UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello friends. My name is Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Nicole Russell-Wharton. Nicole is a certified trauma-informed healing instructor, a bestselling author, and an advocate for mental health, human rights, and the well-being of children. She’s the cofounder and executive director of the Precious Dreams Foundation, which is a global nonprofit that helps youth in foster care and homeless shelters uncover their paths to realizing their dreams. Nicole wrote a bestselling young-adult self-help book called Everything a Band-Aid Can’t Fix, and she’s now releasing, with Sounds True, a new book. It’s a book that takes us on a journey of deep inner-work healing, inherited trauma, and disrupting unhealthy family patterns. It’s called Breaking Generational Silence. Nicole, welcome.
Nicole Russell-Wharton: Hi, Tami, thanks for having me.
TS: Right here at the beginning. I want to congratulate you on your own deep archeological journey. That’s what it feels like reading, Breaking Generational Silence, and you write towards the beginning of the book that committing to writing this book and completing it for you felt like an act of resistance, and I wanted to hear more about that and inner call the drive to write Breaking Generational Silence.
NRW: Yeah, when I think about the act of resistance, I think that thought often came up because I was asking myself, why am I the first? Why hasn’t anyone had these conversations before me? Why is everyone so uncomfortable with the truth? Why have so many people in my family felt like their voices didn’t matter? And so I was processing all of that as I was also trying to reveal the truth and not only help myself heal, but help my family heal. I was trying to figure out why did you feel as though you couldn’t speak? There were questions that I asked my parents and they were sharing things with me for the first time. They had never shared with anyone else. And after I got to the truth, I had to ask why. And as I was unpacking that for not just my parents but for other family members and then eventually friends in my community, I really started to learn that there’s so many systems put in place to suppress people and there were not enough tools and there was not enough mental health support to help people understand stand our differences. And so we were told we were taught these false beliefs that something is wrong with us, that something is wrong with our children, that if we complain it is wrong, that if we talk about painful experiences, were harming others instead of setting ourselves free. And so doing that work simply storytelling felt like such an act of resistance because I was recognizing that for generations no one else had done it.
TS: Storytelling, yes, but what I would say is multi-generation Olympic looking storytelling. And what I mean by Olympic looking is that you through yourself with such determination to understand what people in your family line experienced one generation back, two generation 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. And I want to get more of a sense of how you went about this.
NRW: Yeah, this book is broken up into three sections. The first section is about my mother, second is about my father and his lineage, and the third is about myself. And I put the book in that order because what I realized is that in order to fully understand myself, I needed to understand my genetic makeup. And in order to understand my genetic makeup, I needed to understand the experiences that had been passed on for generations. I needed to understand that I was carrying the cells of my ancestors, people that I would never meet, and I needed to understand what they had been through and what they had passed down.
In order to understand myself, I needed to understand my parents. In order to understand my parents’ behaviors, I needed to understand their childhood. I needed to understand where they came from and what they were taught. And so I think it was opening up a can of worms and you open it up and I was willing to pick everything out of that can until I got as far down as I possibly could because I want to be able to pass that down to my children, to my nieces and nephews, to future generations so that we can equip them with what they need to have a proper start in life so that they are not looking back, trying to figure it out at late age or after the health issues have occurred or after the relationships feel unrepairable. I wanted people to, in my family in particular and with this book, I wanted others to be able to have a fair start and understanding of what they were carrying. And so I wanted deeply desired to look as far back as possible,
TS: This notion of generational silence. I had never heard that term before. Picking up this book. Can you share where that term comes from?
NRW: Absolutely. Yeah. So it is a term that is often used by sociologists and psychologists. It refers to generations of suppressed thought on avoiding communication for at least two generations. If there is at least two generations of this poor communication happening, it can be referred to as generational silence. And so you hear generational trauma, you hear it’s generational poverty, and you hear about all of these issues that we are trying to fix. And the one that impacted me the most happened to be the silence. So that’s really how I came up with the title of this book. It was very easy. I needed to break the generational silence within my own family.
TS: Tell me more about that, how it was the silence that impacted you the most.
