Some families carry secrets so dark they shape the air in every room. Mine did.
We had a terrorist in our family. Not in the political sense—but in the truest sense of the word: someone who used extreme fear, violence, and control to dominate others. He was a predator in every way imaginable and a violent alcoholic. He traumatized three generations—from his wife to his children, his grandchildren, and even extended family.
The horror he inflicted was relentless. What I saw as a child wasn’t just dysfunction—it was devastation. A long shadow that fell over us all, even the ones who only knew the stories. As an adult, I can see how our family was shaped by fear, addiction, and emotional fragmentation. Even when things were “good,” you could feel it—something tight in the air, the weight of tension when he was near.
Eventually, his body gave out—his legs stopped working, his threats became less dangerous, and he died of esophageal cancer. But the damage was done.
And in all of it—there was her.
My Grandmother: The Love That Held Us Together
My grandmother was the only reason we ever stepped foot in that house. She was the most loving, generous woman I’ve ever known. A quiet pillar in a collapsed home.
She didn’t speak English well, which made her world small. She couldn’t easily advocate for herself. She was a strict Catholic, raised with the belief that she would go to hell for standing up to her husband. She was deeply afraid for my soul because I hadn’t been baptized.
But her love was expansive. She cooked from morning to night, filling the home with the smell of stews and pastries and fried cod. She fed us far too much and then sent us home with even more. Her food was more than nourishment—it was her love language, the safety we knew inside those walls.
As a child, I remember watching her come out of the liquor store with a jug of cheap red wine so many times and wondering why she was still enabling him? Or perhaps more honestly, why she was keeping him fed, drunk, and alive?
Before she died, she told me she regretted everything. Through her accent, she asked, “Why he pank my sons?” I didn’t understand at first—pank? And then I understood. She was saying punch. Her question was a gut shot, full of sorrow and confusion, decades too late. She was hit with the guilt of staying. Of not protecting. Of letting it happen.
The Weight of Silence: Women Who Stayed
I often wonder: how much responsibility belongs to the women who stayed with abusers to the detriment of their children’s wellbeing?
It’s easy to make excuses—It was a different time. No one would have believed her. She was financially dependent. She was afraid. All of it may be true. But you still wonder why no one opened the door and ran?
I know I would never allow my kids to be near someone like that, let alone live with them. I wouldn’t even let them breathe the same air as an abuser like him.
So why did the women who were supposed to protect us… not?
Codependency was strong in my grandmother. She stayed “for the family.” For the narcissist. For the church. For survival. It’s a complicated legacy, and one I still don’t fully understand. I just know it left scars. On all of us. And that’s enough for me.
The Inheritance of Trauma
In the fallout, our family is marked by PTSD, complex PTSD, anxiety, depression, to mention only the most prevalent. On paper, the abuse is more than enough to explain it.
But I feel it goes deeper. I believe it lives in our DNA.
Consider this study on rats that found that rats exposed to trauma passed it down to fourteen generations. Fourteen. Their descendants, who had never experienced the trauma directly, still showed heightened stress responses to the same stimuli. Their biology was changed by a history they never lived. Their cycle of abuse wasn’t even perpetuated through them directly – they were simply born with the fear.
I see it in my own children. They are being raised in safety and love. We talk openly. We nurture them. And still—they struggle with anxiety, emotional regulation, fears that seem unrooted.
Maybe they’re not unrooted. Maybe it’s ancestral. Maybe it’s their bodies remembering what I’ve only just begun to name.
Breaking the Cycle of Abuse
Breaking the cycle of abuse is not a single act. It’s not one brave decision. It’s not just walking away or going no contact or going to therapy or calling things what they are. It’s all of those things—again and again. It’s slow. It’s messy. It’s exhausting. And it’s a daily reckoning.
It’s learning how to parent differently while fighting the echoes of what was modeled for you.
It’s setting boundaries with people who raised you.
It’s choosing softness when your body is screaming to armor up and fight like hell.
It’s telling your truth even when it fractures the silence that your family has so desperately held.
It’s feeding your children the same food your grandmother made, but in a home filled with safety and laughter instead of tension and fear.
Breaking the cycle of abuse means facing the truth of what you came from and deciding—intentionally, daily—not to repeat it. It means understanding that you may still carry the trauma in your bones, but you do not have to pass it on. You are allowed to be the beginning of something new.
And it’s hard. It can feel lonely. There’s grief in it. There’s guilt. There’s anger at the people who didn’t do what you’re doing now. But there’s also pride. And relief. And love—the kind that builds instead of breaks.
This work—this reconstruction of self and story – is the quiet, radical undoing of generational harm. It is resistance through nurture. Revolution through repair.
