E61: A Tale of Two Josephs

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:00)
Hi, this is Lindsay Hansen Park.

**Bryan Buchanan** (0:02)
And this is Bryan Buchanan.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:04)
Bringing you the story of Mormonism from the shadow of the Everlasting Hills, straight out of Zion. This isn't your grandpa's Mormon history.

**Bryan Buchanan** (0:31)
That only you can save me, Brother Brigham, Brother Young.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (1:20)
Funny story, my best friend from since I was 12 became a therapist a few years ago, and it's so weird because we grew up together and witnessed, dare I say, survived our Mormon dysfunction together. So to see her now as this like therapist, it's really weird.

**Bryan Buchanan** (1:37)
I mean, healing generational trauma, sounds like a good thing, right?

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (1:42)
Well, sure, but it's weird to see the girl who need me in the crotch in the front of the cute neighborhood boys on the corner of Bluestone, cul-de-sac, be out there healing the world.

**Bryan Buchanan** (1:54)
I know Malia, she's good people, come on.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (1:57)
She's meh, whatever, she's fine. And she and I are working on a project together about generational trauma because it's just so present in all the work that I do around this Mormon place. And you know, because it fits into her clinical work. But I'm going to bring my BFF on for a hot second and let Malia give us a clinical definition of generational trauma and the impacts of childhood trauma.
It won't be the only time you hear old steel knees on the podcast, I promise you. But today she's talking generational trauma and trust me, it's relevant.

**Malia** (2:44)
Hi, Bryan and Lindsay. Thanks for having me on. Bryan, you've got to trust me that Lindsay needed that knee in the crotch. I don't remember why she needed it now, but I'm sure she fully deserved it at the time. I'm going to go ahead and toss out a trigger warning here so that any of you who are sensitive to discussions of trauma, you can choose to know about it here for a minute if you would like to. So generational trauma. As always, let's give thanks to the Disney gods for giving us yet another object lesson of sorts for those of you who are used to learning from them. And Kanto, which is the newish film from Disney, does a really nice job of putting a definition on generational trauma from an insider's perspective. So let's go ahead and spin it out a little bit for our purposes.
For Mormons, we are well used to generational trauma, even if we don't have a word for it. Basically, we're talking about trauma that occurred any number of generations ago and has not been addressed by the people directly affected by it. Or they might have addressed it without working through it completely. So for instance, let's say that your grandmother and grandfather were involved in very violent arguments in the home, throwing things, speaking unkindly to one another. Their children are watching, the kids are scared, they're watching mom and dad be violent with one another, and now they're afraid because, well, it's scary to see your parents be violent.
And it's possible that those children may not know how to contextualize that argument between their parents. They may feel that their safety is threatened. They may spend the rest of their childhood lives afraid that this event is going to happen again.
Stress hormones are produced in their body and the child's anxiety in general increases. The child may feel less securely attached and may begin to act out because the child does not have an appropriate avenue to process through those difficult feelings. If this trauma remains unprocessed, it can follow the child into adulthood. If the child is expending a great deal of energy trying not to think about the scary stuff that they remember from their childhood, there will be less energy for more positive pursuits. They may make decisions that are based in fear rather than good logic.
So as a mental health professional, our hope is that people will be able to access appropriate mental health care so that they can process through the trauma, see it for what it is, and be able to let go of the destructive elements that come into play when trauma goes on unaddressed.
That is usually denial, a perpetuation of the trauma, and possibly even a repeat of the trauma itself upon younger members of a new generation.
To be clear, generational trauma occurs in families, but when the same type of trauma is occurring in many families, we move into historical trauma. And I wouldn't feel comfortable defining that trauma that we're talking about as either generational or historical, because so much of our Mormon history was affecting the same elements of many families, leading to some similarity of experience when it came to generational trauma.