NRW: Yes, so I’ll go deep. We’ve started deep, let’s go for, I had a near death experience. Experience, just a little bit more background. So I have been doing the work to support young people and children to support them with their mental health in my career. So for a living, I was helping people be well mastered, the ability to self comfort and to cope. And so it was something I thought that I personally had a good handle on until I had this near death experience. My lungs, my right lung suddenly collapsed and it was something I had never experienced before. I had no idea what was happening. I just knew that I couldn’t breathe.
And it took quite a while for me to figure out why. And when I did, I learned in a hospital that I had something called thoracic endometriosis, and endometriosis is something that is often passed down in the family. And so I had never heard of endometriosis before, let alone thoracic endometriosis. And so I was having a really difficult conversation at the doctor’s office, something I think we can all relate to where they were running through their checklist of questions and they said, do you have any heart issues in your family? Do you have any this and that? And they said, does anyone in your family have endometriosis? And I said, I don’t think so. I’ve never heard of this before. This is the first time I’m hearing of this.
And so I dealt with my reality in that moment. I needed surgery, it took some time to heal, and as I was healing and teaching my parents who also had never heard of endometriosis, they started to open up about symptoms that I had that they had seen in others. And then I learned very quickly that there’s endometriosis on both sides of my family and it’s something that many of the women were ashamed of and felt the need to hide. And so having these symptoms all of my life, I could have done something about it sooner, but I didn’t because I had no idea that I was born with this. I was born with this illness that allows for the tissue that is similar to uterine tissue to grow in other places. And so as this tissue spreads, it can cause pain, it can cause irregular menstrual cycles and it can cause infertility, and one in nine women have endometriosis.
And I knew nothing about it until I was in the hospital because I only had one good lung. So there was a lot of, I think, sadness and confusion that I was processing when I began to have these conversations with family. And as I became aware that health conversations were not common at all on both sides of my family, it almost turned to anger and then motivation because I didn’t want anyone else to suffer the way that I did, and I didn’t think anyone else deserved to go through that. If they were aware and if they knew the symptoms, then they could be proactive and they could take the preventative measures to take of themselves. So that was really the motivation for me.
TS: It sounds like it wasn’t just that people were silent about endometriosis, it’s that they didn’t know they were ignorant. Is that true or is there more to it?
NRW: Yeah, so there’s more to it. On my mother’s side, I learned that my grandmother was never diagnosed, which is also common. Six out of 10 women are misdiagnosed, so she had all of the symptoms of endometriosis. She dealt with miscarriages and infertility. She suffered from really bad menstrual cycles and cramps. She was never diagnosed with endometriosis, and she passed away before I was diagnosed, so I couldn’t have the conversation with her about it. On my father’s side, there were women who had an endometriosis diagnosis and felt a sense of shame and chose not to speak about it, which in some ways I can understand.
I can understand when you find out that there is a challenge, sometimes you are so overwhelmed, you are almost dealing with emotional flooding in a sense of everything feels like it’s crashing down at one time. And so perhaps for those women, they felt the need to just go into survival mode. And so their first thought was not let me reach out to the other women in the family and start having conversations about this. Their initial thoughts could have been, let me figure out how to take care of myself. Let me figure out how to survive this. But when you learn that what you are carrying is something that can run in the family, I think that it is our duty really to share. I feel it’s an obligation to share, to protect our loved ones. There’s no better way to love someone than to say, did you know that this one’s in the family? You should keep an eye out for it. It’s like setting each other up for success in a way.
TS: What did you do with your anger that this information wasn’t shared with you? How did you work through that if you have?
NRW: I went to therapy. I went to therapy and I cried and I cried and I cried and I wrote, I actually started writing this book, this book, this book didn’t start with the concept of I’m going through this. Let me share it with the world. This concept was a journal. It started with a journal entry. My therapist said, how much are you documenting of these conversations? And after each conversation they would ask, and how did it make you feel when you found that out? And there was so much that I was processing. I was processing so much from every conversation, every text message, every face-to-face interaction where I was learning so much about the pain and the trauma that my family had faced that I needed to find ways to cope with it. And so I was journaling and I didn’t know at the time, but those entries, the writing was healing me.
