Generational Trauma: A Legacy of Pain and the Power to Heal
Trauma, Family Drama, and Your Mama: From Wounding to Transformation
All of my writing originates from a profound and painful search for truth, one that began in 1986. That year, I faced the dark edge of life itself, nearly succumbing to suicide as a result of what I have come to call "suffering’s conspiracy of silence." This silence—that cloaks pain, disguises trauma, and protects the harmful undercurrents of our culture—is something I’ve wrestled with for decades.
For much of my post-1986 life, the idea of writing about my personal search for truth felt utterly foreign to me. My life, often cloaked in irrelevance and isolation, seemed undeserving of an audience. Why document the tangle of emotional threads tied to my family, my culture, and my struggles? Why risk inducing discomfort in both myself and others by placing these pieces of my life under a microscope?
The answer to these questions emerged not through logic, but through life unfolding. It wasn’t until 2013, at the age of 57, that I decided to retire early from a career as an electrician. I did so not to rest, but to care for my father, whose health was in decline. My days became consumed by tending to his needs, but in those quiet moments of caregiving, I was gifted something precious and rare in our world: time. Time to reflect. Time to understand. Time to ask, without rushing to conclusions, who I had been, who I was at that moment, and who I desired to grow into.
Through the lens of these reflections, I began to recognize that the foundation of my life was not only shaped by my actions but built upon the broader structures created by my family lineage. I began to trace threads that connected me not only to my father but to the silent echoes of fathers who had come before him, spanning generations of human stories. This wasn’t merely my story; it was one deeply woven into a larger tapestry that humanity itself has been crafting.
Then came a pivotal evening in November 2016, when my wife and I hosted Sheila Hamilton, renowned journalist, mental health advocate, and author of All the Things We Never Knew, for a book club discussion. Her book is a gripping memoir detailing her late husband’s battle with bipolar disorder, his traumatic upbringing, and the circumstances that eventually led to his tragic suicide.
Listening to Sheila recount her husband’s struggles was like standing before a mirror that reflected my own untended wounds. I knew his pain, viscerally, deeply, as if some hidden part of me whispered, “This, too, is yours.” It was as though her words peeled back yet another layer of the conspiracy of silence, exposing raw truths that could no longer remain unspoken. Inspired by Sheila’s courage to share, I made a vow to offer my perspective to the world. But there was one problem—I was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a writer.
And yet, I wrote.
Between 2016 and 2021, I filled over 1,200 pages with my thoughts, my research, and my deepest emotions. I poured myself into exploring the nature of trauma, its deadly dance with mental illness, its subtle hand in the creation of widespread societal dysfunction, and, most importantly, the possible paths toward true healing. I hired editors, invested more than $20,000 into refining my ideas, and imagined a future where this work could bring light to those who had walked similar paths. But by 2023, the dream of publication had dimmed; my efforts to find interest from publishers and my community had largely faltered.
This failure wasn’t merely logistical or financial; it felt emblematic of something larger. I came to recognize within our world a deeply entrenched rejection of accountability—a historical, cultural, and familial conspiracy of silence that shields those responsible for harm, protecting their legacies while leaving the innocent to bear the weight of unspoken pain. For centuries, violence against both the self and others has not only been normalized but institutionalized, bolstered by societal norms and even religious doctrines. The resistance to exposing and healing these wounds is immense, a towering wall maintained by denial.
There was a time when I wrote with hope, believing that my words could slice through the silence, encouraging others to join in the healing process. Now, that hope has softened, becoming something quieter, more subdued. I no longer write to change the world; I write because the truth itself demands expression. Denial offers no pathway to healing, and while I may not witness the ripple effects of sharing what I have learned, I choose to believe that when light is shone in darkness, it creates opportunities for transformation.
Perhaps the narrative threads of trauma, healing, and accountability will remain discomforting to many. Yet, I continue to write, not out of desperation for change but in quiet reverence for truth itself. The act of writing is, for me, a radical act of bearing witness—to my life, to others’ lives, and to the deeply flawed structures we inhabit. There is no healing without truth, and perhaps one day, with amplified voices and awakened hearts, the silence will no longer hold its grip.
Family History and Shared Narratives
We all have an important perspective and story to bring to the collective narrative. My sister has always been quite the family historian, and in the past, I would defer to her, to let her develop the elements of the family history that might be the most interesting or important in nature. Yet, my sister could not fully develop the emotional heritage of those ancestors, due to the limitations of the availability of letters written by them, the deaths of too many of the carriers of the family history, and her sometimes resistance to discussing the impact that trauma had upon herself and the family. Since my father was so available to me, I took advantage of my direct, almost continuous engagement with my father and his memories, as well as some family records, to help me develop the story.
