Episode 2: Surrendering To The Unknown

It aWelcome to My Mother’s Trauma, a podcast exploring feelings about families, what to do with what’s passed down to us, and how to break the cycle for more justice and liberation. I am your host, Kim Loliya. Let’s take a moment to breathe.

Hi folks, thank you for being here. This episode might feel a bit weird because we’ll be delving into a major elephant in the room within the field of intergenerational trauma and weirdly it’s not something that’s spoken about very often which seems strange because it’s really obvious.

As you might have guessed from the title, it’s the unknown. The unknown is the murky swampy land where inherited trauma hangs out most of the time. So I couldn’t not talk about it and it felt kind of urgent because this is the landscape of this kind of trauma.

The unknown is a really vulnerable place, it makes sense if it feels unsettling, especially in a culture where there’s so much pressure to know, everyone’s an expert and knowing is somehow equated with being competent. And we’re surrounded by

The anxiety of having to know when we’re at work, having to prove to our colleagues, to our boss that we know what we’re doing, having to be knowledgeable, competent parents because we want to do the best for our kids, but also the kind of guilt and shame of not doing well as a parent goes way beyond our kids.

it’s societal, it’s familial, there’s pressure to prove that we’ve got this and sometimes we don’t, sometimes we just don’t know and despite technology, being able to google everything, having phones in our pocket that give us access to all the knowledge we could possibly need and more

There’s still a lot of unknown in day-to-day reality. It’s fully being in limbo, feeling like life is super chaotic, or feeling that something is kind of ambiguous, not being able to get a sense of what’s happening. Or it might not be something, it might be someone.

If we struggle to understand what someone means or how they’ve behaved or even their intentions there’s a lot of unknown in that relationship. It’s kind of like waiting for somebody to text you back especially bad if you like someone. It’s physically and emotionally painful

and massively anxiety inducing when you’ve sent a text into the ether and haven’t received anything or somebody’s ghosted. It’s especially bad if you know that someone’s read your message. So for that I think we have WhatsApp to thank because they have put us through a lot of stress. Thank you WhatsApp, thank you.

So in this realm of the unknown, as you might imagine, researchers, as they do, have come up with a name for this experience. And the name is Uncertainty Intolerance or UI. And of course there’s a scale because it always feels like there’s a scale and there’s a questionnaire as well. So

If you’d like to geek out or you like to get data feel free to check out the show notes and knock yourself out, enjoy, I hope it’s useful. When it comes to this scale that measures how much uncertainty we can tolerate it’s fair to assume that systemic oppression is so strong and pervasive

that as marginalised folks, we might struggle with uncertainty more than others, especially if we have multiple marginalised identities. So from that perspective, we should expect to have a very unique experience with uncertainty. And we also have the broader global political context

of huge uncertainty, multiple pandemics, genocides and a climate crisis. So even on that level, it feels like the unknown is everywhere and that we can’t escape it. And maybe that’s a depressing thought, but it could also be comforting as well to name it and to acknowledge

that other people might be able to relate to our experience of the unknown as well. So if the unknown is everywhere and everything is uncertain then intergenerational trauma is also affected by the unknown as well and this kind of trauma is particularly prone to the unknown because it’s kind of like the tip of an iceberg.

where we might know a tiny bit about our ancestors and what they’ve gone through, but the majority is under the water. It’s completely unknown.

I’m thinking about my parents and how it’s just so hard for me to articulate what they’ve been through, both as individuals but also as a unit when they were still together. They had this big chunk of life before I was even born. The bits that I do know about their life have been relayed to me years after the fact.

and that’s where things get murky because memory isn’t always a hundred percent accurate and you might be able to relate to this but somehow there’s always someone in every family who’s prone to embellishing a story or perhaps substituting some key facts and sometimes people also outright lie so

This idea of ever knowing the truth is really fraught and complicated. And in some cases, folks who have chosen to be estranged or folks whose parents have died might have an even more intense experience of the unknown. In those situations, the unknown becomes this huge crater with all this space.

It’s kind of like a vacuum in space where everything is silent and it feels like nothing is happening and in those cases there might never be any certainty because you can’t ask a parent or it’s not possible because they’re no longer living. In many cultures across the global south

Older generations don’t necessarily name things as trauma and a lot is played down in order to get through the day and cope with life. I’ve heard from so many clients that their parents and grandparents have said the most horrific things and followed it up with, you know, that’s just what used to happen in those days.

