I am the child of FIlipino immigrants and I grew up in my parents’ store, one of the first Filipino grocery store chains in Texas, helping around to the best of my ability from the ages of 4 (no I didn’t actually do any work when I was 4) to 14, when my parents lost their store in 2009 in the middle of the Great Recession.
At that point, my mother began her long stint as a unit secretary at several local hospitals, usually working over 60 hours a week until a few years ago.
But of course, more economic tragedy struck for our family.
A federal bankruptcy court sided with a giant bank (per usual in these United States) and we were unhoused for a few days as a result of the court taking away our house and, thus, my parents’ entire financial life in this nation was wiped out.
And we had to start over.
Even though we found an apartment, the trauma of this episode, naturally, lingered.
Generational trauma and my father
My father would become emotionally abusive towards me because, after all, I was the college-aged 25 year old who didn’t have a job.
He would tell me about how much “smarter” he was than me just because I told him that I needed to see a doctor for what would eventually be found to be an extreme case of rhinosinusitis.
He would blame me for not having a job and rationalize that as the reason for why we lost our house as, just a few years prior, I told him that I wanted to finish my degree and we had a spat at a local grocery store parking lot because he refused to accept that I would no longer be bringing in money for the family for that period of time.
And then, despite graduating with my perfect little GPA, he would constantly denigrate the hard work that I placed into my degree program by letting me know that I got a useless degree just because it wasn’t in business or healthcare.
(FYI: Yes, it was a degree in Liberal Studies, but literally any other degree would have been a waste of time for me since I actually got to study what I wanted to learn since I was able to minor in Business, Political Science, and Art).
The next time that he would be proud of me was when I stepped up as the main breadwinner of the family when I was finally given an opportunity to work two years later. This was in the middle of the pandemic and, at the time, my father had been in the Philippines to try (and fail) at beginning a business venture.
So he came back to the US.
And he has mellowed out over the years, but that intense period of trauma will live with me, and likely contributed to my CPTSD diagnosis that I would get just last year.
But, of course, I found out that he had generational trauma of his own. What I already knew was that his father was a local politician and a physically abusive alcoholic and chronic gambler. These are things that most of our family avoid as a result.
His elder brother, however, would abuse him when he moved to Manila to attend college and live with him.
His brother, my uncle who I thought was a good man from the little time that I spent with him when I was six years of age, would physically and emotionally abuse him, withhold food from him, lock him out of the house when he didn’t make curfew, and essentially cut him out of his inheritance (something that he is currently fighting at the age of 70).
And, unfortunately, these impacts led to emotional abuse and denigration against my elder siblings and I, as well. And, despite having my own trauma, I have helped him realize how his experiences resulted in generational trauma and that this is why my elder siblings are hesitant to have contact with him.
He does his best, but of course I’m still hard on him.
Trauma doesn’t just disappear overnight, especially when a loved one was your abuser and when you financially support him and your mother.
And who knows what trauma my ancestors had and held on to. Being from the CALABARZON region of the island of Luzon meant that I directly descend from people who went through some of the worst humanitarian crises in history, including Spanish colonization, the British occupation, and especially the Philippine-American war and the Imperial Japanese occupation of World War II which, both, unalived at least a million Filipinos in that very region.
Unresolved generational trauma, unfortunately, creates patterns of normalized abuse that will not end until we make a concerted effort.
Fornesus, the Observer 
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