were razed to the ground. And you feel a ripping pain, each time we take the blame for falling down.

You don’t mean it all. You don’t mean it all.

(song arranged, recorded and produced by Mike Billmire in Ann Arbor in 2009 along with the rest of the Painted Room: Mary Fraser, Merilee Philips, and Serge Van der Voo).