Legacies are passed on from one generation to the next. Too often they are remnants from a past with origins too old for us to ask questions of – and so instead, we speculate, mythologize, rationalize, explain with our best guesses how these legacies originated. Sometimes legacies are passed on with intention. Other times legacies are passed on without consideration, without consciousness. Most often legacies are associated with ideas and concepts of honor, tradition, and respect. However, there are other types of legacies – ones less spoken of – ones that have their origins filled with pain, oppression, and shame. Legacies are powerful. They inform our thinking, our actions, our beliefs. They have a way of resurrecting past
storylines into present day context. And more times than not, legacies are passed on because there seems to be no option, because those who pass down the legacy to the next generation don’t know of any alternatives.
Far too many of us carry a burdensome legacy of pain in our hearts and our souls. Legacies that were handed down to us without our asking. Legacies that came to us in different forms – that were delivered to us in different ways. When, as children, the people who were supposed to protect us, instead hurt us, pained us, violated us, and made us afraid. When the people who were supposed to love us, instead found ways to make us feel dispensable, as if we were nobodies and nothings. When the people who were supposed to nurture our confidence, instead made us doubt our abilities, our thinking, every aspect of ourselves. When the people who were supposed to be there for us, instead were never available, were inaccessible, or disappeared from our lives. For too many of us this is the legacy of pain we carry in our hearts and spirits.
And so here lies the question, “How do we stop perpetuating these legacies?” How do we stop the lineage of these painful strategies? How do we give ourselves permission to acknowledge that we have both a right and a responsibility to move away from such legacies – to move away from these strategies of pain?
For too many of us, as heirs to painful legacies, we have found ourselves unwittingly adopting and utilizing painful strategies against others – continuing, as adults, to hand down the legacy that was put upon us when we were younger. To our own dismay, we sometimes find ourselves perpetuating the lineage of pain against those we love, bringing back to life through our actions the pain we endured as children. We resurrect the heavy burdens that we thought remained dormant in our hearts – we reenact deeply embedded experiences of trauma and shame. And through our reenactments of painful strategies, we become confronted with the reality that our hurtful actions too closely resemble the damaging strategies that were executed against us when we were young. We become confronted with the shameful reality that the hurtful, biting, spiteful, damning, degrading words that flash from our mouths in moments of rage are echoes of the same painful messages that struck our ears and souls as children. We become confronted with the shameful reality that our own hands and our own fists too closely resemble the hands and fists of those who pained our bodies and scarred our memories.
And then there are those of us who, despite not being hurtful to others, perpetuate the painful legacies we’ve inherited through our quiet servitude to the debilitating false messages we received as children. We silently and instinctively honor false proclamations which exploit our fears and our feelings of our own inabilities,
illegitimacies, and worthlessness. For some of us, we continue to make space for and nurture devastating false assumptions about ourselves that were born and delivered out of someone else’s ignorance, petulance, barbarism, savagery, and cruelty. We stay entrenched in debilitating inaccurate self-perceptions that we are unworthy and incapable – undeserving of joy, peace, love. We unintentionally resign to the hurtful prophecies that we are nothing, that we will be nothing, and that we will fail at everything we do. And so we settle for far too little. We convince ourselves that aspirations, dreams, and hopes belong to another class of people. We convince ourselves that our experiences of oppression in our work, our communities, our relationships is our fate, our destiny, our blight. We convince ourselves that our only choice is to accept the pernicious
dissatisfactions that stagnate in our hearts with stoicism, indifference, impassivity – and we re-label this acceptance as “honor.” We convince ourselves that because joy, peace, and love, will always be beyond our grasp, we will do what we can to nurture joy, peace, and love for others – (because if we can’t achieve these states-of-being for ourselves, then maybe we can at least create opportunities for others to experience these states-of-being). And so we toil and work arduously to uplift, empower, liberate, and heal others at the expense of our own innate right to experience our own empowerment, liberation, and healing. We convince ourselves (while we do our best to graciously serve the world we live in) to stay locked into painful myths which suggest that we will never experience the sort of love, validation, witnessing that we all innately deserve as human beings.
This strategy is not only killing our spirits and our souls, and our hopes for life affirming love – this strategy of pain against ourselves is modeling for the children in our lives that they too should learn to move through the world settling for too little. This painful strategy is showing children, that in their own lives, they should settle for too little in their own work, their own communities, their own relationships, their own lives. These subtle ways that we perpetuate painful legacies leave the children who witness us with the heartbreaking task of one day having to confront their painful observations of us:
- “Growing up, the adults in my life were always so sad – I always wished I could have seen them happier – I always wished there was something I could have done for them.”
And this too is how we perpetuate painful legacies and lineages of hurt.
As heirs to hurtful legacies, when we discover and are confronted with our own strategic use of pain against those we love and against ourselves, can we learn to give ourselves permission to stop honoring a lineage that perpetuates hurt and suffering? Can we give ourselves permission to stop preserving a legacy that damages and maims ourselves and those around us, those in our communities, those we love? Can we give ourselves permission to finally grieve our hurts, our vulnerabilities, our pain, our isolation, our fears, our shame? Can we give ourselves permission to heal, to ask for support, to ask for forgiveness, to ask for help?
Giving ourselves permission to ask for these things aligns us with our rights and responsibilities to move away from painful legacies. Because, despite the myriads of ways we were made to experience ourselves as worthless and unlovable, we have a right and a responsibility to receive love and give love in healthy meaningful ways – for ourselves and for those we love.
