Making Health Public

In a previous post, I discussed the intergenerational effects of violence and trauma, but today I’d like to dig a bit more into violence as a disease in communities. We often think of violence as something that one person does to another—and that is certainly accurate—but the individuals who commit that violence have often experienced it themselves. Like influenza spreads through a community from person-to-person, family-to-family, violence also spreads through the spaces we inhabit.

We model what we see and what we live and then pass on the love and pain we experience to others. Please be warned that some of what I’ll discuss may be upsetting or trigger memories of abuse that you may have suffered. Please be gentle with yourself.

My grandfather died yesterday. He was quite elderly and was battling an aggressive case of cancer, so his death was not unexpected, but it is painful all the same. We had known the end was near for several days and every time my father called I had expected it to be with the sad news. As a consequence, I have found myself feeling as though my grief were already all poured out and that I'm drowning under the weight of my guilt for being so stopped up. It reminds me a bit of the emotional equivalent of when I had appendicitis and, after days of agony, finally crawled to my bathroom consumed with the thought that I would feel better if I could just vomit. I don't expect that vomiting would do me much good this time, but I can't help think that I would feel so much better if I could just have a good cry.