Generational Trauma Stops Here

My parents loved me. I believe that completely.

They also hurt me. I believe that completely too.

These two things are not contradictions. They are the definition of generational trauma: pain that moves from one body to the next, not because the people carrying it are cruel, but because they never had the language or the tools to put it down. My mother was beaten as a child. My father grew up performing for a grandfather who measured love in achievements and money. Neither of them ever sat with a therapist. Neither of them ever heard the words “that was not your fault.” So they did to me what had been done to them, imperfectly and with love, and I spent four decades unpacking it.

I have a daughter now. She is eighteen months old. She is, without question, the most important thing in my life — the reason everything else I am doing has to succeed, and the reason I cannot afford to pretend I have not inherited something I need to put down.

Here is what I mean by breaking the cycle, in concrete terms, because I am tired of reading abstract things about generational trauma that do not tell you what to actually do:

I name my emotions out loud. When I am anxious, I say “I am anxious right now.” Not to burden her — she is a baby, she does not understand — but to rewire myself, because I grew up in a house where emotion had no name and no space.

I apologise when I am wrong. No adult in my childhood ever said sorry to me — not for the big things, not for the small ones. An apology requires you to believe the other person’s experience is real.

I protect my own health like it is her future. Because it is. My stability is her emotional baseline. When I manage my condition well, she gets the version of me who can be present.

I am in therapy. I say this without shame. My father would have said it was weakness. I say: the conversation I am having now is the one they never had, and it stops here.

None of this is finished. I am still in it. But my daughter will grow up knowing that her father looked at the thing he inherited, called it by its real name, and chose to stop.

That is the only legacy worth building.

Sourov Deb is a writer and educator in La Réunion. He is a father, a trauma survivor, and a work in progress.