Hurt people hurt people

Our mission is to end the ancient generational cycles of reactive violence

To hear my grandmother tell it, he was the life of the party, a joyous extrovert when she engaged to marry him in 1917. Then he was drafted and went off to the trenches of Alsace-Lorraine. It took only a few months before he returned to Brooklyn as the morose and obsessive grandfather whom I knew growing up. 

War is a million individual human tragedies. Most soldiers who go to war never recover. It’s the training as well as the battlefield trauma. Drill sergeants know well how to beat the empathy out of an 18-year-old kid and turn him into an unfeeling killer. But when the war is over, who knows how to restore his humanity?

One lens through which to view all human tragedy is that people grow up traumatized, with unresolved anger and perhaps with a dissociated place inside them that cannot empathize with others. They are statistically more likely to resort to violence in future conflicts, even to make their living in ways that indifferently exploit others. They are likely to inflict suffering on the next generation, to raise their children with episodes of cruelty and abuse, to be unable to offer the unconditional love that every child deserves. The cycle is renewed in each generation. People are capable of unthinkable violence because their great grandparents were savagely mistreated. 

Conversely, all human progress can be seen to arise from individuals who heal and transcend their past. Through some combination of heroic personal integrity and compassionate help from others, they arrive at a place where they are determined to spare others the kind of trauma that they themselves have experienced. We hear stories of saintly forgiveness — Milarepa, Nelson Mandela, Václav Havel, Eli Wiesel, and the Israeli woman who lost her son to the Hamas attacks of October 7, then went on to urge her government to seek no vengeance. 

Slavery

Millions of Americans were legally classed as sub-human and treated as though they were objects that could be possessed by someone with enough money to “buy” them. 160 years later, we are still collectively recovering from the trauma of being enslaved and the dehumanization that any person must undergo in order to be capable of “owning” another human.

To end the abomination of slavery, Lincoln imposed the abomination of civil war. Families were torn apart. Cousins shot at cousins and brothers murdered brothers on the battlefield. Vanquished Southern whites were themselves treated like second-class citizens during Reconstruction. 160 years later, we are still suffering from the collective trauma, the distrust and the division leftover from the Civil War.   

Hate cannot drive out hate

My grandfather “won” for us the War to End All Wars. The Treaty of Versailles put those Germans in their place, so they would know better than to ever threaten the Allies again. The provisions were so punitive that average Germans couldn’t make a living. 

Their suffering made them vulnerable to Hitler’s demagoguery, and they took their anger out on gypsies, homosexuals, anyone with a physical disability, and the Jews. 

After the Second War, Jews who survived the Final Solution were so traumatized that they were ready to steal land and livelihood from the Palestinian people. It felt necessary to establish their security in a world of antisemitism.

75 years later, there are 5 million traumatized Palestinians, people who have grown up without freedom to move or to speak their truth, people whose parents tell them about the house they once had, before it was bulldozed by “settlers”. Palestinians have a rich history of mutual support and close family ties, a rich culture for those who can remember a time when they were free.

Refugee camp in Gaza, November, 2023

It’s not enough to stop the bombing. It’s not enough to stop the oppression and free the Palestinian people. It’s not enough to restore their stolen land, or to resettle them as refugees in Europe and America. Whatever becomes of these people, they will need deep healing, years of TLC and attention to their trauma as they slowly heal. If we fail them, there will be yet another generation of PTSD and the violence it spawns. 

Ukraine and Yemen, Niger and Nicaragua, Cameroon and Cuba…Wars and “sanctions” are perpetuating the cycles of violence from which we must all heal together.

Co-counseling

Since 1977, I have been involved in an international community of peer counselors. People receive an 8-week training in how to listen non-judgmentally, how to stay attentive and take turns. It’s not a PhD in clinical psychology, but it’s 90% of what people need when they go to a professional counselor. It’s free. And it’s something we can do for each other.

A friend has recently been training in Emotional Freedom Technique. This is a simple formula for helping people recover from trauma stored in the body.

It’s scalable.

These are not programs that will save the world, but they are the kind of process that we will need if billions of traumatized humans are to stop passing their trauma from generation to generation.

Healed people heal people.