I spent the better day yesterday and this morning in the comments, which is it’s own peculiar circle of hell, and I want to tell you what I found there, because I think it’s the whole ballgame. I’m an elder millennial, born in 1982. Some call us Xennials. I grew up with parents who were emotionally immature and didn’t make good decisions. Some blame it on all the lead paint. I imagine a lot of boomers are like this mostly because of how they were raised though. Many were raised by their siblings — children raising children. Many suffered unimaginable abuse and neglect. And anytime someone suffers childhood abuse to that magnitude, it is inevitable to leave lasting physical and functional changes in the developing brain.
The body’s stress regulation system becomes dysregulated, leading to either an overactive or blunted cortisol response to stress as an adult. I saw this in my father. He would go from 0-60 in a matter of seconds. His ability to handle stress was non-existent, as was his patience. He would scream and holler at the most miniscule things. Slam doors, push people around, stop them from leaving a room, throw things, punch walls, punch people… you name it.
The amygdala, which is a person’s threat detection system in the brain, becomes hyperactive, leading to heightened vigilance and exaggerated fear responses. Because of my father’s lack of emotional regulation, I grew up to be a very hypervigilant adult. Always watching every single granular detail of every person and thing around me. I was in my 30’s before I learned to regulate my spidey-senses and hyper pattern recognition. It was not an easy journey.
The hippocampus, which controls memory and emotional regulation shrinks.
The prefrontal cortex, which controls impulse control, decision making and also has a hand in emotional regulation, develops with reduced connectivity, making it incredibly difficult to regulate strong emotions. Again, my dad’s prefrontal cortex was fucked. This is because his parents used to beat the snot out of him, for the tiniest things. I remember my dad telling me a story about how he had forgotten to clean out the chicken coup one time and collect the eggs the morning before heading off to school, and when he finally remembered, he rushed home to do his chores hoping nobody had noticed, but my grandma was in the coup waiting for him, covered in chicken shit. When my dad opened up the chicken coup door, my grandma slammed him to the ground and beat him until he quit moving. That story is still heartbreaking to tell. But my dad tells it like it’s a badge of honor that he survived it. He gets animated when he tells it too and uses humor to deflect from feeling any of the bad parts.
My mother has her own story. She was the baby out of six kids. My mother never told me much about her life growing up. There’s a lot of secrets there. Tons of shame. But I could read the things my mother never spoke of. There’s a reason why she had difficulties trusting people and had unhealthy attachments to people — even me, her only daughter. Why she was attracted to abusive men, drank like a fish my entire life, threw things in anger, refused to say sorry or show affection to me.
She was a typical patriarchal white woman in every sense, with a little bit of independent white feminist in her. I saw through all of it. I resented her for a lot of it too. For years. Because, at the end of the day, her childhood trauma became mine and I deserved better than that. Just like my kids deserved better than I gave them.
I know for a fact that I passed down traumas to my children. We’ve talked about them. We cried about them. We gotten angry about them and became estranged for periods of time over them. But, we can’t heal what we refuse to take accountability for. And it is never the child’s responsibility to take accountability for the damage their parents have done. The only difference between my mother and I, is that I own that responsibility and understand that it is up to me to make it right — not my child’s. I’m still estranged from two of my children. And every day, I still do whatever it is I can to make it right. Not for me, but because my children deserve it, because I love them. I can’t consciously hurt the ones I love.
They are not the enemy. They were never the enemy.
This doesn’t mean that I don’t feel sorry for my parents. They had it rough, for sure. But, so did I. Because of THEM. And if we are to truly heal, it begins with admitting what they broke first. Just like I had to do with my own children.
Yesterday, I wrote this and I think it’s important to talk about. Because our nation is in so much pain, and if we ever want to heal, we need to understand the pain and who takes ownership of it. For millennials, the boomers caused us a lot of pain and then told us to eat that shit and quit complaining.
Within hours, my comment section lit the fuck up with comments of DARVO and victim shifting and cruelty from boomers.
One boomer told me, with total sincerity, that her generation passed Roe v. Wade, even though it was decided in 1973 by nine men born between 1898 - 1924, back when the oldest boomer was 26 and had never sat on a bench in her life, let alone the highest in the land.
