Youth Voices Rising New York Op-Ed Contest 2024 — Second Place.
The women in my family have been experiencing trauma for centuries. We have a long history of domestic, racial, and physical violence without ever having the mental resources to heal. We inherit our families’ behavior, emotions, and environmental responses because of epigenetics. So, the child welfare system should focus on addressing generational trauma with children and families if they want to protect, heal, and serve them.
Generational trauma, also known as transgenerational, intergenerational, and multi-generational trauma, are trauma responses passed down from our ancestral lineages mentally, behaviorally, emotionally, and biologically. Epigenetics tells us that our family’s traumatic experiences alter how genes are expressed throughout generations.
My dad’s family is from Liberia. Liberia had an extremely long civil war, so during the late ‘70s, my grandma came to America. During that time, the war on drugs was taking place in America, and this deeply impacted my family. My grandma fell victim to drugs, and my dad ended up in foster care, living in group homes and shelters. When he met my mom, he lived in a shelter, and they both became teen parents.
They had an extremely toxic relationship because raising two kids alone as young as they were with all they’d endured wasn’t easy. My father was incarcerated when I was 4 years old. My mother was incarcerated when I was 14 for taking her abuser’s life after my sister and I already spent a year in foster care. I was diagnosed at 15 with depression and anxiety. Year after year, I received different diagnoses while being in care that didn’t encapsulate any of my experiences or my family’s experiences.
The only resource I was given was talk therapy with a therapist who did nothing but stare at me and ask the most generic question after 10 minutes of silence: “How are you doing?” As a traumatized teen with her guard up, I gave the generic response back: “I’m fine.” The next 50 minutes of our session was nothing but empty silence. I wasn’t surprised at the disconnect between me and a white woman in her 50s.
I never even received a proper psychological evaluation, and when I did, I was thrown into psych wards and medicated. I never had a therapist who looked like me. Even though I had all these mental battles, I was never a therapeutic foster child. I developed poor coping mechanisms and poor “support” systems, suffering in silence.
A system that’s supposed to help only ignored my pain and stereotyped it along with my mother’s pain. If only my mother received proper care — culturally responsive community-based care — our family might have been mended. My mother wasn’t working, and they made her travel to Brooklyn from Queens for programs instead of trying to create tailored support that considered her experiences and childhood. Without the proper help, she never healed from her trauma and what she experienced as a child, and that took a toll on the relationships that could have been between my siblings and her.
Why didn’t they address her with curiosity and empathy instead of throwing the labels of abuse and neglect onto her? How can the system prevent something that it can’t see or choose to ignore? And how can it prevent something that’s already happened? Prevention shouldn’t be at the center. Community, healing, empathy, and love should be. We need people who can pick up on the signs that are past the surface and address them with compassion. We need people you can see yourself in and people who offer proper resources, not just things that allow them to check the tasks off their to-do lists for work.
Once you’re 18, everyone sees you as an adult, but you haven’t worked through any of your trauma, you’re emotionally irregulated, and you’re secretly suffering from substance abuse. That was my experience along with some of my peers’ experiences. I got my own apartment at 20 and deteriorated mentally because I wasn’t prepared to live alone. I wasn’t comfortable in bed for months, so I slept on the couch. Then, my body still didn’t understand that my home was safe, so I would never leave my room. If a youth has an independent living plan, you should be doing more than just hygiene workshops and making them apply for SNAP. They should be getting educated on how to build credit, fill out tax forms, alternative mental health resources, using transferable skills, types of health insurance, etc. They push employment and public housing on you so much, but what about my sanity, my mental peace, and my hurting heart?
How much advocacy and talks with policymakers should be had before we are truly considered and not seen as numbers and data? I know policy change is a slow process, but my mentor once said, “We can look at the data all we want, but all it does is perpetuate fragility and dehumanize us and our cultural nuances.” Present day, my mom refuses therapy or any type of mental health services. But, just because the system ignored her and me for years doesn’t mean I had to ignore myself. I’ve done a lot of self-healing. I realized that we don’t need to be “saved,” and eggshells don’t need to be walked on. We need to be considered as individuals with unique experiences.
The Family First Prevention Act wasn’t passed until 2018, five years after I was already in care. I sometimes think about how the system not only stripped me away from my family but also wasn’t culturally responsive and actually didn’t tend to me and my mother’s mental needs. The impacts of domestic violence, poverty, and parental incarceration are extremely nuanced experiences that shouldn’t be handled with talk therapy but with specific therapeutic treatment plans. A majority of youth in care are people of color, but I never saw a therapist of color ever working at my agency. A culturally responsive space will include generational healing, and I hope to see more of it in the future.
I’m four years aged out of the system, and I do advocacy work with children of incarcerated parents and for youth in the child welfare system. I also recently launched my own mental health business centering Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) voices. I’m offering them community support, one-on-one support, a resource library, and complementary and alternative methods of dealing with mental health. I’m in school studying Ayurvedic wellness and integrative health because we are misdiagnosed, underdiagnosed, lacking healthcare or the funds to cover medication, and isolated from our roots with minimal spaces to heal as a collective.
I’d like to bring my community back to its roots of the land and cultivate a village focused on healing. That’s what my business, Whole Care Wellness, is for me. This is just a fragment of my story. Although generational trauma almost took my life, I fought back, long and hard, to not drown in the seas of the pain it has done to my family.
Original article found here:
Comments (0)