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Inherited Trauma:
Powerful True Story Reveals How Painful Emotional Patterns
Can Be Passed Down Through Generations
ATLANTIC CITY, NJ,
In her captivating book,
I Hate You, Mary Sullivan: A Memoir of Inherited Trauma,
author
Barbara J. Williams offers a vivid depiction of her evolving
relationship with her grandmother, Mary Sullivan, and
explores the process by which inherited trauma can be passed
down from one generation
to another.
Williams was 22 when
Sullivan died in a New Jersey nursing home, far from her
family and the town she’d settled in as an immigrant.
Williams felt one emotion: relief. She’d never liked the
mean, critical woman she called Nana.
More than 50 years
later, that death suddenly and inexplicably began to haunt
Williams, who felt compelled to heal their relationship and
learn more about the stoic, tight-lipped Nana who never
discussed her past. Who was she? What was her life like in
Ireland and then in a strange new country? Why did she make
the choices she made?
In I Hate You,
Mary Sullivan, Williams begins by retracing Nana’s
footsteps in Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland, and learns
that her ancestors, the Kenny family, were farm laborers.
For the first time, Williams imagines the poverty and
hardship her grandmother likely endured as a child and young
woman. When the second famine of 1879 struck, Nana was only
2 years old. Williams wonders how hunger may have affected
her grandmother. She also visualizes how the threats of
forceful evictions and violent uprisings might have
traumatized the young Mary Sullivan.
As Williams walks
the land Nana walked and learns the cold hard historical
facts, she feels compassion for the woman she once hated.
But that’s not all.
Williams, a retired psychiatric nurse and researcher,
infuses her narrative with scientific insight. Using her
story, she shows how unearthing and understanding the denied
stories of the past, Irish or not, can resolve painful
inherited emotional patterns. In Nana’s narrative, for
example, Williams finds keys to her own otherwise
inexplicable adolescent anxiety and intense fear of home
invasion and death by enemy bombing. When she learns that
trauma may be transmitted epigenetically, she thinks, “That
fits!”
Williams further
learns that the silent communication styles of trauma
survivors like Nana can inadvertently project unspoken
trauma onto descendants. Recalling her own family’s
interpersonal patterns, she thinks, “That fits, too!”
“If not faced,
unresolved traumas can lodge themselves in a family’s psyche
and cascade through generations,” she writes.
Braided with
personal, historical and psychospiritual threads, I Hate
You, Mary Sullivan is nuanced and deep, carrying with it
Williams’ message of intergenerational healing, even beyond
death.
About the Author
Barbara J. Williams,
Ph.D., was raised in a New Jersey neighborhood of Irish
immigrants and their first- and second-generation
descendants. She went on to have a long nursing career,
primarily in psychiatry and then research. Her articles,
including research studies, have been published in several
professional publications. Williams, who lives on the Jersey
Shore, is a member of Irish American Writers and Artists.
When she isn’t writing, she enjoys Zumba dancing, reading
psychological thrillers, and traveling with family and
friends. I Hate You, Mary Sullivan is her first book.
Connect with her on Facebook at
https://www.facebook.com/Barbaraw522.
Amazon link:
https://www.amazon.com/Hate-You-Mary-Sullivan-Inherited/dp/193912915X/
I Hate You, Mary
Sullivan: A Memoir of Inherited Trauma
Publisher: Cape
House Books
ISBN-10:
193912915X
ISBN-13:
978-1939129154
Available from
Amazon.com, BN.com and other online outlets
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