Truths Held Self Evident

Among truths held self evident, that healing is the purpose of life must be central. But this view challenges the conventional A-list: asset acquisition, accomplishment, accumulation of wealth, accolade, acclaim, awards, advancement…to name but a few.  

“He who dies with the most toys wins” is the popular path, but life’s hard labors will come to our doorstep, at which time the question is whether we step up or cower. Our future hangs upon the response. 

Easier it is to kick the can down the road.  John Maynard Keynes, the economist of destiny, who structured the post-WW2 financial reconstruction, famously said, “In the long run, we are all dead.”  But life’s grim reaper is one keen accountant, and even if we choose to ignore, intergenerational trauma will settle all accounts going forward.  

“Intergenerational trauma” was a new concept to me until a few years ago when my wife, a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor spoke of it.  Since then the term keeps popping up and it seems to define something of our zeitgeist.  Some among us may claim this is just “a hoax from China” but scientific fact argues against brazen disregard.  

Epigenetics is the science of how environmental and behavioral factors alter gene activity without changing the DNA sequence.  The term “epigenetics” comes from the Greek word epi- which means “on or above.”  Originally introduced in 1942, the field has grown rapidly since 2004, when the genome was fully sequenced.  

Among its findings are that environmental factors can influence the health and traits over three generations through epigenetic change passed down via sperm and egg cells; the “transgenerational” effect impacts grandchildren even though they were not directly exposed to the original environmental factor.  In other words, even the untold family stories shape who we are, and become. 

“Beneath every railroad tie there lies a dead Irishman” is an adage describing the struggles of the Irish emigres.  My father’s ancestors immigrated to the United States circa 1850. We do not have records, but believe the Mahany clan were from the city of Cork, in the County of Munster where the Great Potato Famine raged.  Between 1845 and 1855 more than 1.5 million adults and children – all enduring trauma – left Ireland seeking refuge in America.  

The railroads were major employers of the Irish, and the Mahany family followed that path.  Daniel M Mahany/Mahoney, my great-grandfather, was born in Kentucky in 1860, the era of the Civil War, the Confederate South; intense tension among the Catholics, immigrants and the Protestant natives; machine politics and its rogues’ gallery of gang violence.  As a laborer on the L&N Railroad his work must have been extremely difficult, and how he dealt with those tensions, or even traumas, once home is left unspoken.  

My Father said little, next to nothing, about his family of origin and I can only wonder what traumas lie buried, untold stories of a painful past, but which still shape our gene pool.  I am the third generation of Daniel Mahany’s child D.J. Mahany  

One of five siblings, I process this neither in a vacuum nor by committee.  The path of healing is deeply personal, each of us bringing to bear the untold complexities of our own lived lives.  But plain is the historical record, factual is the science, and now is my moment.

I wonder if the turbulence of our times is not, to some degree, a long overdue reckoning of intergenerational trauma.  There seems a purging of the collective id; the hypermasculine posturing, saber rattling of geo-political Oligarchs, the comic pretensions of World Wrestling Entertainment, all of which seem a masking of unhealed traumas endured and too long accrued.  Mass violence marked the 20th century – the “century of genocide” – and I wonder if now comes the time when accounts need be settled.  

My children are the fourth generation.  My parenting choices have the potential to be liberating.  Nothing can be more important to me now, at this stage of my life, than healing as the only thing that matters, that the future may be made more clear, centered in the light.