I’ve spent the last few years exploring support groups geared toward survivors of narcissistic abuse, scapegoating, and child abuse. Social media is certainly good for allowing access into the worlds of others through various hobby, art, religion, and support groups. At first I was emotionally raw, and read and read, never commenting. I was rather stunned to find so many people shared my experiences, and they aren’t as rare as I had once believed. They are hard to explain, though, especially to people who grew up in stable, loving homes, or to counselors who didn’t spend their formative years walking on eggshells and questioning their own reality, and they are on a spectrum from bad to worse.
With reading so many stories, day after day, and feeling the raw emotion and confusion of these people, I began to see parallels. This type of abuse is not creative, not in any sense, and so many report growing up with the same events. Sudden, unpredictable, outbursts of anger, crazy making and impossible demands, bullying and mocking, triangulation between siblings, ruined milestones and holidays, adult issues dumped on children’s shoulders, and a lot of illogical, overly emotional and/or violent situations that leave the person drained, exhausted, and depressed. It became clear that there is a lot of fear and anger being handed down through the generations.
One of the more disheartening things I saw was how often unaddressed trauma is diagnosed as mental illness. I’ve seen this over and again, victims carrying the weight of family dysfunction on their shoulders, and accepting the diagnosis and drugs to numb, sedate, and ease the turmoil inside. Usually the misguided diagnoses are labeled bi-polar disorder or borderline personality disorder, and the treatment is mind numbing drugs, and shame for being mentally weak. But the struggles that come with surviving trauma and insane amounts of gaslighting is not a mental illness, it’s the natural and logical reaction to poor treatment. It’s a huge business, this mental health industry treating abuse victims and ignoring the bigger picture of why so many people are perpetually in fight or flight, and so traumatized.
But with all things I discover in life I tend to zoom out and try to see the bigger picture. I understood the micros, the fear and anger infecting adults that they both knowingly and unknowingly pass on to their children, but how was it so widespread? Why do we have so many traumatized adults? It dawned on me that there are strands of generational abuse, trauma, or just plain ole curses running through our nation, and it had to come from somewhere, but where? In looking around I found this trauma was woven through our nation, through our society, and is impressed on us from many directions.
My father (1920s-1990s) was a genealogist and historian, obsessively tracing his family tree back as far as he could, and learning about what led to the creation of our nation. He often complained about little old ladies changing official records to make their family name appear above reproach, and how that made things difficult for him. He also mentioned a change in the world dating and calendar system adding additional problems to his research. Despite my dad’s obvious trauma issues, and having only received an eighth grade education, he was a very intelligent man. He gave me my first concussions, and was one of those fine line people, a fine line between genius and insanity, a fine line between calm and raging. He was a formerly abused child, and a WWII vet with undiagnosed PTSD, and sensory and anger issues.
I bring up my father because I remember him having a very emotional reaction to a discussion about adoption. He ranted how unjust and harmful it was to uproot children from their lineage, and how it would leave the child forever questioning where they belong. I didn’t understand, as I was sure he hadn’t been adopted, but his reaction has stayed with me since then, and I’ve often wondered why. Why he reacted in such a fashion, and why it has stayed with me for over forty years? Over the top reactions were not out of character for my father, but this particular one has lingered in my mind while hundreds of others have not.
It seems the whole world carries a generational trauma, a curse, and no one speaks of it. The first orphanage in the United States was created in 1729 before America was even established, and it appears they were springing up in other countries as well. Orphanages became an industry, written about in popular literature, acted out in stage plays, and by 1900 there were over 1000 orphanages spread out across our country, each holding hundreds or thousands of kids at a time, a steady stream of kids coming in and then aging out. These were massive buildings where the children were warehoused like cattle, and treated brutally without parental care and concern. Interestingly enough a review of the Protestant Orphan Asylum in St. Louis, Missouri from 1847 to 1869, found that only 27% of the children had no parents.
The official record holds that the leaders of the time felt that children shouldn’t remain with their families due to poverty, low education, and other facets of life, and removed them. So three quarters of those orphans weren’t actually orphans, just uprooted and tossed into care. Coincidentally, as the leaders were yanking children from their parents, the first mental hospitals or lunatic asylums began opening in the United States in 1752, more massive buildings where brutal treatments were enacted.
