Family Trauma Triumph

© Beverly Hubble Tauke, Author
Healing Your Family Tree
http://www.beverlytauke.com/

BRAIN TEASER #2 ~ See end of this column


As has been said, the boy is father to the man. The girl is also mother to the woman. Early history hardwires our systems. Thank God, minds, hearts and relationships can also be retrofitted.

So it was for physically and emotionally abused Abraham Lincoln.

Thomas Lincoln raised motherless Abe and his sister in squalor—in a forest shack without proper doors, windows or roof. Expressing bitter disdain for his son, the elder Lincoln beat knowledge-hungry Abe for the offense of sticking his nose in books.

What’s with Thomas? Why was he such a tyrant?

Thomas was himself a trauma survivor whose father had been killed by Indians. From the age of eight, Thomas roamed rural Kentucky as a child laborer. A product of illiteracy, poverty and rootlessness, Thomas sucked his son into his own misery.

While abusers tend to produce abusers, some victims emerge from early abuse with super-sensitive radar for others’ emotional trauma, as Daniel Goleman notes in Emotional Intelligence. Perhaps that’s why Abe’s sons created chaos in the White House. Their dad could not bear to discipline—as severe punishment had so deeply embittered Abe that he severed himself from his birth family, including a step-mother who loved him dearly.

But Abe’s high-gear oppression radar may also explain why he had eyes to see and ears to hear the agony of slaves, and was compelled to act. Peer beneath the skin of many liberators and find an oppression-soaked soul. Think Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela.

Such ability to pry triumph from trauma is a prime trait of those who soar out of suffering, as the legendary phoenix rose from ashes. Viktor Frankl, survivor of four Nazi death camps, saw such trauma-transformation as the key to life itself for those who shared his death-defying journey.

Old Testament political superstar Joseph demonstrates mind and heart healing secrets for other trauma survivors. Sold into slavery by his own brothers and framed into prison, he refused to whitewash family treachery. But he also celebrated his good grief, grateful that the very acts “meant for evil” by his brothers were used by God to catapult him into astonishing power (Genesis 41:51-52; 50:20).

What old wounds infused character, wisdom, resilience, and strength into the core of each of us, enlarging both potential and opportunities? As Joseph showed, answers to that question can dramatically revise autobiographical memory. But answers also reveal intriguing clues to God’s choreography of our lives--even at the darkest moments.

BRAIN TEASER #2
As Father’s Day 2007 nears, what U.S. Presidents were raised without birth fathers? Which ones were raised by alcoholic father figures? See the next blog.