Extreme Severe Parental Alienation & Trans-Generational PA Trauma
Unspoken wounds fester and unresolved loss and trauma returns, generation after generation until it is resolved.
ONLY BY Recognizing and Fulfilling
THE NEED to GRIEVE THE LIFE the Alienated CHILD
DESERVED and SHOULD HAVE HAD
WILL HEALING the SCARS BEGIN.
extreme severe parental alienation
A TOTAL of 92-1/2 "Supervised" Hours From Age 6 to 18.
Words of my alienated daughter
"I tried to reach out for help,
But my cries were ignored,
So I hid behind my magic,
And kept my sadness stored.
In the end, all fades away,
No trace of what we've been,
And in the silence we lay,
Mere relics of a world that's been."
trans-generational pa trauma
“Parental Alienation is about the hidden toxicity of generations, of psychological disorder which is hidden in the family or normalized, it is about terrorization of others by an unwell person, it is about a system being poisoned and children being held captive in plain sight.” ~ Karen Woodall
“ALIENATION is a family disease. Living with the effects of someone else’s
ALIENATING BEHAVIOR is too devastating for most people to bear without help.” ~ PAA
“The child’s best therapist is the rejected parent.” ~ Karen Woodall
“These now-adult children are cut off from their authentic parent
and don’t yet have a road back.” ~ Craig Childress
“Parental alienation is a generational game of splitting, of dividing the world into good and bad
and its dynamics are complex, dangerous and deeply damaging to children, their families and
the practitioners who work with them.” ~ Karen Woodall
“The result of living with hidden trauma and the hidden trauma is the negative projection which rejected parents are being forced to carry every day of their lives” – Karen Woodall
trans-generational pa trauma
It is as if the whole family lives in a world of their own and in fact that is exactly what they do. A case of trans-generational trauma transmission, requires that anyone who is involved with the family on an intimate level, must conform to the internalized, often highly secretive narrative of the family. To be unable or unwilling to do so, demands that the person be excluded, silenced, shunned and shamed.
This is because within the internalized walls of these families, within the inter-psychic subjective life of the family lies a secret. This secret is so secret that it is either unknown by the family members, was known but is split off into the unconscious or is known and deliberately kept hidden. Depending upon whose secret it is and how far back in the generational line the secret goes, inter-psychic relationships to and with the secret will be adapted to suit the need to keep this secret.
When children are born into such families, they attach to their care givers and inter-psychically absorb the reality that there is an encrypted secret (Salberg 2017). The secret, which is never spoken about with words, is part of the unconscious life of the growing child who will, in some situations, seek to manifest an opportunity to resolve the unresolved by recreating a scenario which is similar to the original wound. This understanding, of how a child of a parent suffering trauma, seeks to attach to every aspect of the intra-psychic experience of that caregiver, even the negative, explains how that child replicates that traumatic experience in the here and now.
This is the atmosphere which is readily apparent in cases where fixed and fused dyadic relationships between parent and child are present and where historical patterns of loss and trauma become apparent on investigation. This is the space in which the things are not said and not given symbolic representation, where the world is divided into two parts in which the trauma is frozen alongside a life which is going on in the here and now.
A case of alienation of a child can, in this context, be thought of as a defense against the disintegration of the intra-subjective life of the family or the atmosphere. The parent who has been cast out/or who has left the family but who has refused to go away without a relationship with the child, is felt to be an interloper or intruder into the internal world of the family left behind.
In reality, when working with these families, the parent who is being rejected will often be shown to have been experiencing either rejection or inability to fit in with the family narrative for a time prior to the rejection by the child. If we think about the birth of a child in a family affected by trans-generational transmission of trauma, as being a risk factor for the family secret to be revealed, it is easy to see why many parents are evicted from the family when they will not allow baby to be brought up in the way which is necessary to keep the family internally regulated.
The atmosphere of alienation is suffocating, it is foggy, and it is quite often bewildering in the way that the spoken narrative is broken and not linear. The past is not another country in these families, it is happening right now, alongside the here and now and it is manifested in ways which can only be interpreted because they cannot be easily understood cognitively.
