The Power of Cycle Breakers
Many people seeking therapy share the desire to be a cycle breaker. A cycle breaker is someone who recognizes harmful or dysfunctional traits that exist in the culture of their family and decides to discard these traits and trade them in for something different. This can be life changing and liberating work that unfortunately may trigger a negative response in other family members. For many, doing the hard work of dismantling the structures of these cycles is often ridiculed by the family of origin. In these cases, the cycle breaker of the family is scapegoated for trying to discard family traits that do not serve them anymore. Families with a cycle breaker often develop the defensive belief that everything was fine until this one person decided to point out areas for growth and refused to carry the weight of generational curses any further.
Deemed an unwelcome whistleblower for calling out toxic behaviors or dysfunctional family norms, these individuals put a spotlight on the problems that have most likely existed for decades. This can make the rest of the family feel like their illusion of the perfect family, or their deep denial to face any imperfections, is shattered. Watching the cycle breaker make changes can bring up feelings of judgement, shame, or guilt for the rest of the family as they see them doing work they have not been able to do yet. It can also trigger fear regarding having to do their own work because they are now grappling with the fact that they have been suffering for a long time as well, and could possibly feel grief that they didn’t address it earlier before they passed it on. A common response from family members towards a cycle breaker is gaslighting, making them believe that they are making up the traits they are dismantling, exaggerating how bad they are, or convincing them that they, instead of the dysfunctional traits, are the problem.
Generational cycles are like stones being dropped in a lake, with the impact rippling out over generations to come. The ripples of abuse, neglect, and trauma flow through generations unconsciously due to parents not being critically aware that they internalized dysfunctional and harmful patterns from their own parents, and now lack the insight to see that they are replicating these same patterns in a different language to their own children. Disrupting these patterns is like stepping out of a river you’ve been floating down your entire life. The path of least resistance is to continue floating as you have been. Brains are attracted to familiarity. They crave taking the same paths again and again regardless of if the path is healthy and good for us. For cycle breakers, the river has turned into violent rapids, making it worth considering doing the work to steer to shore in order to escape the chaos, dry off, and step into a new landscape of healthy communication, boundaries, empathy, and collective compassion. By stepping out of the river and committing to creating positive changes for your bloodline, you liberate not only yourself from these cycles, but all who come after you as well.
Genetics or Learned Behavior?
Generational cycles are often given the reputation of being pure biology; a static and unchangeable way of life that we are burdened with dealing with. This lie is meant to keep people feeling helpless and shamed into silence. Psychology has normalized pathologizing the individual instead of holding the family system or society accountable. A study on rats is a good starting point to understanding how generational cycles are more than just genetic mysticism. Traditional white patriarchal psychology has historically placed the blame of any mental health or relational issues on the individual for having some innate deficit undefinable by science. In studying rats, we began to discover the truth is much more complex.
A 2014 study on intergenerational trauma in rats found that when the mother was exposed to the paired condition of an odor plus fear stimulus, their infants grew up to show fear responses to these same odors that they themselves had never been exposed to before. On the surface, this gives evidence to the biological argument stating that we are predisposed to feel and act certain ways based on our parent’s experiences that have been communicated to us through our genes. But there is another piece to this puzzle only recently being considered.
Further assessments in this study showed that it might not have purely been the genetically programmed response to the scent that caused the baby rat to react in fear. In fact, while attempting to pinpoint the root cause of the fear response in the rat babies, researchers noticed that the hormones associated with fear and amygdala activation occurred in two conditions. The rat babies showed the same fear response in conditions where they were exposed directly to the scent and when exposed to their mother being afraid. The impact of seeing the parent they depend on for survival experiencing fear was internalized and became a core belief conditioning them to fear the same thing they watched their mother fear. These findings expand upon the theory that places all responsibility on biology and genetics by introducing the idea that traits and patterns may be learned behaviors. Consider the statistics reporting that anxiety and depression are disorders that are passed down genetically in families as a biological generational cycle. This framework disregards any chance that these are traits children observe, internalize, and imitate in childhood. How can we separate what is innately biological from what was learned behavior?
If the caretaker shows high anxiety in social situations, it teaches the child that this is something they should also be afraid of, even if these lessons weren’t explicitly stated. Children, like all humans, are wired to be attuned to others. Every facial expression, change in vocal tone, shift in body language, increased heart rate, and stress hormones emitted in others are unconsciously processed in every moment of interaction whether we are aware of it or not. These observations are perceived through our nervous system and sent to our brains as signals of threats or safety.
Children are always internalizing the behaviors, words, and emotions that caretakers are expressing in their presence and using that modeling to shape their own emotional reactions, thoughts, and behaviors as they learn to navigate the world. Many people want to blame undesired traits on unchangeable biological causes or throw their hands up claiming these traits came out of nowhere and must be a fluke instead of acknowledging our role in passing on the learned behavior. The importance of facing our own issues before projecting them onto young ones and our peers is integral to creating change on the individual and community level. Doing this work allows for generational cycles such as tendency towards violent communication, abuse, judgement of others different from you, or standards of perfectionism to come to an end. Adults, as the children who grew up, take on the responsibility of creating these changes for themselves once they are out of their parent’s care. Generational cycles are unique to each family system, and the impact of them is unique within each family member. Breaking out of generational cycles will therefore look just as unique, as there is no one-size-fits-all program to deconstruct and grow into something new.
Steps to Being a Cycle Breaker
Therapy can be a supportive, empowering space for cycle breakers to do this work. In counseling, you are given the space to explore what generational cycles you would like to end, and grieve the relationships that may shift due to choosing your own norms over continuing to be a part of harmful family cycles. Additionally, therapy can be a place where you explore the nuance of both/and thinking without any judgement. In today’s world of cancel culture and black and white thinking, it is much easier to cut people off and demonize them for any wrongdoing than it is to compassionately understand the gray area that exists and set the appropriate boundaries. What allows for a more healing experience is stepping into the space in between black and white to understand why your family is the way they are and considering the possibility of them experiencing their own trauma in childhood. Holding space for acknowledging the hurt they caused you within the context of the hurt they might themselves still be stuck in allows you to move beyond demonization and into the space of setting healthy boundaries that accept them as they are while still protecting your peace and growth. With this mindset we also give up the need to bring these people with us when they indicate no desire to change themselves. We cannot force anyone to make changes they aren’t willing or ready to make.
Ways to explore what generational cycles you are a part of and discerning which of those do not serve you anymore takes honest and vulnerable reflection. Here are some suggestions for practices of self-reflection:
Try to objectively take note of traits you see in your family system that may be stemming from generational trauma. Those that have been historically and systematically traumatized have gotten fears passed down through generations. For example, does your family hold the belief that nobody outside of the family is to be trusted? That it is every human for themselves in life? Is self-worth determined by productivity or capitalist gain, demonizing rest as being lazy? Do disagreements always lead to defensive arguments or physical violence due to differing opinions being seen as a threat? Are boundaries or having different points of views seen as a betrayal to the family due to enmeshment and intolerance of difference?
Are there harmful views that your family holds that you are being pathologized for expanding beyond? For example: exploring gender and sexual identities beyond binary thinking, unpacking implicit and explicit racism and white supremacy, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, toxic masculinity, gender roles.
Resources
Rat Study: Debiec, J. & Sullivan, R. M. (2014). Intergenerational transmission of emotional trauma through amygdala-dependent mother-to-infant transfer of specific fear. PNAS, 111(33). https://www.pnas.org/content/111/33/12222?etoc=&csrt=13283225163895306479
For a BIPOC perspective we recommend reading My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem