Chapter 1: What is Generational Trauma From My Book How to Heal....by V. Jones on Amazon.com

I am a survivor of generational child sex abuse trauma. I struggled with depression, low self-esteem, and anxiety for decades. I healed in the most unusual way--by going through more trauma. I won a child custody lawsuit my ex-husband filed against me to take custody of our daughter from me. I won by obtaining court orders for our family to work with a therapist, for my ex-husband and me to work with a court-ordered parenting time coordinator who was a forensic psychologist, and for our children to work with their own therapist. The whole series of events around the lawsuit my ex-husband filed against me took place over eight years or so.

I was imperfect as a parent and made plenty of mistakes, but I was much better at following the therapist's and the coordinator's advice than my ex-husband.  When my ex-husband's lawsuit to take my daughter from me finally went to court, the coordinator testified on my behalf. I won the case so thoroughly that the judge ordered my ex-husband to pay 90% of my attorney's fees. My attorney told me that very rarely happens. Moreover, when the case was over, I realized that my lifelong struggle with depression and anxiety was over. I had healed the low self-esteem decades earlier by excelling at my work as a fisheries biologist.

I thought my book would help other child sex abuse survivors struggling with depression and anxiety and/or child custody battles. Because I am old and had not developed a publishing background, I decided that the easiest route was to publish my book on Amazon.com. Only one person bought my book despite the fact that I traveled to several domestic violence agencies to promote it. I had worked as a volunteer with child sex abuse and domestic violence survivors who lost their children to the men who abused them.

My best guess is that I don't have an MSW, LCSW, PhD, or PsyD behind my name. I still believe in my book, so I decided to publish segments on my blog, which has had quite a few views in the past. I am also trying to raise awareness about how requiring divorcing and separating parents to learn and use mental health and communication skills, such as mindfulness and Nonviolent Communication, could reduce trauma for children.

Chapter 1: What is Generational Trauma?

My Story

When I was 4 years old, my mother sat on the living room couch, depressed, smoking cigarette after cigarette, and not watching over me. One day, two teenage neighbor boys lured me into a basement and sexually abused me. I told my mother what happened.

She said, “That’s where babies come from.”

But she didn’t do anything. Her blasé reaction caused me to think that what happened to me was not important.

A few weeks later, my mother put my clothes into a paper grocery bag, and my brother’s into another, and took us to our day babysitter. She told us that she wasn’t coming back. She had left us with the babysitter before, but she always came back. I couldn’t believe she wouldn’t come back this time, but as the day passed, all the other children’s parents came to

take them home, but mine did not.

I thought to myself, Why do all the other children have parents who want them, but my parents don’t want me?

My brother and I slept on the floor in the babysitter’s toddler son’s bedroom that night. I cried and cried and cried.

The babysitter came into the bedroom and turned on the light.

“Be quiet; you’re keeping the whole house up.”

So I was quiet, but I couldn’t sleep.

I also couldn’t eat. The next day, the babysitter gave us Campbell’s Alphabet Soup for lunch. All I could do was push the letters around my soup bowl, so she made me sit inside at her dining room table while all the other children she babysat went outside to play. 

After a few days of this, the babysitter took me to the doctor, who said I was suffering from

“loss of mother sickness” or something like that.

Fortunately, my father’s aunt came to stay at our house, and my brother and I were able to stay home instead of going to the babysitter's. My great-aunt was very loving, and I felt much happier sleeping in my own bed, in my own room, and with my own toys to play with. My father, brother, and I even made a trip to the psychiatric hospital where my mother was to visit her. I don’t remember the hospital at all, but I do remember the room-sized model of San Francisco Bay my father took us to see along the way.

A few months passed before my mother came home.

Our family life seemed good for several years. We visited my father’s mother in Monterey, camped in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and picked blueberries on my uncle’s farm in Vermont. Unfortunately, I also experienced bad times, such as when school classmates gathered around me and teased me about my knee-length skirts and bobby socks. The year

was 1969—the era of knee socks and thigh-high skirts. My mother grew up during the Great Depression and preferred the more classically styled clothing of that era. She hand-sewed all my clothes, so she chose what I wore. My classmates didn’t care.