And it turned into this book where I decided I don’t want to just do this for my family. I want to be able to guide other people. I want to inspire other people to pick up the phone before it’s too late. I wish I could call my grandmother. I wish I could ask her questions. I wish I could tell her about endometriosis and say, you know what? This is probably what it was, and I’m so sorry that you suffered for so long with no answers and you were experimented on and you were trying all of these different medications and nothing worked. I wish I could have that conversation with her, but I can’t. And so if I can inspire people to just pick up the phone and talk to their elders and talk to their family that is here while they can, and that’s healing for me too.
TS: I want to ask you, Nicole, and to take it slowly here, but to talk about the transformational process, if you will, from your point of view. And what I mean by that is here you found out about all kinds of deep painful experiences that your mom went through that your father went through, and then their parents and their parents and great great grandparents all the way back to slavery and even before that. And you’re connecting with that inherited trauma, you’re touching it, you’re knowing the stories. And I think for some of us, when we enter that process, we connect to the pain, but the transformation part, we’re not quite sure how to do that successfully ourselves. And we get stuck instead in feeling like we’ve in inherited all of this pain that’s in our cells. What are we going to do now? How do we become these healing agents? And that’s what I want to hear. I mean, of course there’s no, here’s your recipe, 1, 2, 3. It’s not like that, but tell me about the alchemy in you.
NRW: Yeah, I learned that we all have the capacity, we all have a different capacity to manage trauma, and it was something I had always felt confident that I had a really strong grasp on. In some ways, I felt I had mastered the ability to self comfort. I knew what I needed, I knew how to set the tone for a good day. I knew how to set boundaries. I had my go-to tools for coping. I knew how to manage my own trauma in the present pretty well. I didn’t know how to manage the trauma of all of the information that I had taken, and it got really heavy for me, which is why I had to rely on more therapy than I had ever done before.
But what was healing and what was helpful was recognizing that simply having conversation was helping some of my family members heal. And I was seeing my mother come alive in a way that she had never done before. I was able to see my mom blossom into this new person through this journey my mother shared, it’s so crazy and I’ll share the backstory at some point, but my mother and I started this nonprofit, which is my full-time work. It’s called the Precious Dreams Foundation, and we support young people that have navigated the foster care system or those who are experiencing homelessness. And so our inspiration for starting this nonprofit was always this little girl that my mother took in at a very young age, and it was the first time I ever learned about the foster care system, and I was so inspired by her and I wanted to help more kids like her, and I had always just thought, my mom wants to help these kids because she is very empathetic and she has a big heart, and so this is why we’re going to do this. We care deeply. I didn’t learn until about a year and a half ago that my mom experienced homelessness as a child, and it was something that my grandmother told her to never tell a soul. Even when my mother was dating my father in her teen years, she didn’t tell him that they were unhoused, that she was couch surfing.
She was sworn to secrecy. And so when my mother shared that with me, it was like seeing the biggest weight lifted from her shoulders, and I was able to help my mom process why she thought it was so wrong that she had experienced homelessness. I helped her understand every child, every family, every person that we’re helping, it could be any of us. Many people are one paycheck away from becoming homeless. Things happen all of the time. And so it’s not something to live with thinking that something is wrong with you or thinking that something was wrong with your mother or that she was a bad mother because in no way was she a terrible mother. She was doing the absolute best that she could as a single mom. So being able to help my parents and help some of my cousins and my great aunts, I think that is when I realized there’s magic here. It doesn’t just have to be heavy be, it can be beautiful.
Our time together can feel good. We can come into these spaces and we can have difficult conversations and we can leave feeling closer. Everything doesn’t need to lead to an argument. And if it does, what do we do? How do we respond fast enough to keep the conversation going until we get to a better place? So the magic of that at any age, I think for anyone who’s able to do that for someone before they pass, before their time is done, I think that’s the beauty in doing the work. We’re going to have to reveal our truth at some point, and we all carry so much in our DNA, no matter what our cultural backgrounds are, we all carry so much. So we can’t be afraid of getting to the truth. That is part of the path that we must take in order to get to the healing and get to the magic.