My father, Beryl Donald Paullin, was a product of the Great Depression, having been born in 1927. His Father, also named Beryl, was a Fire Chief who was respected within the community, and also feared in his home because of his abusive nature and alcoholism. I know little else about Grandpa Beryl (also known as Bruce), other he also served in the military, during World War 1, and is buried in Willamette National Cemetery, as is my father.
Note 1: My father kept my sister Pam and I away from Grandpa Beryl until we were teenagers, that is how much my father wanted to protect us from his oppressive presence. While in our early teenage years, Pam and I did visit with Grandpa Beryl at his La Center home twice, and I visited him in the VA hospital prior to his death. In his later years, he was sober and seemed like a pleasant enough man.
Dad’s mother Elsie was the classic abused wife, suffering also through physical and emotional problems while married to “that Brute”, as my father referred to him. I also know little about her, either, other than she had kidney disease, was one of the first Oregonians to receive a kidney transplant, and that she died shortly after my birth. John Edward was dad’s older brother (Ed preceded him in death) and Ed was removed from his home and placed at their grandparents’ farm in Oregon City at 6 years of age, after nearly being beaten to death by their father. Susie carried an unfortunate and hurtful story about my father all the way to the end of my father's life, which was that it was my father's fault that Edward was almost beat to death, because my father, at four years of age, might have tipped over a lamp, and broke it. Edward's near fatal beating supposedly arose from that event.
I later learned that Elsie secretly gave birth to a daughter at age 15, which she gave up for adoption. Elsie had claimed that she had been raped by several young men, which resulted in her pregnancy, but it was later learned that this was a family lie. This unfortunate lie was to be passed on to Susie when Susie became pregnant with Sharyn Robinson, with Elsie counseling Susie to use a variation of this story as a cover to her out-of-wedlock pregnancy by Lauren, a married man that she had taken a fancy to at age 25. Susie still lived with her parents at that age, perhaps due to poor self-esteem or job prospects, while still being deeply influenced, often quite negatively, by both her mother and father.
Gloria (or Susie) as most people now know her, was Ed’s and Dad’s younger sister. Both Susie and my father suffered under abusive conditions for most of their childhood. My father and my aunt were often beat and berated when Grandpa lived out of his bottle on his long weekends off from the Fire Department. Both my father and my aunt displayed some symptoms of PTSD for most of their lives, as well as both being products of the challenging age in which they grew up.
My father really loved his older brother Ed, through all of the years of his life, though he loved to challenge Ed about the mess that was always present in the yard on Ed’s farm. Ed loved to collect old and junk cars, much to the chagrin of his neighbors, friends, some family members, and the local police department.
Note 2: Sharon and I started sharing in their love beginning in 1995, when we all started sharing breakfasts, and family gatherings together for the first time. My Uncle Ed was a masterful storyteller, and I always enjoyed it when he grabbed my ear, for his epic tales about family, friends, and his work at the Crown Zellerbach paper mill, where he was the lead electrician for over forty years.
In 1943, at 16 years of age, Dad enlisted in the Marines, as he wanted to serve his country, get away from his family of origin, as well as he thought of himself as a “dummy”, with no faith in his ability to successfully finish high school at Benson Polytech. His mother promptly collared the local Marine Corp recruiter and forced dad’s return home from the service. He re-enlisted in the Navy the moment he turned 18 years of age, and was assigned duty on two different warships, the West Virginia, and the Wisconsin, during his two years in the Navy. Upon his return from active duty in 1947, he returned home, where he threatened his dad with death if Grandpa Beryl ever laid a hand on his mother again. Grandpa Beryl was to divorce from Elsie in 1948.
Dad moved on from that relationship with his mother and father, not seeing either of them again for many years.
He started college at the University of Portland, studying Psychology, Logic, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, and other courses, from 1947-1952. He wanted to understand himself and the world better, and the inner workings of minds that would bring harm to their families. He wanted to understand the human mind at the deepest level (his curious mind about other issues only left him after my mother's death in 2009). But he had to delay his search for the truth about the broken human mind, as his now hyper-busy life, including his marriage to my mother in 1950, got in the way of him finishing his studies of the human condition. Dad formed a great friendship and relationship with Father Delaney, who taught at the University of Portland, and in whose name the Delaney Institute was named. They would discuss those “deep issues” until well after class some days. He struggled a bit with his schoolwork, but he did stay at it over a course of five years, which did not result in a degree.
Dad still had a fire in his heart, and an incredible desire to succeed. He worked harder than anybody around him, the sign of a classic “overachiever”. He endlessly drove himself, and he was going to overcome his upbringing, and prove to the world that he had higher value than the poor self-esteem that his verbally and physically abusive father had inculcated him with. His perfectionism and zealousness for order and efficiency was utilized to its best advantage in his future employment with the US Postal Service. That same attitude tended to, at times, challenge others, especially those that he attempted to help, or manage, as both a general manager with the Postal Service, and as a friend and family member.
