Transmuting the Pain and Anger to Strength and Determination
If you know my story at all, you know it was a struggle for me to shed my childhood trauma, to overcome destructive mindsets and behavioral patterns, and to find new ways of living in the world. We all have our demons and our battles to overcome.
To live an intentional, aligned, purposeful life is a challenge; science is finally coming to recognize that not only do adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) tend to affect physical, mental health, and professional outcomes, but that trauma also actually affects your DNA at an epigenetic level and is passed along generationally.
Thus, it is no exaggeration to say, as a child of Jewish ancestry on one side and a first-generation American on the other side, and as a woman in a patriarchal society, I must strive to overcome both my individual and my ancestral traumas. Wherever you stand on the spectrum of wokeness or being politically correct, you likely recognize that some people are granted more privileges than others. Privileges range from socio-economic, race-based, and gender-based privileges to pretty privilege and ableism.
The intersection of how you have personally and ancestrally benefitted from privileges and/or suffered from discrimination or traumas informs not only your personal and professional life, but your internal mindset, your worldview, your spirituality. I am not encouraging or condoning a victim mentality, but rather am stressing the importance of compassion, and of working toward individual and collective healing.
As a single mom sole care provider, I have so much anger and sadness. Some days it takes all I have not to explode from it (and some days I let myself pour the sadness out). Dating is impossible. My work is threadbare and underpaid. My situation now also amplifies for me how systematically some professions, specifically domestic and feminized labor, tend to be vastly undervalued.
I have so much anger at a system and a society where education and motherhood are not more valued, where we don’t support working moms or invest enough into our education. I have anger that simple financial education is not meaningfully taught as part of the curriculum. I am saddened that making a career out of writing is, for most of us, excruciating and near impossible.
Yet I must balance this anger and sadness with the demands of providing for and being present for my daughter. I must balance these negative emotions with hope and with the desire to create a better future. I envision building or joining a community with other moms and children so that my daughter and I can better thrive, so that we live a more aligned, meaningful, communal life. I envision building my career and continuing in my healing journey, and every day I am thankful that I am able to raise my daughter more consciously, with more presence, gratitude, and generosity than my mother did with me.
To transmute the pain and the anger into strength and determination is really my only viable path. And so I forge ahead. I hope you will join me in this path toward individual and collective healing. I hope we are moving toward a more matriarchal, egalitarian, conscious age, as our overlapping crises reveal how urgently humanity and the world need new, more conscious, harmonious ways of living.
Like my writing? Become a Medium member today. Your membership fee directly supports Olivia Love and other writers you read. You’ll also get full access to every story on Medium.
You can also support my work by buying me a coffee.
References:
Burke Harris, N. “How Childhood Trauma Affects Health Across a Lifetime.” TED Med 2014. Sep. 2014. https://www.ted.com/talks/nadine_burke_harris_how_childhood_trauma_affects_health_across_a_lifetime
Rediger, Jeffrey. (2020). Cured: Strengthen Your Immune System and Heal Your Life. Flatiron Books.
Youssef, Nagy A et al. “The Effects of Trauma, with or without PTSD, on the Transgenerational DNA Methylation Alterations in Human Offsprings.” Brain sciences vol. 8,5 83. 8 May. 2018, doi:10.3390/brainsci8050083