When we enter into these spaces it should be cautiously and at first reverently, because here is where a traumatic secret resides. Whilst the purpose of our work is to take the child in the here and now to a safer place, we should recognize that in doing so, someone has been badly harmed and needs help within these walls.
If you are living this, you will know it.
If you are working with families affected by alienation, you need to know it.
Thank you for addressing root cause of the issue. When these roots are exposed and brought into the light – with inclusive care – and especially for the most wounded – I believe there is much greater potential for real healing for the entire family, most importantly for the children. I believe our Intention for family healing at this inclusive Trans- Generational level dynamically supports the children’s highest potential for healing and ENDING abuse cycles. At this level I believe this becomes a Collective issue. What does it take to move out of isolation, and the silent Fog surrounding ‘the secret’? Multiple people holding really safe space is very powerful. Sacred safe space – where no one is denigrated, and othering is not allowed and wounds are actively attended to, with great care. As much of the family, and surrounding community, as possible becomes Involved.
How can the most wounded be invited into the needed healing process?
How does it become safe to include ‘the secret’?
How to safely generate collective seeing and participation? Storytelling? Someone else’s experience inspires the longing for health to move into possibility? ie “look at them, how messed up things were, and how real healing was finally generated, look what they did it wasn’t easy but look what they have now ” Just a thought.
Only by recognizing and fulfilling the NEED to GRIEVE the life the alienated child deserved and should have had will HEALING the SCARS begin.
For children who have no words, our voices may be the only hope they have.
As an adult who was first alienated from my father at the age of 7, it has only been in recent years (some 50 years on) that I’ve begun to start comprehending the long-lasting harm that a psychologically unwell parents-with-care can impose on a child……in this case, on me.
An inability to recognize or regulate my most intense feelings and emotions was something I wasn’t even, consciously, aware of, let alone able to manage. A poor understanding of how to develop and maintain healthy boundaries with others negatively impacted my sense of Self (often over-compensating for lack of self-esteem with sporting and other natural talents that ‘masked’ my true sense of inferiority) and the way I connected with others……whilst I had a clear sense of my own reality, in challenging situations, it was almost impossible to, simultaneously, hold my reality with that of another (very different) person. In summary, consciously, recognizing my own basic human needs was a concept I’d never encountered or developed growing up……because, of course, my own needs were never discussed (or, for that matter, of any importance)
The ‘escape mechanism from an intolerable dilemma’ that alienated routinely use greatly resonates with me and I can only describe the feeling (back then) as “holding on to nurse for fear of finding something worse”……especially when the alienated parent has been demonized and depicted as someone who cares very little (if at all) for you
It was only when I first read you writing that ‘understanding the route in is a prerequisite of planning the route out’ that I was able to start making some meaningful sense of my own, PA-related, childhood and, then, gain a better understanding of options for the possible routes out of defensive splitting where my own adult-children are concerned.
Induced psychological splitting in children of divorce and separation causes them to be unable to hold two realities in mind. This simply means that the child can no longer tolerate the way in which their lives are divided into two different experiences in the external and internal world. In order to resolve the impossible dilemma of being unable to hold those two different realities in mind, the child uses a defense mechanism which is well known in psychoanalytical work, this defense is called splitting, and it occurs when the child is not able to hold positive and negative images of self and others in mind.
Splitting occurs when the mind is overwhelmed by pressure. It happens when children are sexually abused, and it happens when they are physically abused. In our experience as psychotherapists, it also happens when they are psychologically and emotionally abused by parents who breach boundaries and promote their children in the family hierarchy to people who have executive decision-making powers. In this respect, it is our view that all of the signs observed by Gardner, arise from the one defense mechanism of splitting and that it is the induced psychological splitting defense in a child which is the cause of all of the drama which happens when a child is said to be alienated.
Ghosts are present at the birth of every child when, as the mother is crowned with her new mantle and father is born with the child, the learnings and lessons and laughter and tears of the people long gone, are made and manifest again.
With each new child are reborn the generations long gone. In the remembering, the songs, the swaddlings and the rocking of the cradle come the ghosts of the past. Within the pregnant body of the mother to be, lies dormant her own experience of being mothered and grandmothered and great-grandmothered.