An interesting and compelling offshoot of my father's career at the US Postal Service was that he had made friends with some employees in the 1950's prior to his management career. He had many conversations with peers about his life and family. One conversation revolved around Dad's need to keep me quiet at night, because I was a noisy, crying baby, interfering with my father’s sleep. Dad worked two jobs, the primary job at the USPS having too poor of a salary to sustain him. He really needed his five hours of sleep a night. He told Bob B. that my mother would wrap my baby body in a blanket and place me into their car in the garage from about 10:00 PM until 2:30 AM, when Dad would go to his second job delivering newspapers for the Oregonian.
I worked for the USPS from 1975-1985, and heard the story directly from Bob, who sought me out in 1976 to tell me the tale. I knew nothing about trauma and its potential for lifelong wounding then, so I just accepted the story, not knowing what to do with it. I did get confirmation from my parents that they actually stored me in the garage, though they never acknowledged that they might have made an error.
Note 3: I never understood trauma’s impact upon myself until recent years, finally gaining an understanding why my voice seemed to carry no power with others, and why the world felt like it has abandoned me in my time of greatest need. The still compelling image of my mother cowering in the corner crying while I begged for her to protect me from my father’s belt will never disappear from my memory.
Over the years, Dad found a way to manage his life much more successfully than his sister Susie. Susie made many poor choices, including taking on her mother’s alcoholic boyfriend, Vern, as her first husband after her mother’s passing in 1956. Vern was over twenty years older than Susie, in addition to his drinking problems. Vern was to tone down his drinking considerably when Cindy was born in 1961, but his health was very poor, and he died when Cindy was seven years old. Cindy was quite resentful at Susie in adulthood for marrying a man so much older and unhealthier than she was and ultimately depriving Cindy of a father at too early of an age.
My dad and his brother and sister had an older sister that they never knew of, until very late in their lives, after their mystery sister had passed away. Our “new” cousin Wendy is the present-day gift of that secret finally becoming exposed. Susie had a daughter she had adopted out and "forgot about", who came back into her life in 2004 after adopted out daughter Sharyn researched the now publicly available adoption records and found those showing her birth mother as being Susie. Sharyn wanted to know about her birth father, and Susie told her that malicious lie inspired by Elsie that Sharyn was a product of a rape, and not a love relationship with a married man named Lauren. That information had the negative impact upon Sharyn that you would expect.
Sharyn eventually, came to live with Aunt Susie in 2015. Sharyn had contributed to a failed marriage through infidelity and drug addiction and became homeless, living out of her car with her beloved dog Ruby. Sharyn needed a place to recuperate from a diabetic wound in her foot, and, conveniently for us, we needed extra eyes on Aunt Susie because of her deterioration, so we encouraged Aunt Susie to let her daughter stay with her for a little while. Susie finally relented, letting Sharyn in. That "little while" turned into two years, and it was a relationship fraught with complexity and mutual woundedness.
One day, Aunt Susie confided in Sharon that Sharyn was not the product of a rape, but of an illicit relationship with a married man. I was shocked and dismayed, and after an intense conversation with my wife Sharon, we determined that Sharyn needed to know the truth about her biological father. Sharon was to deliver that powerful, reorienting story to Sharyn, a story that we both hoped would bring some measure of healing to Sharyn about her origins. Sharyn was created in a loving atmosphere, and not the violence of rape. Sharyn was relieved but eventually grew to intensely hate her biological mother as she neared death from pancreatic cancer in August of 2017.
Generational Trauma: A Legacy of Pain and the Power to Heal
Sharon came home yesterday after visiting my estranged cousin Cindy, Aunt Susie’s #2 daughter. She described her attempt to connect, which only led to hostility. Cindy's family has long neglected Aunt Susie, leaving Sharon to shoulder the responsibility of her care. For the last ten years, Sharon has been the sole family member truly present, guiding Susie's placement into a safer environment as her health declined.
This neglect has been a defining feature of our family, woven through decades of trauma. Susie, now 96, rests in the Mountain Park Memory Care center. But that place holds more than her frail body; it shelters the weight of a painful family history shaped by alcoholism, abuse, and neglect. As her life ebbs away, she represents the last link to a network of relationships that, for generations, perpetuated suffering rather than healing.
Her approaching death feels both like the closing of a chapter and the deep irony of familial connections. What should have been bonds of care and joy became conduits of inherited pain. The choice now lies in what we will carry forward from this legacy.
Generational trauma is the unseen force shaping how families interact. It’s passed down through behaviors, parenting styles, and systemic norms, and its origins are often unspoken. My family’s story exemplifies this. The shadow of my grandfather Beryl’s alcoholism looms large. His violence created ripples that disrupted relationships long after he was gone.
My father, for example, rarely spoke about Beryl except to call him “that brute.” It was all he needed to say. Words beyond that might have been redundant for a man trying to shield his children from the scars of his own past. Susie wasn’t as fortunate. She bore the brunt of Beryl’s abuse, and the damage persisted in her parenting.
Trauma doesn’t simply end when one generation passes. It plants seeds in the next, growing into behaviors and mental health challenges that repeat old patterns of harm. Cindy’s struggles and neglect, along with her son’s evident mental health issues, are part of this continuum.
Even Susie’s other daughter, Sharyn, exemplified how trauma thrives unprocessed. Her addiction, homelessness, and eventual death from pancreatic cancer at 63 years old mirrored Susie’s wounds. Their fractured relationship, punctuated by pain and misunderstanding, was trauma’s final triumph.
Recognizing the impact of generational trauma is the first step toward breaking its cycle. Within families, it explains why relationships fracture, why silence fills rooms where understanding should live, and why love is so often misunderstood as conditional.
Understanding that trauma is passed like a cruel inheritance allows us to approach relationships with greater intention:
Acknowledgement: The courage to name our histories and understand them is an act of defiance against the silence that keeps trauma alive.
Seeking Help: Individual therapy, family counseling, or support groups can provide critical insight and tools for healing.
Creating Boundaries: Protecting oneself from toxic patterns is not abandonment; it’s preservation.
New Patterns: Introducing habits of genuine communication and mutual respect into relationships sets a foundation for growth.
Susie’s life and struggles reminded me of how far-reaching the consequences of unhealed trauma can be. It took conscious effort to disrupt these dynamics in my own life. Witnessing my father’s anger and my family’s fragmentation helped solidify my decision not to have children. That choice, though painful, was an intentional act to ensure the cycle stopped with me.
For others in my family, like my wife Sharon, healing took the form of compassionate care for Susie, attempting to spare her dignity in the final years of her life. It showed that even within systems broken by decades of pain, love could still manifest as an act of resilience.
One story stands out that underscores the complexity of family love amidst traumas. When we discovered that Susie had lied about the circumstances of Sharyn's conception, claiming a violent origin when the truth was a loving (albeit illicit) relationship, we decided that Sharyn deserved to know her real story. Sharon told her the truth, shining a small but powerful light on years of deception and hurt.
For Sharyn, knowing that she wasn’t conceived in violence offered a measure of healing. For Sharon and me, it was a stand against the dishonest narratives that breed shame and confusion in families. While the revelation didn’t fix everything, it proved that honesty and love could coexist even in the darkest histories.
Generational trauma doesn’t just affect families. It mirrors societal issues like systemic inequity, normalized cruelty, and the refusal to address collective harm. Witnessing the effects of these dynamics on a national level during events like the Trump administration clarified the need for systemic healing alongside personal effort.
Both within families and societies, the work of healing requires:
Acknowledging Harm: Whether it’s historical injustice or family abuse, the first step is recognition.
Changing Narratives: Moving away from shame and silence toward open dialogue about healing.
Investing in Compassion: From policies to interpersonal relationships, creating systems of care is essential.
Susie’s impending death marks both a loss and an opportunity. It forces us to reckon with generations of pain while also offering a choice about how we honor her humanity.
Her life was often marked by suffering, but it also carried many traces of love and connection. By holding both truths, we honor her story in its entirety. More importantly, we commit to building legacies of healing rather than pain.
Every family is shaped by trauma, be it familial or cultural, or both, yet every family carries the potential for resilience. The inheritance we pass forward isn’t just the scars that shaped us but also the courage and love we bring to the process of healing.
Whether through choosing to stop cycles, as I did, or actively repairing relationships, as Sharon exemplified, the power to disrupt trauma lies in conscious, courageous choices.
What will we leave behind? A legacy of wounds or a story of healing?
The answer depends on what we’re willing to face and how boldly we choose to transform.
We now live in a country where cruelty and traumatization of innocents is becoming institutionalized and normalized by Donald Trump, the all-time corrupt leader in history. The country needs to heal its trauma, not worship and spread it like the mind virus it is. Family members who support this demon will not find a welcome mat at our front door
The effects of alcoholism and Trump generated, the family's and historical trauma outlives us all. The conspiracy of silence will continue to feed energy into our national shadow, until there is a collective intention to stop its historical momentum.
Trauma, the resultant suffering, and our response to it, whether it be it with compassion and healing, or with more hiding and denial, continues to feed its energy into our cultural narrative and continues our cultural legacy.