TS: What are your suggestions for people if they want to have some of these conversations starting with their mother and father, if they’re still alive and they can connect with them? Where are some entry points?
NRW: I think the first thing is understanding your why. Do you want to have these conversations? Is it so that you can have records so that you can keep records to pass on to future generations? Is it so that you can understand what you’re carrying? Is it so that you could potentially help someone heal? I think the most important thing in going in any conversation is understanding your why. Because for me, there were every conversation didn’t end the way I wanted to. I had no expectation of the outcome. I just knew what my intention was. So I think being super intentional about your conversation because you may talk to someone who is not ready to share, who is not ready to open or doesn’t feel safe in the moment.
So I had to be very careful with my approach and I had a very personalized and unique approach with every person in my family. I think it’s important to consider what everyone’s communication preferences are, and if you don’t know them, you can ask. There were times where I know my own communication preference as a writer, it’s writing. And so there were times where I would send a text to someone and say, Hey, do you have time to talk? Can we jump on a call or text or email? What would you prefer? Would you prefer that I came over and whatever they needed, that’s how I would show up because I knew what I needed. And so I wanted to give them the opportunity to feel as comfortable as possible with what I was going to bring and what I was going to ask or share. So I had to be very intentional and I had to make sure that people felt safe with me.
I also had to make sure that people felt respected. People will tell you things that maybe you disagree with. We all have our own version of a story. I was a witness to things as a child, and if I asked my mother and I asked my father for their sides of the story, I’m going to get two very different sides of the story. And so even knowing that I went in with no judgment, I allowed people to share their truth and I didn’t question it. I allowed them to just be open and be vulnerable with me.
I think that’s the first step is being intentional, understanding your why, being respectful and making sure people feel safe after you have that first conversation on whatever topic it is. Because in this book I talk about finances, I talk about religion, I talk about racism, I talk about job security, health, whatever topic it is, go back after the first conversation and process it and decide what you want to do with that. Does it make sense to go back again and continue to talk? Did you get enough? Do you feel fulfilled with what you received or what you shared? That’s where it all started for me. And I was very lucky that my mom opened the door and said, come on in, let’s do this. My dad looked out the window and said, what’s going on? Why are you here? So it was two very different approaches that I had to take with both parents, but I tried to be as respectful as possible. And I also know that when people are sharing personal experiences that you can understand that that is true to them. That is,
TS: I’m sure you get this question a lot, Nicole, but I think a lot of people are like, oh, I’m so frustrated when I hear this kind of thing because either my parents are dead. I don’t have anyone to call to talk to about this. I don’t know who my biological parents are. This is all really frustrating for me.
NRW: So with the kids that I work with in foster care and even my little sister whose biological mother has passed away, it is really difficult to have conversations with people when the relationships are not there or when the people are no longer here in physical form. And so I want them to know that there are still ways to find answers. I not only had conversation, I searched far and wide for documents. I was able to pull up public records online, which anyone can do. You can look for someone’s death certificate online, which would tell you so much about a family member and how they passed. It’ll give you information about health issues. Actually, as I was digging online for death certificates, I learned that my grandmother lost many children, children that I was not aware of, babies that were two months, that were two years that was 1-year-old and this hadn’t been talked about in the family at all.
And so even with those things, I was starting to piece together some of the health issues that were on my father’s side. So I think using public records is super important. And then also we have the ability to look at our DNA to find out if there are any people within our family with similar DNA matches through all of the different ancestry and all of the different sites. And so I actually found myself having conversations with complete strangers that matched my DNA that were third cousins or fourth cousins, people that I felt safe with because there was no history of toxicity or issues. These were just people that were curious about where they came from, just like me. And so I felt safe connecting with them online. So I think for anyone that doesn’t have the ability to have a direct conversation with a family member, they should use the internet as best as possible and then also go within the communities that your family members are from and talk to their neighbors. You’d be surprised how many people still live in the same place who went to school with a parent of yours or someone who knew a family member very well. I think going into those towns and having the conversations, whether that’s at the church or at a local community center, that’s another way of trying to piece it all together.