Within the expectations of the father, lies the learnings passed down from great, to grand, to father. Each ghost leaves its imprint, stronger in some places, weaker in others.
When the ghosts in the nursery meet, over the head of the newly born child, an alchemical change occurs as the parents in the here and now grapple with the ghosts and bring them into a new generational line.
When that alchemical change is successful, gold appears. When it fails, disaster strikes and the eruptions from the unconscious life of the most dominant family, brings forth the ghosts and the demons that have lain buried beneath.
Here then, is that place of transgenerational haunting, where the ghosts in the nursery overwhelm the here and now and the child, born at the right time but in the wrong place, becomes co-opted by the ghosts into the script that was written a long time ago.
Families are peculiar institutions. Some are fixed and unbending with rules that divide the people within them and others are diffuse and without boundaries, where everyone blends into one.
Life within the four walls of any family is an interesting topic, life within my own family is, for me, something akin to an archeological dig, endlessly fascinating and always turning up new treasures.
Working in this field is made all the more fascinating for me because of my long-term interest in the psychodynamics of the family.
Listening to the words not said is as rich in content as any spoken word and how the family flows and plays together as well as how the family does conflict together or apart, speaks volumes.
Excavating the scripts through which a family operates is one of the key ways we understand how alienation in a child occurs.
Hearing the voices of the ghosts in the nursery tells us much about how the family navigates conflict and change and where the bodies are buried. In alienation cases, it is incredibly rare to find alienating behaviors only in the horizontal plane of existence (here and now) and very common to find them in the vertical life of the family (the lives of previous generations).
Learning to let the ghosts in the house whisper the scripts which are driving the alienation in a child, is a particular skill.
People in families do not live largely in the conscious world but the unconscious and it is in the unconscious where the ghosts come out to play.
And when they do, repeating patterns, especially in families where the attempt to blend two tribes into a new one fails, come rushing up into the here and now to cause chaos.
In many of the families I work with, generational patterns of estrangement are very apparent.
How a family deals with conflict, through cutting someone out and sending them to Coventry, though not speaking to someone for decades at a time and through avoiding the reality of the unspoken by ignoring or avoiding it, is passed down through generations.
The dominant force in the couple relationship will bring their own ghosts to the party, thus a man whose own family tree contains no estrangements and normal relationships, might marry a woman whose history is full of those things.
He then must wrestle with her ghosts and if she is more powerful (and the troubled people usually are), then he must capitulate and live life by her script.
The same is true in the reverse when men take control and force women whose lives were previously untroubled by conflict, to live in a world where conflict and chaos are rife.
Children born to such unions will inherit that felt sense of conflict and danger and so goes the march of the next generation.
Which leaves us with what when we consider these families (2016)? Well, it leaves us with ghosts and with whispers and silences, it leaves us with glances and voices half-heard in the stillness It leaves us with fragments of truths which surround the children (we work with: and it leaves us with this:
-
We cannot remove from the life of the child, those ghosts which are haunting the here and now. We can only learn to work with them.
-
We cannot evacuate the nursery and start over again with clean sheets and fresh scripts, we can only bring resilience and strength to the children who live there.
-
We can educate, excavate and illuminate the dark spaces within the family so that the children can see better the ghosts that attempt to seduce them and we can build up the strength of the parent who can better protect them.
-
But we cannot get rid of those ghosts. We cannot remove them completely. To do so would be to remove the reality of the life that the child is born into and we are not god.
-
My work with alienated children increasingly tells me that whatever we do (and we can do much) to help, we can never get rid of the ghosts, but we can turn up the light so their impact is weaker.
-
We cannot silence their voices but we can turn down the volume.
-
And we can teach children the skills that ensures that when they become mother and father, the alchemical struggle brings gold and not ghosts.
"The alienation-aware practitioner KNOWS
further investigation on BOTH SIDES
of the FAMILY IS NECESSARY"
FOCUS ON THIS 2018 QUESTION ASKED BY WOODALL HERSELF!
Mapping the unconscious is all very well but it leaves us with a question. If it is not Billy whose needs are not being met and it is not Billy’s mother who is not meeting his needs and if parental alienation in this case is a trans-generational trauma re-enactment,
WHAT DO WE DO about it given that Billy has been handed the responsibility for carrying this myth forward?
