Pain Travels Through Families Until Someone Is Ready to Feel It

On legacy burdens & freedom from generational cycles

Breaking generational cycles is grueling and uncomfortable. These maladaptive structures crave silence, denial, and shame—a thick layer of protection against threat, both real and imagined. Beneath the floorboards lay stacks of physical, emotional, and spiritual illnesses that repeat, over and over, since nothing has ever been acknowledged, absorbed, and released. This is not easy; this is necessary.

I asked my mother about my grandmother again. About how she fell pregnant at seventeen, how my extremely religious great grandmother snuck my grandparents across the border to West Virginia to get married, closing up the shame in a box with a crisp off-white bow. About how my grandmother raised two children while my grandfather was in vet school, how they left Appalachia and only looked back for holidays and scheduled visits.

My grandmother developed an addiction to alcohol and pills much later in life when my mom was in elementary middle school or maybe middle school? I’m not sure. She hid it well. She passed away at age sixty-two, when I was twelve, but I didn’t know the true cause of death until after I’d already gotten sober a decade later. I’d been told it was genes, at first. A hereditary disease of the liver, that’s what they all said. The truth was shiny once uncovered from the soil, a glint of metal reflecting the moon.

“Did they want to get married?” I asked. “Did she have a choice? Did she know if she had a choice?”

“Yes, they wanted to. Well, I don’t know—they never talked about any of this with us.”

“What was she thinking?”

“I don’t know. She never spoke of it.”

“What do you think she was thinking through all of this?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Do you think she gave up on any of her own dreams? Was there anything she wanted to do in life that felt out of reach, maybe something she wanted to return to eventually?”

“She didn’t say. She always seemed to be having a good time, having fun no matter what she was doing.”

“I guess I’m just trying to connect these threads. Considering the addiction. I don’t think any of us just spontaneously develop alcoholism. I wonder what her inner world was like.”

“Yeah, I don’t know. No one ever talked about any of that. They still don’t.”

One time I scraped up my knee riding my bike down the winding driveway in the summer heat, hands sticky with watermelon juice. I looked up at my grandfather expectantly as I choked on a sob. He didn’t provide comfort, which left me aghast, as a child who’d learned comfort was a given once blood was on the table. He told me it was just a scrape, to brush myself off. He almost seemed irritated by my tears, or maybe disappointed in my bruisability. He didn’t know. It truly wasn’t his fault. He loved me then and still loves me dearly—he just didn’t know. It hurt worse than the scrape but he didn’t know.

“Pain travels through families until someone is ready to feel it.”

Stephi Wagner

Both sides of my family are doused in alcoholism, and both sides of my family are marked by tales of grief, strength, love, bravery, and struggle. Mental illness that was never discussed, never acknowledged. Pain experienced without the proper infrastructure. Intellectualized grief, redirected waterways, weaponized shame, it wasn’t trauma because I wasn’t affected by it—it’s hard for me to give and receive comfort or understand my own emotions but I wasn’t affected by it, survival over exploration, pragmatism not poetry.

Silence has become a poltergeist; it speaks of loyalty in a disappointed tongue, because why would I take an axe to the tree that has always nourished me?

I try to explain to the ghost in my brain that there is no axe, that I still love the tree, but nuance doesn’t exist in an emotional battleground of winners and losers.

What would my grandmother have been like if she’d been allowed to feel? If she’d been allowed to crash, to crumble, to flood?

And did that become my job? To do it for her? Who else am I feeling for?

Or are these questions reductive? Grandiose, even?

I’m not sure if I was allowed to flood either, but I did it anyway, water escaping through a closed fist.

And I remember practicing this act of devotion for the first time at eleven years old, so distinctly, staring out over the farmland on my grandparents’ porch. Through my faceless iPod and white corded earphones I listened to music that opened the gates, and I found myself consumed, tears falling down my cheeks in ancestral rivers. When asked why I was crying, I couldn’t answer, which served as another mild irritation to someone I’m certain. I just felt and felt and felt.

Which brings me back to the beige couch in the dimly lit room—I always asked to turn off the overhead lights because of their constant subtle flickering, flickering that clearly doesn’t bother most people, and I’m not sure why I’m the exception—where my therapist closed her eyes and nodded. It was a movement she made when I knew her next words were going to stay with me.

“I know we’re out of time. But I’m wondering how much of this belongs to you. I’m getting the intuition that some of this isn’t yours—that it might come from your ancestors. I’m curious about their relationships with love, men, and safety.”

She told me an example about her family who survived the holocaust. The panic of scarcity that wasn’t her burden to carry, but passed anyway to her waiting, outstretched hands.