According to the official record (which I rarely trust to give the real, true, and full picture) between the years of 1854 and 1929 the orphan train movement operated. Hundreds of thousands of kids were shipped all over the country and “adopted” at train stations, more often to work as farm hands and servants, than to be taken into a loving families. Coincidentally at the same time we were overflowing with “orphans”, Ellis Island was open and bringing in millions of immigrants and their families, while the insane asylum industry continued to grow at an unbelievable rate. So our nation destroyed countless families, tore the children away to essentially fight to raise themselves while working adult jobs, and those who complained were committed. Well, that would certainly leave an awful lot of trauma and anger in the heart of each of those children. And those children grew up to be parents and grandparents, passing on the hurt in a myriad of ways.
And then came the wars, and we certainly had a lot of angry young men to fight in them, war after war sending traumatized men home to start families. And then came the televised traumas, presidents being shot on screen, national leaders who brought hope being slain, and of course more wars with gruesome images of our dead young men being shown on the evening news each night. How many children got to know, love, and admire the astronauts before watching the Challenger explode in mid-air from every schoolroom across the country? There was 911, and the terror of more planes attacking the innocent, and the towers coming down over and again on repeat for days on our screens. And then the pandemic with the rolling death count on TV while nurses and doctors danced in empty hospitals, almost as though they were mocking us. Then there are the weather events, the tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, and earthquakes where we see more of our dead countrymen, and it has gone on and on for my entire lifetime, one shocking and numbing event after the next. Our country appears to be invested in keeping us traumatized and off balance.
Could it be that this trauma, this dysfunction, has been deliberately spread out into mankind? Why did every major country suddenly need to separate parents and children and imprison them? What is history not telling us? Depending on your beliefs we people have been on the earth for thousands or millions of years, have we always been so rough on our children? Where did our ideas of parenting begin? Could the lessons of parenting that we know have started in dark and archaic asylums where only the strongest survive? Who decided that this Lord of the Flies mentality (where bullies reign, children suffer, and personal identity and morality is lost) was the way to create a productive adult?
The Bible tells us that there is no new thing under the sun, and the world’s dirty secret is, and has always been, that children are a commodity. They are bought and sold and killed and used, and it’s the richest dark money scheme that exists. Despite the fact that the asylums, orphan trains, and orphanages are long in the past, hundreds of thousands of children are uprooted and disappear yearly in this nation alone, and this fact is not mentioned on the TV or media. There is still, in this day and age, a dark cloak of evil after the children of this world, and it’s far bigger than the abuse in individual families, it’s sewn into the fabric of our very nation, and our nation’s soul and identity.
The big picture shows that there is a massive evil stalking our children, and the micro knows how hard it can be on the individual kid where nothing makes sense, there is no stability or trust, and armoring and closing yourself off to others is the only way to survive. And perhaps that is what the nation wants for us, maybe it wants us to be closed off, broken, scarred, and no longer giving a care about our neighbors or fellow citizens, and perhaps that was always the goal from the beginning.
Jesus teaches us to love our neighbors as ourselves, to seek the truth, to love and honor God and have no idols, and to protect our children, while the world’s message is far different. In this world debauchery is power, truth is negotiable, infanticide is bravery, sacrificing everything for money is heroic, idolatry is the norm, and experiencing and surviving great traumas is simply mental illness. The Bible is right yet again, what’s been done before will be done again, there is no new thing under the sun, and the soul of this nation, and the souls in this nation are in a very dark place. A dark place contrived and created by our leaders with a purpose, and looking out, and over, and under, and around I only see that the purpose is to drive us further from God, from salvation, from our rightful inheritance, and from our place in heaven. Generational abuse, trauma, and curses are real, and useful to a dark agenda, and the only way to end them is with acknowledgment, faith, personal sacrifice, honesty, and prayer. The world continues to inflict the trauma programming, and hate and shun and mock and cancel the ones who stand up and point it out.
Keep seeking.
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