This guest post is courtesy of Autumn Miller, Regent Family Law student:
Understanding
their trauma will allow you to advise them in a way that can help them heal and/or
find a remedy for their problem that best fits them. The best way to illustrate
generational trauma is the age-old story about how a family cuts off the wing
tips of a turkey before putting it in the oven for Thanksgiving. The family has
done this for decades until they finally ask the matriarch why she cut off the
wing tips. Great-Grandma responds, “To make the turkey fit, my oven was tiny.”
This story illustrates that the phenomenon affects not only the actions of a
subsequent generation but can also affect an individual medically.
Encouraging a client to consider family mediation or
therapy to identify the weak points in their history is a helpful course of
action. Once they can identify those points, the client can work within the
family unit to solve the problem. Sometimes, generational trauma is not as
terrible as surviving the Holocaust or the Potato Plague. It could even come in
the form of corporal punishment parents inflicted on young children. Even
adding family mediation to an attorney’s practice to help families break the
bonds of generational trauma could be a step in the right direction.
Your clients are people created in the image of God who have histories and experiences worthy of understanding. History teaches us to “step into” the shoes of an author of a historical document. This allows historians to understand the thoughts and decisions of the author best without passing judgment on them for those things. In many ways, the practice of law may benefit from this technique to help our clients.
Take
your client’s deep-rooted and often uncovered trauma and use it to heal a
family in family mediation or advise a client executing a parent’s estate on
dealing with their siblings. Everyone has trauma, and if they cannot break the
cycle, they too, will doom the next generation with the same fate.
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