Then, when I was in 8th grade, my mother filed for divorce and began drinking glass after glass of wine almost every night.

One night when I was a senior in high school, I came home from studying at the library and discovered that my drunk mother had lit the dining room table on fire while trying to light a cigarette. Fortunately, the fire was still small enough for me to put out with wet towels, but I couldn’t sleep that night. The next day, I moved to my father’s house.

Unfortunately, my stepmother did not like me being around, so my father moved me out to my own little house, where I lived alone. Most high school students fantasize about the freedom of living on their own, but I felt unwanted and unloved, and struggled with depression. 

Fortunately, I grew up in a rural farming town on the banks of the Sacramento

River in Northern California. I was the top student in my class, but my academic competition was much less than it would have been if I lived in Palo Alto, Pasadena, or Berkeley, California. But being the top student meant that lots of people asked to copy my math homework, but no one asked me to a dance if I went to a school dance, so I didn’t go.

Fortunately, living in a rural area provided me with a unique form of healing. I discovered that I felt better when I rode my bicycle along the Sacramento River or walked through the riparian woodlands that surrounded it. Walking and riding my bike in nature, while thinking about my life challenges, healed me the same way Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy does, but it is much easier on the eyes. I had no idea I was helping my brain process my life traumas. I had to read about EMDR many decades later to understand that I was unknowingly healing myself.

After I graduated from high school, my father paid for me to attend college, which was significantly cheaper back then than it is today. Unfortunately, I still struggled with episodes of depression. Fortunately, during and after college, I found jobs in wildlife and fisheries biology that I loved and which improved my self-esteem. 

Later, because all my wildlife and fisheries jobs were temporary, I studied to be a Registered Nurse. I worked as a psychiatric nurse for several months before I gave birth to my son. I loved the work. Unfortunately, I still experienced episodes of depression. When I worked as

a psychiatric nurse, the links between child sex abuse, other traumas, and depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues were becoming better understood, but effective therapies such as Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) were relatively new and not as widely used as they are today.

When I was 28, my mother died of congestive heart failure, cirrhosis of the liver, and emphysema. My father confided to me that my mother’s doctors thought my mother suffered from psychosis, or altered perceptions of reality, which can be genetic. I wondered if I had inherited a predisposition to depression from her.

When I was 43, after my father died, my cousin called me and told me that our aunt had told her that our grandfather had sexually abused all the sisters in the family. My initial reaction to my cousin’s news was denial. My cousin’s story did not match the diagnosis my father told me, but the more I thought about it, the more I decided my aunt and cousin must be telling the truth. 

One patient in the psychiatric hospital where I worked was a very sweet woman who

struggled with addiction and depression. Her medical records revealed that she was a child sex abuse survivor.

My own struggles with depression, low self-esteem, and anxiety began to make sense to me. I didn’t inherit genes for depression from my mother. I had a traumatic childhood because my mother had experienced severe trauma during her childhood. There is a name for this—generational trauma. Unfortunately, she never received the kind of therapy she needed

to heal because it didn’t exist in the 1960s and was under development in the 1970s and 80s.

Unfortunately, as is often the case for survivors of generational trauma, more trauma followed. 

When I was 22, I was raped on a date. The rape left a lasting scar that greatly frustrated my husband. After that rape, I rarely enjoyed sex. I have healed other symptoms of sexual trauma. Enjoying sex is the one thing I cannot heal.

Exercise 1—Did You Survive Generational Trauma as a Child?

____Yes____No.

Exercise 2—If You Survived Generational Trauma, Describe Your Experiences

If you need more space, continue journaling in a notebook, on a computer, or on a cell phone.

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Continue journaling in a notebook or on a computer or cell phone, wherever you feel most comfortable.