And it’s a weird kind of gaslighting to hear someone react like that and think, no, this is actually a big deal. But when you try and say something to that person, it’s played down even more. And then it kind of feels like you’re pushing someone and they’re resisting and it gets awkward. So it’s really hard in those situations.

for things to be named as they are and some people in our families just won’t be ready to do that. They won’t be ready to admit that something’s traumatic or they might not want to as well and that’s something that we need to respect even though that’s really hard. There could also be

language barriers and some words like trauma, anxiety, depression, addiction, abuse they don’t translate well or some meaning is lost in translation and this can be painful for those who need something to be known by their family and

that naming feels like it’s a really important part of the healing process. It’s so disorientating to be left with hints, vague stories or family members being completely in denial when you have a sense that something’s happened and you know that you would feel better if

People just acknowledged what you felt. It’s really, really sad when that doesn’t happen. So within the unknown, we occasionally bump into an island or two that feel more known. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Some aspects of intergenerational trauma can feel more certain because they’re easier to identify, like a natural disaster, which is then talked about for generations. These types of events don’t seem to carry as much stigma as interpersonal trauma.

so they tend to be easier to talk about and that tends to be why we know about them. These events that have a clear start and finish, they’re spoken about as single incident trauma but a lot of trauma isn’t like that and again it’s really murky.

like having a parent who’s in a series of unhealthy relationships or who’s experiencing microaggressions at work. It’s not just one situation and there’s no beginning or end, it’s this continuous process of going in and out of trauma and it’s hard to quantify the impact

of those situations and to get a sense of what’s been passed down if anything’s been passed down at all. So imagining that as an example your mother’s nervous system was supported while going through a single traumatic event or multiple events then

you might still have inherited some information or some adaptations about those events but maybe not anything that’s necessarily problematic. So in that sense the cycle has been broken or could be broken but if your mother hasn’t felt safe or hasn’t received support when going through these events

then it could be a different story and something might have been passed down. Or at least there’s a higher likelihood that something’s been passed down. Whenever we’re in murky waters, like the ones we’re in right now, we need an anchor. Something that we can hold onto, that

gives us an ability to make meaning out of what feels to be strange, random and difficult events. And that’s where making assumptions comes in as a potentially useful tool. Assumptions can be a lifeline for those who desperately want to know more

about what they’ve inherited but don’t necessarily have access to that information. Some people don’t like assumptions because they’re inaccurate or unhelpful, which is kind of true, but they’re used all the time in maths and science to solve all sorts of problems, so surely we can use them in this context as well and they can’t be that bad.

So as an example, an assumption that we can make within the context of the global South is that our mothers and ancestors are likely to have been affected by environmental trauma and famine over the years and in some cases over decades as well. And making this assumption

might be helpful to our global understanding of intergenerational trauma and how it’s affecting us, as well as provide a sense of how we might be able to work through it. We can start to feel, to dream, to talk about what it might have been like for our ancestors to go through this experience. And

Perhaps we can also create a bridge through the unknown, almost across time and space, where we can make sense of those experiences and link them to what’s going on in the present. We can also do research and go through historical records to see what was going on at the time and

This would turn our assumptions into facts, but maybe they can’t be 100 % accurate because records don’t always tell the truth and they might have been doctored by those with a vested interest like slave owners or governments. But if we assume that there was a famine and that

any psychological issue that we have with food today comes only from that famine, only from that event, then the assumption becomes really narrow and the margin of error gets really high. Because we can’t be 100 % sure that that’s what happened and that one cause is leading to one effect.

We might not realise that yes there was a famine and there was also food insecurity at home when we were three but we can’t necessarily remember it or link the two. And we also need to bring in diet culture and white beauty standards that can also affect issues around food and eating.

We might miss some really valuable information about what’s happening in our world if we pin everything that we have onto that assumption and think that’s the only truth that exists. So I guess what I’m trying to say is make assumptions work for you, keep them spacious and useful.

and be willing to question them as new information comes to light. Who knows you might need to re-evaluate things as the unknown becomes known.

Going back to this idea of uncertainty and tolerance, as we can’t get rid of it entirely, the best we can hope for is to increase our ability to hold ambiguity where possible. And that’s where studies show that if we can do that, it has a positive impact on our mental health.

It can reduce anxiety, depression and the intensity of PTSD symptoms as well as create a general sense of safety. I’m not talking about fully not caring about the unknown. I’m not sure that’s even possible. It’s more of an ability to hang out in that place for a few more seconds.

or take a breath sensing into the unknown for a few moments and then doing something else. It can also look like grieving what we don’t know about our ancestors and our family line or the missing knowledge that we have about our roots and our culture.

being able to be enraged about that because a lot of knowledge has been lost due to colonialism and imperialism and it’s okay we need to be angry about that. In the unknown there’s room to imagine what the past might have been like and that can also be generative and healing in and of itself.

and stepping into that imagination could reveal even more about who we are right now and that has immense value even if we don’t get to a place of certainty about anything else. So here we are, we made it to the end of the episode.

We started with this swampy murky water and ended with rage and dreaming so a true decolonial journey. It’s been a lot. Thank you for hanging in there. Talking about the unknown is really strange and this murky energy is a bit disorientating so

I’m really grateful that you’re here and that I have company in this place because sometimes being in community can be a really big balm to uncertainty intolerance. I’ll leave you with a quote which is that not all those who wander are lost. Enjoy your wandering.

If you’d like to learn more about intergenerational trauma, as well as decolonial and anti-oppressive ways to heal, check out blackpsychotherapy.org. We offer classes, programs and talking therapy for individuals, couples and groups. If you’d like journal prompts, decolonial musings and special discounts,

You can sign up to our newsletter via the link in the show notes, where you can also find a link to submit a question for me to answer in a future episode. I super look forward to connecting with you again and take care.ll begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.