Given that Billy is adamant that he will not see his mother and given that CAFCASS (Family Court) consider that parental alienation is all about high conflict and so only really focus on the superficial presentation and given that social workers rarely understand how a child’s wishes and feelings can be manipulated by a parent,
HOW DO WE (in the UK), reconfigure the dynamics which have caused this problem in the first place?
The realization that circumstances from our past lives does flow into and influence present-day lives.
2019 Living in a World Without Windows in a House Without Doors
https://karenwoodall.blog/2019/11/27/living-in-a-world-without-windows-in-a-house-without-doors/
2024 reactive splitting now all about abuse and neglict defining it and now rejected parents are key to everything and now back to therapists this time to acknowlege the abuse to us rejected parents and it is so serious they need to get it... and now again back to therapists this time now to they must know how to support rejected parents to be anchors to our children ...... that maybe last year it was up to us rejected parents that while woodalls healthy mirrir and helping older child come home
COMMENTS on Everyday Trauma
Nov. 11, 2019
“Which means that our work is focused where the reality lies and where reality lies, new insights are made possible.
This everyday trauma, this drama of the alienated child is the next child abuse scandal to come to light in the western world.
Suffering little children, who as adults still do, will have their day.”
Only by recognizing and fulfilling the NEED to GRIEVE the life the alienated child deserved and should have had will HEALING the SCARS begin.
11 Nov 2019
It's fascinating, as I’ve said before, to read and understand of your developing knowledge, in seemingly real time. How for me this means a thought I’ve held develops and shifts and focuses, and refines. How a definition I’ve adopted can both narrow and expand, and become both more pointed and more clear.
The two examples of this in the last two of your blogs are from:
‘In Their Footsteps: Trans-generational Trauma in Divorce and Separation’ – where you write “…Induced psychological splitting in children of divorce and separation causes them to be unable to hold two realities in mind. This simply means that the child can no longer tolerate the way in which their lives are divided into two different experiences in the external and internal world.”
and the blog above –
“When a child is being terrorized in the inter-psychic world by a loved parent, the only way to cope with this is to create a defence which allows continuation of that love.”
A light went on for me thinking about how to describe/understand when a child has to say some version of ‘I hate my Dad/Mum’ at the same time as every fiber and instinct in their mind and body is telling them they don’t feel that. The internal/external world.
And then similarly to acknowledge that these children have to reconcile for themselves how a LOVED parent is saying or doing something that hurts them, and find a way to cope with that.
And another observation to put here, just because I’m writing, is about the alienation tendrils that creep out and twist and throttle long into the future. How the loss of a child can mean a parent loses the experience of directly parenting their own child through (difficult/normal) teenage years, so their child’s possible behavior, and that parenting relationship in those lost years is only ever seen through the prism of how they hope they would have parented their child – which when measured up against how any step-children in their life are being parented by their partners through those same teenage years, means the day to day parenting choices made by their partners in front of them can fare very badly by comparison. Just another side effect that ripples out.
13 Nov 2019
It’s so inspirational, to many of us, to see that just keep keeping on – I’m a believer in the saying that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ and the work you’ve done is gradually educating the villagers
As an adult who was first alienated from my father at the age of 7, it has only been in recent years (some 50 years on) that I’ve begun to start comprehending the long-lasting harm that a psychologically unwell parents-with-care can impose on a child……in this case, on me.