And now I wonder if the pain of every wound must be felt by someone, if that’s another law of the universe as certain as gravity or thermodynamics, and that’s why this happens—why it gets stored in the cells and spirit fiber and epigenetic war zones.

After all, the egg from which I hatched was inside my grandmother at one point, before the Big Bang separated womb from womb.

I wonder if it’s another wound that my grandmother’s death was methodologically covered up by shame, a repetition and window into the past—the marriage across state lines, the unexpected blessing of a son.

And it doesn’t feel right to call all of this pain a gift, either, as if I’m some holy martyr, a selfless conduit. I might’ve enjoyed that more before all the therapy, an ode to the comforting cocoon of living unhealed and unexamined.

I connect with her, with my grandmother Nina, in my devotional work and spiritual practice. I leave her Snickers bars on my altar. I ask her for guidance, welcome her presence in my life. I know she’s watched me get sober with beaming pride. I don’t think she ever really knew that was an option for her. I question how many choices she ever thought belonged to her in general. It saddens me that it was death that finally brought clarity, showed more expansive horizons.

My grandparents loved each other immensely. They didn’t know how to feel in every shade, how to express and give space for water held in open palms, because that’s not what they were taught, their choices limited from the start. That’s why when my grandmother passed, my grandfather went straight back to work the day it happened. He didn’t let it all pour out until after the funeral, in private, after a great deal of alcohol had knocked that flood loose.

Nina adored me and my brother beyond words when she was still here on earth—I think back on her radiance, her wit, her humor and mischief, and her playful love with immense nostalgia. I am grateful for the beauty she brought to my imaginative, vibrant childhood. I miss the land that helped raise me, the land that raised my mother and uncle. To this day, I use a stick in the shape of a wand from that farm to cast my circles. It connects me to my inner child, my roots, the womb within a womb, as I stand facing my future.

There’s no room for blame in this lineage of murky, obscured woundedness. To do so would mean setting fire to the tree in a futile search of some unknowable beginning. It would mean denying the flowers that bloom on its long branches each spring, the fruit that weighs heavy in autumn, the fullness of my stomach as my spoon scrapes the last bit of pie from my bowl.

If some of my hardships and suffering are shared, if they are indeed family heirlooms, then so too are my gifts, my successes, my joy, my hopes and dreams. There’s a responsibility there, but it doesn’t feel heavy or ill-fitting; it feels like a gift to the soil, bearing witness, straddling the line between yesterday and tomorrow.

I have so many more choices available to me than my ancestors did, especially the women. I don’t know how exactly they felt when they were alive—my reconstructions will forever feel clunky and misshapen—but I feel their support now, a steady river.

Death, the great equalizer, a reminder to the living to suck out every last drop of coveted marrow. I never want to forget to be grateful.

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I will leave you with an excerpt from a book I’m reading with a lovely book club in my new Brooklyn neighborhood. The book is Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life by Joanna Ebenstein.

To love and to lose is to grieve. To love that which is impermanent, that which can be lost, is, by its very nature, to make oneself vulnerable to grief. The more deeply we love, the more vulnerable we are to the commensurate pain of loss.

In his book The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise (2015), author and educator Martín Prechtel—who was raised on a Pueblo reservation and later became an initiated member of the Tzutuhil Maya community—turns a keen outsider's eye to contemporary affluent American culture. From his perspective, this is a culture that has been taught neither how to grieve nor how to praise, one being the flip side of the other.

From the Tzutuhil Maya perspective, he explains, if you are unable to properly grieve that which you have loved and lost—and by "properly" he means, in his words, "where you look bad when you're done"—the natural flow of grief can solidify into depression or even physical illness. If you cannot in some way express (literally, "to press out") your grief, you endanger your mental and physical health.

Prechtel goes on to address the despair he sees in the United States. He poignantly notes, "When you have two centuries of people who have not properly grieved the things that they have lost, the grief shows up as ghosts that inhabit their grandchildren." These ghosts, he says, can take the form of disease, even hardening into tumors, which the Maya see as "solidified tears," or manifest as psychological issues, including addiction and depression. He notes that one needs cultural support to mourn well, and that his own Indigenous communities offer the support necessary for the bereaved to completely lose themselves in their grief. Such support is essential to mourning properly, and, as he points out, the United States provides no such container.

Echoing Prechtel's observations is a statement commonly attributed to Sigmund Freud, which proclaims that "unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways." Contemporary science also affirms these ideas. Emotional stress, particularly that resulting from blocked emotions, has been linked not only to mental illness, but also to physical problems including heart disease, intestinal problems, headaches, insomnia, and autoimmune disorders.

To feel is a blessing. Thank you for being here with me <3

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