TS: Now, why it sounds like, if I understand correctly, started really because of your health crisis and wanting to understand what is going on with the cells in my body. Now, just to share a little bit here for me, my why of why it’s been important to understand my family lineage has come because of visions and dreams and some neurotic patterns, particularly around money and security that I had no other way to explain in from events that happened in my current lifetime. I was like, I don’t think this makes sense, the images that I’m having unless I look deeper. So that has been my motivation to really understand many generational family, multi-generational family patterns. Let’s say someone else is like, I don’t know what my why is just kind of curiosity, I don’t know, just general curiosity. I mean that probably wouldn’t motivate such a quest. It’s hard work. You have to really want to get in there for some reason. What do you think about that you do?
NRW: I think the best motivation is self-love. And before we can serve or think about future generations or anyone else that can benefit, I think we need to think about being our best self. And how can you potentially be your best self without understanding your genetic makeup or understanding where you come from or what you’re carrying without understanding your dreams, without understanding your visions, without understanding your health. I think that needs to be the biggest motivator to get people out there to have these uncomfortable conversations with family members. And it can be about anything. You could study your spending habits. Why do you have those particular spending habits? Why does your relationship with money look the way that it does? What from your childhood impacted that? What did you learn from your parents that you still carry or that you need to unlearn?
And so even with something like finances, I’ve had to say to my mom, what did your mother teach you about managing money before you had me? Because very often people want their parents to be perfect people or to be fully grown or to be ready to raise them, and they’re doing the best they can with the tools that they have, with the experience that they’ve had. And so to fully understand our parents’ decisions and behaviors, we need to understand how they were raised and why and understand how difficult it is to break the cycle. And that kind of brings me back to your first question of me feeling like it was an act of resistance because it is not easy to break a cycle. And in no way in writing this book do I want anyone to think you read this book, you learn how to break generational silence, you master it, you move on to the next thing. This is lifetime work. This is conversation that’s continuous, it’s relationship building that needs to be continuous. And we need to do that for as long as we’re having the human experience with the people that are related to us by blood.
So it’s not easy, but it’s worth it. It’s worth it because you’ll find that not only do you learn more about yourself, but you will find yourself healing and you will find yourself deciding to maybe make some changes, changes to make some improvements based on your learnings. So it’s worth it. I really do believe it is.
TS: You begin Breaking Generational Silence by talking about your new son being born became pregnant in the process of writing the book. And it makes good sense that doing this inner work is a gift to the next generation to your child. Totally get that. People often who really are inspired by doing this lineage healing work will say that you’re giving a gift to past generations by doing this work to your ancestors. And I noticed there’s a part of me that’s like, I love that idea. And another part of me is like, what are you talking about? What is it that you love? Exactly. They’re all dead. And I’m wondering how you see that.
NRW: I think about parents’ sacrifices and we make sacrifices out of love because we want our children to have everything that we could possibly give them, even if it is a little. And the reason we make those sacrifices so that they can have a better life, they can have better experience, they can go to better schools so they can have more knowledge so that they can get better jobs. And so oftentimes we only get to see one or two generations that come after us if we are blessed in that way. And I believe, and everyone has their own spiritual beliefs, but I believe that my ancestors had me in mind when they were doing the work. I believe they had me in mind on the nights that they had silent tears when they wished they could fight, when they wished someone could hear them. I believe they made sacrifices for those that came after them so that they wouldn’t have to go through the same pain. And so I think everyone here who is in this space can have pride in knowing they are living in a way that is making someone smile down, that is making someone say, I wish I was bold enough to say that I wish I could have done that. I wish I had those tools. I wish I could have shared that. I wish I could have expressed that more.
And so there’s just so much beauty in knowing that there are sacrifices that were made, and I am rising because of those sacrifices to look back and say, I’m doing it what you were afraid of, what you wanted to do, what you fought for. I am doing it. I am going to pass the torch. It doesn’t stop with me. It only gets better. I’m going to continue to make sacrifices for future generations. So if you meet any parent, they will tell you that sacrifices is part of the love. And if you look back at anyone’s lineage, you’ll see those same sacrifices so that we could all live better lives and have better human experiences.