An inability to recognize or regulate my most intense feelings and emotions was something I wasn’t even, consciously, aware of, let alone able to manage. A poor understanding of how to develop and maintain healthy boundaries with others negatively impacted my sense of Self (often over-compensating for lack of self-esteem with sporting and other natural talents that ‘masked’ my true sense of inferiority) and the way I connected with others……while I had a clear sense of my own reality, in challenging situations, it was almost impossible to, simultaneously, hold my reality with that of another (very different) person. In summary, consciously, recognizing my own basic human needs was a concept I’d never encountered or developed growing up……because, of course, my own needs were never discussed (or, for that matter, of any importance)
The ‘escape mechanism from an intolerable dilemma’ that alienated routinely use greatly resonates with me and I can only describe the feeling (back then) as “holding on to nurse for fear of finding something worse”……especially when the alienated parent has been demonized and depicted as someone who cares very little (if at all) for you
It was only when I first read you writing that ‘understanding the route in is a prerequisite of planning the route out’ that I was able to start making some meaningful sense of my own, PA-related, childhood and, then, gain a better understanding of options for the possible routes out of defensive splitting where my own adult-children are concerned. You also introduced me to the writings of Alice Miller which have been hugely beneficial in the progress I’ve been able to make with my own journey
Reunification depends upon the openness of heart and spirit and the capacity to take risks.
If it was not there in the beginning, it won’t be there in the end which is also a new beginning.
ALL in Help Her Come Home
ALL in HELP HER COME HOME
Clearing a Path to Your Door: A Structural Therapeutic Approach to Help Older Children to Come Home
https://karenwoodall.blog/2021/11/11/clearing-a-path-to-your-door-a-structural-therapeutic-approach-to-help-older-children-to-come-home/
Holding up a Healthy Mirror: Becoming a Therapeutic Parent to Alienated Children
NOW an online course for parents of alienated children and their families with Karen Woodall
2023 Holding Up A Healthy Mirror: A Step Wise Recovery Route for Parents in the Rejected Position
https://karenwoodall.blog/2023/03/13/holding-up-a-healthy-mirror-a-stepwise-recovery-route-for-parents-in-the-rejected-position/
2018 Lamp Lighting: Helping Alienated Children to Find Their Way Home.
2018 Homecoming: The Paths & Pitfalls of Reunification With Lost Loved Ones (AND comments for Holly's 6-months post-reunification FOR MENU IN HOLLY’S STORY!)
https://karenwoodall.blog/2018/05/17/homecoming-the-paths-and-pitfalls-of-reunification-with-lost-loved-ones/
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
THIS IS NOW GOING ON HOLLY'S STORY!!!!
Holly's ORIGINAL Coming Home STORY
Featured on Karen Woodall
2018 Coming Home (Holly's ORIGINAL Story)
https://karenwoodall.blog/2018/02/24/coming-home/
2018 Homecoming: The Paths & Pitfalls of Reunification With Lost Loved Ones (comments for Holly's 6-months post-reunification)
https://karenwoodall.blog/2018/05/17/homecoming-the-paths-and-pitfalls-of-reunification-with-lost-loved-ones/
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
ON ALIENATED CHILDREN
2016 Children in the Mirror: Working with Alienation
https://www.karenwoodall.com/2016/10/06/children-in-the-mirror-working-with-alienation/
I work a lot with alienated children, those who are still alienated and those who are in recovery from it. In doing so I find myself always aware that these children are distinct from other children in that their psychological self has been divided in two. For these children the world looks and feels like the battle ground of some comic-based Armageddon, where the goodies are out to defeat the baddies. In the world of the alienated child, without the protective input of a parent who is healthy and who has perspective, the child develops in the mirror held up by the alienating or influencing parent, which reflects back to them, a world which is divided, brittle, blaming and self-righteous.
trans-generational pa trauma
Transgenerational haunting passes trauma through the family narrative in the form of secrets and lies and half-truths. It consists of knowing and unknowing and of unspoken things which are seen and heard but half-forgotten or buried, like treasure, or ghosts, in the unconscious. Haunting of this nature can control a family system and can cause children to carry burdens which are not theirs and it can put at risk the next generation if trauma is carried through without resolution.
It is as if the whole family lives in a world of their own and in fact that is exactly what they do.
This is because within the internalized walls of these families, within the inter-psychic subjective life of the family lies a secret. This secret is so secret that it is either unknown by the family members, was known but is split off into the unconscious or is known and deliberately kept hidden. Depending upon whose secret it is and how far back in the generational line the secret goes, inter-psychic relationships to and with the secret will be adapted to suit the need to keep this secret. The secret, which is never spoken about with words, is part of the unconscious life of the growing child who will, in some situations, seek to manifest an opportunity to resolve the unresolved by recreating a scenario which is similar to the original wound.
