Darkest Hour

The Trauma Gene is explained as the passing along of trauma from one generation to the next.  

I recently saw a film about a Holocaust survivor who decided, at a late age, to speak to high school students about her concentration camp experiences.  She’d kept these stories to herself until she’d read a news account about a young skinhead group who claimed the Holocaust was a hoax.  With her prisoner number still tattooed on her forearm, she told the teens about watching the Nazi’s shoot and murder her father and brother,  about the bits of bone she’d seen in the ashes she’d been made to spread in a field outside of the crematorium, and about the day her mother had been taken away to be burned alive.  At the end of WWII, when the camps had been liberated, she’d fallen in love with and married another survivor.  Together, they came to America and had a family of their own.  When interviewed, her children described their home life and upbringing as ‘different’ from the childhood experiences of their friends.  Their father had violent nightmares.  Their mother seemed to lack the ease and joy of life they’d seen in other mothers.

When I first heard about the trauma gene I was skeptical.  I’d heard it applied to the Holocaust, slavery, and the trail of tears, but the film made me see it differently.  

I began to think of the victims of school shootings, wouldn’t they necessarily behave differently because of their experience?  Would they be able, as parents, to trust that their own children would be safe in an environment that had failed them so miserably?  I thought too, of all those who were victimized by 911; the people who were in the buildings, on the planes, the first responders, their surviving family members, and even the trauma experienced by those of us watching from home.  As a nation we were traumatized.  As a nation, we drew closer to our own and adopted a mistrust of the systems that were in place.  Our soldiers too, come home from war, having seen death and destruction up close and struggle to live in the homeland they’ve risked their lives to protect.  Don’t their children pay a great price for their service?

I thought of singular or personal trauma.  As a survivor of sexual and mental abuse during my early teen years by a coach, I thought of the trauma I have passed along to my children.  Hadn’t my overprotectiveness stunted their growth?  And what of the trauma experienced by others, the trauma of physical abuse, bullying, pedophilia, date rape, addiction, poverty, divorce, abandonment, unjust judgement – heaped on people of color, and police officers alike?

Who among us is spared?  Who among us is without trauma?  

We are prone to categorize ourselves— He is the skinhead, she is the addict, I cannot identify with them.  I am separate from them.  I am Christian, I am educated, I am middle class, I belong here.  I feel safe and understood here.  We do this in all aspects of our lives.  We separate ourselves based on income, political affiliation, geographic location, sexual orientation, race, religion, and so on.  

The problem is that God did not intend for us to be separate.  After the crucifixion of Jesus, the disciples were traumatized – terrified of being persecuted.  Could they trust the system to treat them any differently than Jesus had been treated?  They hid in the upper room for days, and when they emerged, they did not come out with weapons to protect themselves.  They did not declare war on their perceived enemies.  They emerged with a new fire in their hearts, determined to live out the love and oneness they’d seen in Jesus- even in his darkest hour.

Trauma is universal.  Some of us are still in the thick of it, while others are lucky enough to be survivors of it.  Like it or not, it is our common denominator — a connective tissue running through humankind all the way from Jesus to you and me.  I wonder what the world would be like if we were able to connect with each other on this level — if we could step down out of our turrets of judgement and certainty, offer to wipe the brow of someone we have defined as “other” and say, “I know your pain.  You are not alone.”

2 Corintians 4:8-10

We are pressed on all sides, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.  We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.…