TS: Thank you for saying that, Nicole. I feel very inspired by that. And I also just want to point out that I notice a, I would call it, you could call it a heaviness or a sense of gravitas in our conversation together here. And I think it’s fitting. I think it fits what we’re talking about and it’s not necessarily what everybody’s like. Yeah, this is what I, and now I’m going to take it. Given that I get that, I want to name that and I want to take it a step deeper, and I feel a little edgy asking you this, but I want to, which is in my own lineage work. Part of what I’ve been working through, and I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this, I just want to point to it as a way to ask you this question, has to do with really understanding and acknowledging the pain that Russian Jewish people went through in the pogroms and the Holocaust. And you write in Breaking Generational Silence about the pain of the slave experience. And I would love to know for you how that lives. And is alchemized my word? I don’t know what other word to use right now in you.
NRW: Yeah. Wow. That’s such a personal question.
TS: I know it is.
NRW: Yeah. It’s interesting. When I look at my work, what I do for a living, my writing, I truly believe I am being used and guided to make these decisions. And it’s something that you could probably relate to Tami, but I can’t take credit and say, this is just me. I am just born with the spirit to give. And I was born to be a philanthropist. I was born to be a creative writer. None of this is me. I truly feel like all of my decisions are guided. And I think I truly couldn’t understand why I was doing this work until I took a look internally and I started to learn more about my family history and then it all made sense.
When I look at the phenomenal women that have come before me and the grace and the grit that they carried and the ways that they showed up for their communities and their families, I can say that I aspire in many ways to be like them. I think that I am guided in many ways. Sometimes someone might ask you something, and if you don’t think you just speak and something might come out and you say, whoa, I didn’t mean to say it like that, but it’s just this innate ability just be authentically me in whatever that means with everything that I carry inside. I’m showing up in the world and I am sharing and I’m creating, and I am giving, and I in no way can take credit for that.
And all of us, if we look back at our family history, we will see pieces of everyone. I was watching this piece the other day about addiction, and someone was saying that people who suffer from addiction, they are the ones that are most intact with the trauma that has been passed down from generation to generation. And because they are not in any way denying or suppressing that it is difficult for them to manage it. And so they’re doing everything in their power, whether that is drugs or alcohol, to cope with all of this stuff that they’re carrying. It’s not enough trauma just for one lifetime to suffer from addiction. This is stuff that people are carrying. And so I don’t think anyone should be credited for their decisions whether they are good or bad. How I show up today is a result of the experiences of my ancestors and how our loved ones who suffer from addiction show up is a result of the experiences of their ancestors. And so I don’t think we should give anyone the credit or point a finger or be judgmental because it’s not just us all so much bigger than us. And that’s what the book is about, that’s these conversations are about, it’s helping people put the pieces of the puzzle together.
TS: I want to talk to you about two topics that you delve into quite deeply in Breaking Generational Silence, faith and forgiveness. Two topics that are important to me, starting with faith. You talk about your father’s loss of faith and yet it returned, but I wasn’t quite sure what enabled your father’s faith to return, and also what has grounded you in a faith-based life, the way that you’re grounded?
NRW: Yeah, it’s a good question. And it was a revelation about my father that I had because I started doing this work. I was taught as a young girl that my father did not believe in God. And it’s so funny because I think oftentimes when we have experiences with people, we create a perception of them, and sometimes that perception does not change and we can carry that perception for our entire lives. Categorizing that person is one way, forgetting that we all had the ability to grow and to change and to heal. And so as a child, I learned my father did not believe in God, and I had always thought, he still doesn’t believe in God because it wasn’t a conversation that I thought to spark. It was something that was very triggering for him when I was younger, and I knew not to bring it up.