Transgenerational haunting passes trauma through the family narrative in the form of secrets and lies and half-truths. It consists of knowing and unknowing and of unspoken things which are seen and heard but half-forgotten or buried, like treasure, or ghosts, in the unconscious.
Haunting of this nature can control a family system and can cause children to carry burdens which are not theirs and it can put at risk the next generation if trauma is carried through without resolution.
A case of trans-generational trauma transmission, requires that anyone who is involved with the family on an intimate level, must conform to the internalized, often highly secretive narrative of the family. To be unable or unwilling to do so, demands that the person be excluded, silenced, shunned and shamed. The parent who has been cast out/or who has left the family but who has refused to go away without a relationship with the child, is felt to be an interloper or intruder into the internal world of the family left behind.
If we think about the birth of a child in a family affected by trans-generational transmission of trauma, as being a risk factor for the family secret to be revealed, it is easy to see why many parents are evicted from the family when they will not allow baby to be brought up in the way which is necessary to keep the family internally regulated.
When children are born into such families, they attach to their caregivers and inter-psychically absorb the reality that there is an encrypted secret (Salberg 2017).
This understanding, of how a child of a parent suffering trauma, seeks to attach to every aspect of the intra-psychic experience of that caregiver, even the negative, explains how that child replicates that traumatic experience in the here and now.
This is the atmosphere which is readily apparent in cases where fixed and fused dyadic relationships between parent and child are present and where historical patterns of loss and trauma become apparent on investigation. This is the space in which the things are not said and not given symbolic representation, where the world is divided into two parts in which the trauma is frozen alongside a life which is going on in the here and now.
A case of alienation of a child can, in this context, be thought of as a defense against the disintegration of the intra-subjective life of the family or the atmosphere. The parent who has been cast out/or who has left the family but who has refused to go away without a relationship with the child, is felt to be an interloper or intruder into the internal world of the family left behind.
In reality, when working with these families, the parent who is being rejected will often be shown to have been experiencing either rejection or inability to fit in with the family narrative for a time prior to the rejection by the child. If we think about the birth of a child in a family affected by trans-generational transmission of trauma, as being a risk factor for the family secret to be revealed, it is easy to see why many parents are evicted from the family when they will not allow baby to be brought up in the way which is necessary to keep the family internally regulated.
The atmosphere of alienation is suffocating, it is foggy, and it is quite often bewildering in the way that the spoken narrative is broken and not linear. The past is not another country in these families, it is happening right now, alongside the here and now and it is manifested in ways which can only be interpreted because they cannot be easily understood cognitively.
When we enter into these spaces it should be cautiously and at first reverently, because here is where a traumatic secret resides. Whilst the purpose of our work is to take the child in the here and now to a safer place, we should recognize that in doing so, someone has been badly harmed and needs help within these walls.
If you are living this, you will know it.
If you are working with families affected by alienation, you need to know it.
Only by recognizing and fulfilling the NEED to GRIEVE the life the alienated child deserved and should have had will HEALING the SCARS begin.
For children who have no words, our voices may be the only hope they have.
Listening to the words not said is as rich in content as any spoken word and how the family flows and plays together as well as how the family does conflict together or apart, speaks volumes.
Excavating the scripts through which a family operates is one of the key ways we understand how alienation in a child occurs.
Hearing the voices of the ghosts in the nursery tells us much about how the family navigates conflict and change and where the bodies are buried. In alienation cases, it is incredibly rare to find alienating behaviors only in the horizontal plane of existence (here and now) and very common to find them in the vertical life of the family (the lives of previous generations).
Learning to let the ghosts in the house whisper the scripts which are driving the alienation in a child, is a particular skill.
People in families do not live largely in the conscious world but the unconscious and it is in the unconscious where the ghosts come out to play.
And when they do, repeating patterns, especially in families where the attempt to blend two tribes into a new one fails, come rushing up into the here and now to cause chaos.
In many of the families I work with, generational patterns of estrangement are very apparent.
How a family deals with conflict, through cutting someone out and sending them to Coventry, though not speaking to someone for decades at a time and through avoiding the reality of the unspoken by ignoring or avoiding it, is passed down through generations.