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Chapter Seven:
Writing & Talking in the Seven Generations: How Story Heals Family Heritage
This material is edited from a much longer chapter with hopes it will intrigue you to discover the fullness of the book, Storycatcher, Making Sense of our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story, by Christina Baldwin. Each chapter is carried by a tale about people, family, or community, intertwined with philosophical and practical instruction about the nature of story, how it works and how we can practice it in our lives. The Storycatcher reading group guidelines show the list of questions that appears at the end of each chapter.
In the larger scope of storycatching we are challenged to raise our attention from self-healing to explore how story might heal the families and communities and organizations we live within. In this chapter, we look at family lineage.
 ...
Kit Wilson: a Grandmother's Timely Voice
Sitting comfortably in her home in Phoenix, Arizona, a modest hacienda along one of the side streets of this sprawling desert metropolis, a wise and witty woman sips her daily indulgence of coffee and brings the perspective of seven decades to the question of family story.
"I remember exactly the moment I realized I was taking on the work of healing my life and family," she says. "It's a scene of such pain that I would do anything to not repeat it — and that 'anything' has turned out to be committing the rest of my life to growth and healing. Which hasn't been easy either, but is still more tolerable than waking up that Thanksgiving Day in 1971."
The woman pushes back wispy gray hair, adjusts a shawl around her shoulders and stares into the walled courtyard of her backyard. The surface of her swimming pool is adrift in puffs from the weeping acacia tree ... "Over the last twenty-five years, I have come to understand about the dark night of the soul, the process of death and rebirth that occurs within life. I have come to understand how these moments bring us, willingly or unwillingly, to the very core of life and to the very heart of our story. But that morning I did not have any wisdom or perspective. I threw the covers over my head, bit down hard on the pillow and bellowed my pain into the feather ticking. I was married, a mother of two teenagers; soon I would have to go downstairs to the kitchen and try to pull off a family occasion that I hoped would fall this side of disastrous...
 "My name is Kit W. and I am an alcoholic. The day after Thanksgiving in 1971, I entered treatment, and more importantly, I entered recovery. I come from a family of longtime drinkers and longtime sufferers. My grandfather was an alcoholic. My father was an alcoholic. One of my grandsons is an alcoholic. This is only one aspect of our family lineage, but it's a defining intergenerational pattern for those of us who have taken directly to drink, and those who have watched, endured, and enabled. From where I sit, thirty-plus years sober, a woman in my late seventies, I can see three generations back, and two generations forward: I am writing and talking my story midstream in the generations."
...
When something exists in a family that is not discussed it goes into what Carl Jung termed, "the shadow," the unacknowledged aspects of the self. This is true individually, and also collectively — whether the collective is the family or society. In the vernacular of Alcoholics Anonymous, the shadow is called "the elephant in the living room." Everyone knows that something is wrong, but no one speaks it. Everyone accommodates the presence of what is unspoken and verbally talks around that territory, avoiding it as though there really is an elephant in the living room.
... Kit is a psychotherapist ... what still fascinates her is evidence that the work of healing has a collective impact beyond the single person who comes in the door.
"People come into therapy on behalf of others as well as on their own behalf," she says. "They may not know this for a long time and may even be resistant to the idea. Often people come to see me because they are mad at somebody. They feel wronged or misunderstood. They want someone to listen to their view about, say, their relationship with a partner or parent. They don't want me to immediately take that person's side. Part of my job as an educated and empathetic listener is to encourage their story to emerge and emerge until they can begin to see it in a multifaceted way. The day I can ask, 'What do you think was going on for so-and-so in that moment?' and they follow the question without defensiveness, is the day I begin to see the family heal. I would not have understood this about my clients if I had not already done that work in myself."
If we step up to the challenge of healing the family story, we need to be grounded in the healing of our personal story. We start there, standing firm in our own life experience and the person we have become through linking, editing, disorienting, and revisioning our personal story. This is the psychological and spiritual foundation required to head into family history. ...This intergenerational insight occurred for Kit around the emerging story of alcoholism in her lineage.
...
"I don't remember ever seeing Pop, my mother's father, drinking, or being aware that he was drunk. But he only gave up drinking when he was 89 and then after 12 years of sobriety started up again at 101 — and died 6 months later. So, he must have been drinking all that while. As a child, I never thought of either my grandfather or father as being alcoholics; we didn't even know the word. What I remember about those Sundays are Pop's arms around me helping me push the old-fashioned lawn mower and teaching me how to graft apples onto a tree trunk so skillfully that we had one tree that produced six different varieties of fruit. ... To me, he was quite wonderful, but the adult stories of him are terrifying.
 "What my father did alone on all those Sundays, when we were with my mother's family, I have no idea. Maybe he drank. My father's alcoholism was pretty invisible to me. He didn't drink at home because my mother wouldn't let him. He may have drunk when we weren't there, but during the week he would stay out late, miss supper and come home drunk, have a terrible fight with my mother, and go to bed. I didn't understand the role booze played in this. And I had no one to talk to, not even a cousin with whom to compare notes. Like most kids, whatever was happening to me, well, I thought that was the norm.
...
The particulars of Kit's tale have a universal quality when we see her story as illustrative of how any repetitive pattern inserts itself into a family heritage. A young woman grows up with a father who drinks and rages; she marries a man to escape this scene but discovers that he also drinks and rages, so she inserts a corrective action: he cannot drink at home. Surely he will choose her, surely he will choose their child, surely he will choose to stay home. But the man stays away from home to assert his independence — and to drink. The woman grows depressed, bitter, projects her sense of entrapment onto their only child. The child grows swiftly independent and withdraws from the family as quickly as possible, determined to make her own way in the world. She marries a man to escape the situation. She misses and loves her father. She starts to drink.
...
 We were far from the beginning of this story when we entered the world, and it will be far from over when we leave. This has always been true, but ordinary people have not had to be aware of the immensity of life in the ways we are made aware today. Noticing where we stand in the middle of the generations places us in time with a sense of continuum and gives us a way to see time proceeding before we were born and after we die. Noticing that we stand in the middle of the generations gives us a way to make story out of how we got here — both in a small life and a big life sense — and to lay out tracks of story for where we might go. We who become the Storycatchers, who become the chroniclers, the journal writers, the interviewers, the listeners, the gatherers of tales, contribute to our families and to the human family through the work of healing story.
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Tell Me This Story: Your Opportunity to
Share Your Story
Story can help us understand, forgive, and heal family heritage. Storycatchers have a responsibility to make family stories conscious, creating a space in which family truth can be spoken and heard with compassion and a commitment to preservation.
What do you hope your family will remember about you?
Let's start there.
Tell me that story.
Click here to respond to this question with a story from your own life >>
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