And it wasn’t until I started asking questions about his mother’s religious practices that I began to learn that things have changed and that he has found his own connection and he has found his own relationship with God. And I would’ve never known that. So without giving away too much from the book, there’s a chapter dedicated to religion and me trying to understand what is my relationship, if any to God, and why is spirituality so important to me? Where did this come from? What was I taught that I felt a sense of belonging to? And what was I taught that I didn’t like? And how did that shape or mold my relationship and my faith today? And even with that, I had to look back to understand my parents’ relationships and their parents’ relationships. And then I started to look into my ancestors and what they learned about the church and what church initially meant to them, why they went what they were taught about God.
A lot of people lose faith because there are spaces where people use religion to control others or to manipulate people. And it breaks my heart when I hear that it is being used in that way because this belief that God fixes everything. If we walk this path and we check everything off and we do everything the right way, we will get everything we want. And that’s just not how life works. But if we put God on a pedestal that he is supposed to do those things for us, if we hold a bargain at the bargain, then of course we will, will not have a strong relationship because our love for God is conditional. And so my father’s understanding of what God is was very conditional. And when he prayed and lost a loved one that meant a lot to him. He felt as though God was punishing him.
And so I learned through my father’s experience at a very early age that while we use words like favor, I have so much favor and I do, but we all do. We all do. And we’re all here having the experiences that we have so that we can guide each other and help each other and teach each other. And good things are going to happen and really, really, really bad things are going to happen too. But it shouldn’t make us question whether or not we’re loved. And so my faith is strong as a result of my experiences. But in this book, I had to really unpack my why am I so spiritual? Why do I pray when I pray and how I pray and what does that mean to me? And then why do other people do it in different ways and what does that mean to them? So yeah, it’s heavy. But yeah, there’s a chapter dedicated to religion and me trying to understand it. And even still
TS: What I want to know is this feeling that you have in you, that you are loved by creation, by the universe, by spirit. I want to know how that is so strong in you, what your understanding is of that. I think that’s what we all want, that feeling of being. I’ll just use the word unconditionally, loved and accepted.
NRW: I look at everything I have. I look at life on a daily basis with a sense of gratitude, counting blessings, right? They say you should count your blessings. I think just being aware of everything you have in every moment, our breath is the most priceless thing that we have. It is the biggest gift. That is something that I was aware of, but I did not completely appreciate it until my lung collapsed. At any moment, when we are stressed, when we are feeling anxious, we can take a beat and we can just breathe. It doesn’t matter where we are. It doesn’t matter what our home looks like. It doesn’t matter what the clothes on our back looks like. We all have the ability to breathe if we have the ability to walk, if we have the ability to be in conversation, if we have connection, if we have community, that is enough to understand that that is love. It is something that people pray for. There are people dying in the hospital who can’t breathe, who don’t get to sit at home and have a laugh or tell someone they love them because they’re not here. So when we think about all of our blessings and when we live life with a strong sense of gratitude, we understand that this is love. We are given so much because we are loved.
TS: And I mentioned forgiveness, and one of the gifts I got from reading, Breaking Generational Silence was a deeper forgiveness of my own mom, through your forgiveness of your mom, and towards the beginning of the book you write, how much do you know about the pain your mother carries or carried? How much do you know about the pain your mother carried? And I thought, God, most of the conversations I have with my siblings are about the faults my mother had and et cetera. We don’t talk very much about the pain she was carrying. And in your own case, your mother as you write about, left you and the family when her father, your father, and she split up, she left. She left you all. I mean, I could see that you could stay angry for gosh knows how long, but that’s not what happened. So share with us a bit about how this perspective of understanding the pain people carry can open this doorway as children.
NRW: And we are all children, right? Because we all have parents, and so we are all someone’s child. As children, it is really difficult to think beyond ourselves and our childhood experiences. It’s very easy to point the finger when we reflect on our pain, and it’s very easy to see the direct result of some of the behaviors that our parents carried and the decisions that they made. And I always looked at the decisions my mother made and how those decisions hurt me. And because of that hurt, the triggers that I carried and how those triggers impacted my relationships and had this ripple effect that continued to cause me pain and cause other people pain in my adulthood. And so when I thought about that issue, I pointed the finger at my mother’s decision, and that was as far back as I would go, I am this way because my mother did this.
