Why Your Father Unwittingly Traumatized You (100 Year Trauma)

Our fathers grew up under the generation of, arguably one of the most traumatized generation of men ever. The men who came back from World War II specifically carried so much trauma and PTSD. And they returned home and were expected to pick up their jobs, go back to being husbands, go back to being fathers, and go back to dealing with the problems of everyday life while, you know, three to four weeks ago or a couple months ago, they just saw their friend, you know, blown to pieces. So I think, I think we're kind of coming out of this experience where a lot of men were raised by men with an intense amount of trauma and that created this sort of wave throughout our society and our social structures. So I'm curious to get your, your thoughts on that and maybe the role that it, it's played in, I mean maybe our attachment as men to one another, to our fathers, to, to, to our friends. But just to get your take on.

That, I mean it goes back even further than that. I mean that layers on top of the industrial revolution which overtook families living together and staying together in urban environments, families in rural environments, on their family farm, long term, working together, connecting together, living very close to each other, to throwing into cities and being in tight little quarters where there was five families with apartment kind of thing, families, parents working 16, 18 hour days. People forget that Henry Ford came along and invented the eight hour workday. He invented the nine to five, he invented the 40 hour work week. Before it was, before that the average workweek was 100 hours for parents. So, so that was what we walked into initially from okay, let's work together in our farm and fields and take care of each other to parents are removed from the home 100 hours a week. And that, that was a, a devastation, ripping up kith and kin, family organizations and groups. You lost all five networks that you're supposed to connect through family, kith and kin. Your, your even religious community, your village, everything was destroyed. And now you're thrown into cities for the first time in mass numbers, bigger numbers even than ever than before. And then you had World War I, then you had Great Depression, especially here in the United States. You had massive depression throughout Europe as well and devastation of economies and shifting and changing. Then you had World War II and that was, that was okay. We've already been through a living hell and our parents were through hell and we lost everything and we have no connections. Now let's all become the worst traumatized generation in history. Then let's come home to every everything being broken, no family connections and we don't have human bonds hardly anymore. Now let's be the worst off any generation has ever been from both of those directions. What you said, and I said, now let's raise the baby boomers. And that's why the baby boomers are so messed up. So many of them, not all of them, but so many of them are devastated by, you know, my parents didn't love me. My parents did love me, but they were broken. I don't understand what love is. And then the technology growth that has come out of that. They got the car, which became the mobile sex wagon. Now you can go anywhere you want and have sex with anybody within 50 or 100 miles. That was overwhelming. That was revolutionary. That was. That's what created the idea of really modern dating. Hey, I can just go find someone attractive and have sex with them in my car somewhere. Hey, we can just start doing that. We can go faster and faster and faster. They at least had some family network surviving, but then they gave birth to generation X and generation Y, which life changed around them so rapidly, and they had so many conflicting messages screamed at them. Generation X and generation Y have basically told everyone, go f yourself. And then they just sort of hide in the corner. Then baby boomers got divorced, and in their second round of marriage, had the millennials and said, we won't make mistakes like we did with our first batch of weak children. We'll make exact copies of ourselves. And the millennials and boomers hate each other because the boomers tried to make the millennials harder than they made the first generation. And the baby and the millennials have never seen a functioning family system, not ever. And now we've got generation what Z now, where they're living in the rubble of a society, in the rubble of in ruins and smoking ruins, trying to pick through and find scraps of food to eat. And that's what our dating system is now, and that's what our family systems are now. That's what our political systems are now. It's what our economic models are now is people living in smoking R from the last hundred years of family devastation. And that's how attachment and masculinity all fit together, because men are more needed than ever, and they are more terrified and disconnected than ever at the same time. But one good piece of this, one good piece is that Rome started off with a bunch of random outcasts and foreigners and strangers wandering the wilderness. And they were drawn into a tiny little village called Rome that was set up as a sanctuary for anybody who wanted to live There. And Ro got to be pretty decently sized from what I hear. So men can come back from almost nothing when we are given the incentive. And when we connect to other men, we can come back from absolute devastation. So that's my little historical spiel.

I was going to say it sounds promising before you, before you added in the last piece. And I think it is. I think when I hear the doomers and I hear the catastrophizing of, of whatever the problem of the day is that's going to wipe out the entire species of humanity.

I can't help but return to being a kind of relentless optimist, a realist as often as I can, but still relentlessly optimistic. Not naive, right? Not stupid, not closing my eyes to the problems that exist in life, but relentlessly optimistic. Because I do feel like part of maturity is being able to, in the words of Francis Weller, hold grief in one hand and gratitude in the other. And so we can't look at the catastrophe or the shit that's happening in our world today without also holding the gratitude and the joy and whatever you want to say, the goodness that also simultaneously exists. And if you can't do both, then you're probably hijacked. And it's funny how in today's culture, you know, that seems to be looked down on. And I think one, one final piece that I wanted to add it in, as you were talking about the whole. The whole cycle was that the boomers are also the richest generation. And so you have these kids of these very traumatized people who all of a sudden have had tremendous economic prosperity, just insane amounts of economic prosperity, right? And it's, you know, it's kind of easier to avoid your problems when you have a couple boats and, you know, the Lambo in the garage and the 8,000 square foot house, right? It's like you. You can go through your second or third marriage and just keep dating younger and not worry about it, right?

So.

So anyway, that dopamine is a hell of a. Means one hell of a drink.

You never have to come off dopamine. You won't.