Color Me Butterfly

It comes as no surprise to me whenever I encounter:  “I understand how domestic violence and abuse can pass down from one generation to the next . . . but how is it that it kept a hold on four generations of women in your family?  How is this even possible?”

The first time this question landed on my ears, I was baffled.  I, too, didn’t understand how this could happen.  How could it be remotely conceivable that domestic violence and abuse can start with my grandmother, then pass down to my mother, then down to me, and now on to my daughter – four women, in four generations – all struggling with this?  And by the second time this question came to me – I made a vow to FIND OUT.  I needed to understand it.  I needed to own it.

I set out on a crusade to FIND OUT.  I researched papers, articles, the science.  And with all my research, I was able to find a common explanation – an explanation that made sense, but still didn’t quite dig beneath the surface – the explanation: Intergenerational Abuse.  Simply put, Intergenerational Abuse is when abuse has a way of passing down from one generation to the next – when the cycle of abuse continues to perpetrate.  For example, when a son bears witness to his father abusing his mother, then he later becomes abusive.

Now this made total sense to me, but still it wasn’t enough to quench an unnerving thirst and craving that I’d gained to come to terms with how my family ended up in this predicament.  This definition just didn’t quite cut it for me.  It had to be more to it then just that.

After still feeling an unresolve in my resolve to FIND OUT… I steered away from the obvious definition.  It all sounded too cliché.  In writing Color Me Butterfly, I had come to know more about my family than I’d ever expected to know – and the one thing that I now understood was that something more lurked at the fabric of my family and put a dent in it.  I became obsessed with better understanding the ‘not so technical’ explanation.  And in the corner of one evening, deep in mind, the answer came to me.  It came packaged in a simple seven letter word.  It came in all its simplicity.  The answer?  SILENCE.  Domestic violence and abuse took hold of my family, not simply because of intergenerational abuse.  Not simply because we lured it into our lives.  And not simply because we weren’t strong enough to break the cycle; but simply because we did nothing to break the SILENCE.  Talking about what happened to the women in my family was simply just something ‘we refused to do.’  It came with the old family adage that you just don’t air your family’s laundry; and more importantly, ‘you just don’t talk about it.’  This was the enlightment behind what led to 60+ years of domestic violence and abuse in my family.  The fact that we just didn’t talk about it.  We just didn’t discuss it.  This was unfortunately, just something we just didn’t do…

Having allowed silence to conform our beliefs, it also confined our growth – and kept this horrible thing in our family.  If only my grandmother would have opened up to my mother about the perils of her life… if only my mother would have shared her experiences with me --- if only I had had the tools sooner to communicate this to my daughter, then perhaps there would be no need for Color Me Butterfly. 

Intergenerational abuse is more than just about passing down the cycle of abuse from one generation to the next – it’s also about passing down the silence.  It’s about coming to terms with the ideal that if we continue to embrace silence, then we will never be able to break the cycle.