Going on this journey and writing this book made me ask, why did my mother do that? Maybe if I can understand why she made that decision, I could have just a little bit of empathy for her maybe, or maybe I can just hope knowing she did the best that she could with what she had. And I went to this holistic doctor as I was trying to heal myself spiritually, physically, emotionally, mentally. And he asked why. He said, why is it that you were angry with your mother? You need to forgive your mother. And I looked at this man, he was crazy, and I’m like, you don’t know anything about me. I just met you. And we didn’t talk about my mother throughout this entire session. We talked about my endometriosis. And so at the very end of the session, he said, he asked, who taught you how to love? Who was your first example of love?
And I thought about it, and I quickly answered my dad. And he said, why? And I said, he was always there. He was always there. And he said, and that is why you need to forgive your mother for not being able to do the thing that your father did. It doesn’t mean that she didn’t love you. That threw me in a way where I spiraled for a couple of months of trying to unpack the fact that I even answered the way that I did. If you said to me, who loves you more, your mother or your father? I would say, well, that’s a really difficult thing, but maybe my mom has always been there for me. My mom has taught me everything. I know my mother has loved me in so many beautiful ways. But in that moment without thought, I went back to my 8-year-old self who recalled the feeling of knowing this person loves me and they have my back.
And it was my dad because I felt like I was abandoned by my mother. And so having that reflection and going to therapy to process all of those feelings, I was able to pick up the phone and share with my mom, I’m still angry. I’m still angry, and I can’t shake this, and I want to talk to you about it because I don’t want to be upset with you anymore. I want us to have a better relationship. And it’s unfair to you. And it’s unfair to me that I am still carrying this. And I remember my mother was crying and she explained things as best she could, and I was able to better understand her through the conversation. Did it make it right? The decisions that she made, did it make me feel less pain? No. But it helps me develop a stronger relationship with her, and I’m grateful for that because our time on earth is limited, and I don’t want her to leave here feeling like she didn’t do the best she could with what she had because she absolutely did that, and it looks different for everyone.
TS: Nicole, I want to end with you making a comment about the title of the final section of Breaking Generational Silence, speak or Repeat, and this notion of each one of us animating our voice, the courage to bring our voice forward.
NRW: Yes. Wow. It’s such a timely question, and there is no time better than now to speak or repeat. We think about our history and why no matter what is happening in the world, no matter what we’re being taught, it’s so important to pass on those truths. When we think about our time here, there is no date that we have that we are guaranteed in life. So when I say speak or repeat, sometimes it’s just referring to the generations of silence, of being able to say the things that need to be said so that future generations can be well.
I think when it comes to our trauma collectively and individually, if we don’t talk about the wrongs, we never hold anyone accountable to make them right. And you can take that however you want to take it because there are a million things that could apply to. But I think within our families, within our communities, we have to speak about the trauma. We have to talk about when we are wrong. We have to share it with others, and we have to listen to others. We have to be open-hearted, and we have to allow people to explain their viewpoints and why they feel the way that they do. That’s how we learn by listening and not shutting people out, by not feeling like we are any better than anyone else, by just having dialogue and understanding and empathy, and then knowing that everyone’s beliefs is a result of their upbringing, of what they were taught, of what they were shown. And that doesn’t mean that it’s absolutely right or true. So there’s always opportunity for us to correct, redirect if we lean in and listen to one another and allow people the space to share their pain, their experiences, so that we can help others not have to go through those same things.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Nicole Russell-Wharton who has authored a new book. It’s called Breaking Generational Silence: A Guide to Disrupt Unhealthy Family Patterns and Heal Inherited Trauma. At the beginning of our conversation, I said, you had an type intensity to do the inner archeological work, and you do. I’ve had the honor of interviewing a couple of Olympic athletes, and in your own way, in your own area of inner truth finding, you have that quality, Nicole, and it’s so admirable and inspiring to me. Thank you so very, very much for who you are. Thank you.
NRW: Thank you, Tami. Thank you.
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