Our Generational Trauma Didn’t Stay at Home. It Built a Nation.

I grew up in an Evangelical faith where women had their place. I loved my faith, my church, the songs, and of course, the stories. But I wanted nothing to do with “my place.”

The misogyny wasn’t subtle, but it was normalized. And I came from a long line of smart, snappy Southern women who were devoted to the church. I assumed if the church didn’t accept them as they were, they would never be so into it.

The women in the churches I went to were valued, but it was strictly for organizing the potluck, playing hymns on the piano, and working the nursery.

I was in my 30s before I realized that the fact that I never had a woman pastor was on purpose. It was around that time that it dawned on me that I would never be asked to lead a prayer.

When I left the church, I had a million realizations about what I had been conditioned to believe, one of them being that internalized misogyny was an inherited response. It hugely impacted the way I saw myself and the world.

It’s also the best part of my story - recognizing that those patterns are not my truth.

The patterns that we inherit from generational trauma are not shortcomings to be shamed. They are creative strategies that we often learned early to survive in an environment that was unresponsive to our needs. These patterns help to fill a need and make sense at the time, but in order to break the pattern, the pain needs to be acknowledged.

Generational trauma often shows up less as a single event and more as repeated responses. Silence. Hypervigilance. Self-loathing. Avoidance.

And as an American, I can’t help but notice how harmful patterns feel culturally familiar, how those same responses show up at a national level.

In the same way we as a country like to avoid accountability for harms that have been done, families and individuals avoid the hard conversations surrounding their part in perpetuating trauma. Sometimes, the conversations go unsaid to protect the ones causing harm. No matter how it plays out, the same defenses get used: That was a long time ago. Why can’t you move on?

Sometimes the past is rewritten and retold to be more palatable.

As trauma shows up in our history, so it does in our behaviors. Patterns like emotional distance, self-loathing, and unhealthy attachment go unnamed and continue to repeat. When rugged individualism and the ‘bootstraps” myth are built into the foundations of our culture and baked into the framework in which we are taught history, along with a healthy dose of hatred of anything not white, male, wealthy, and Christian, the expectations of what it means to be a person of value leave many of us falling short and feeling shame.

Because when harm goes unnamed, it adapts, taking the form of shame. This shame quietly but persistently shows up in the pressure to be more, do more, prove more. It keeps us focused on fixing ourselves instead of questioning the systems and stories that shaped us.

In families, shame keeps people quiet and compliant. In a broader culture, it works the same way. It reinforces the idea that if we’re struggling, it’s because we’re not trying hard enough, not doing enough, not being enough. The focus stays on individual failure rather than inherited patterns.

We break the cycle of shame by bringing the stories of truth to light.

Cycles cannot begin to break until you name the harmful patterns. Think about how you were taught in school about slavery, or Jim Crow, or the colonization of America. I don’t believe we can ever fully heal from these harms and generational traumas as individuals and as a nation until we acknowledge the hard truths about how we came to be.

Many families perpetuate this by also confusing silence with strength. Just keep going like nothing is wrong. When we’re in a survival state, we don’t have time to process, so “keep going like nothing is wrong” sometimes feels like the only option. And in our hustle-hard culture, and in families and communities who value those who give more than take, this self-sacrifice is a virtue.

Both families and countries normalize harm simply because it’s familiar. Please take “This is just how it is/that’s just how we are” as a giant red flag. Stories are the antidote and the pattern disruptors. Speaking the truth stops that normalization.

Personal healing and collective healing ask the same thing of us: to share our truth. If stories have the power to heal an individual, they can help us heal a nation.