We the BIPOC people can often feel small, isolated, and insignificant. Most of us, so far from the land of our ancestors; our skin color, features, and ways of being are called Different. Different is often seen as Dangerous. Years go by, generation after generation, we end up seeing our Difference as Dangerous, as Disease.
Hold the pain and witness our fragmented selves. Take a breath and look back. In truth, cultural pain reaches far back than our own individual lives. It is inherited from our parents, grandparents, ancestors who laughed, lived, cried, and bled on a different continent. It is really easy to blame others for the pain we feel we’re born into. But that doesn’t heal us.
We the children, of immigrants and refugees, must re-recognize the humanity in our stories. We do the work of taking the beaten and broken parts of our ancestral line and restore them by honoring ourselves in order to honor our ancestors.
Intergenerational and cultural trauma is insidious, and often actually looks like child abuse and neglect, narcissism, aggression, and abandonment. Our parents and caretakers were born into cultures that had been abused, defaced, and hence, forced to be cruel. These are cycles that have been perpetuated for as long as humans have experienced war and oppression.
Our generation are cycle breakers. I have found that only by expanding our compassion beyond what was shown to us, can we turn the tide. By choosing to love ourselves exactly as we are, we can subsequently learn how to love the parents and elders that have created internalized suppression within us. Going forward, we learn our personal and cultural histories. And we find that instead of suffering, we see bravery and courage in our ancestors that allowed for us descendants to even get this far. The more we learn about our ancestral stories, the more we learn about ourselves and the stronger we become.