Another told me he’d survived Vietnam and a decade of stagflation, as thought hardship is just a receipt one hands over in place of an answer. Someone else accused me of looking down on an entire generation for the crime of nothing, said I was “Sitting high and looking down” and how it’s not a good look.
And then, threaded in the same conversation, were boomers said something else entirely. They reached across the aisle, and said things like this:
That gap — between the ones reaching for a rebuttal and the ones willing to just sit in it, is what I keep circling back to. Because the difference isn’t intelligence and it isn’t even politics, really. It’s whether a person can hear a hard truth about a group they belong to without immediately conscripting themselves into it’s defense. We see this with groups of white women, men, democrats, republicans, gen Z, millennials, boomers and others.
Same applies when I say things like “white women uphold patriarchy.” It’s inevitable to get someone in the comment section taking it personal and shouting in all caps, “NOT ALL WHITE WOMEN!! PATRIARCHY ISN’T THE WOMAN’S FAULT! HOW DARE YOU! REVERSE RACISM!!!”
Well, I do dare. Deal with it.
First of all, I never say, ALL white women and if by me saying such generalizations bothers you, all I ask is that you sit with it for a minute and try to understand why it bothers YOU specifically. Because, I’m white. And I’m unbothered as fuck. Why is it that I don’t feel the need to shout it to the rooftops that I’m not that kind of white woman, but you do? Think about it.
The same pattern shows up in the boomers who flooded my comment section. There’s a word for what I watched unfold in their replies and it isn’t subtle once you know it. It’s called DARVO. Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim, and Offender. It’s a term borrowed from trauma psychology, coined to describe how people respond when confronted with harm they caused and are not mature enough or equipped enough to admit it. They deny what happened, attack whoever brough light to the issue, then perform a quiet sleight of hand until they’re the one who was wronged. I watched that sequence run unbroken, more than once in the comments.
This commenter can’t see that she’s also a casualty of her own generation’s choices. Instead of holding that group accountable alongside the rest of us, she reflexively took a structural critique as a personal attack — classic DARVO. Deny the pattern applies. Attack the person naming it, and Reverse Victim/Offender so she’s suddenly the wronged party, lecturing millennials for supposedly aiming their anger at the wrong target instead of ever turning that same scrutiny towards the generation she’s a part of. And she’s also got it backwards. She said, “You’re blaming millions for the dirty deeds of the few.” No, mama, the majority did this, not the few. I advocate for the few.
I don’t doubt a single one of these boomer stories of hardship. I believe all of them, fully, without whataboutisms or questions. But a difficult life doesn’t grant a generation immunity from also having voted, collectively and repeatedly, for the policies that hollowed out the one behind it. Both are true at the same time. Both are valid. The refusal to hold both isn’t confusion — nobody is that obtuse by accident.
It’s a defense mechanism, a remarkably efficient one, because it guarantees nothing ever gets repaired. You cannot fix what you cannot admit is broken and who broke the fuckin thing. All I want boomers to metabolize is that when we say, “this happened, and it hurt us, you don’t answer with anger or defection or a hasty costume change into the victim — that you aren’t defending yourself. This teaches an entire generation that naming harm gets punished, not the harm itself. That’s the actual erosion between us all and what keeps this nation from reaching any resemblance of solidarity.
The path forward isn’t the boomers groveling, and it isn’t my generation or my children’s generation pretending the last forty years didn’t happen the way they happened. The path forward requires accountability without collapse. And forgiveness without amnesia, in service of a fight that needs every generation standing in it at once.
We can’t build solidarity without people who won’t admit there’s something to reconcile. But, we also can’t win this without you. Because at the end of the say, we love you and you are not the enemy. Both things are true. Yes, your generation harmed us. But yes, you were also harmed. We are dangerously low on time to keep choosing defensiveness over the harder, better thing — telling each other the truth, so we can stand together against the people who would love nothing more than to watch us keep relitigating 1974 while they finish taking everything else.
There is no version of what’s coming that either of us survives alone. XOXO
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Your childhood and mine had so many parallels - violence, abuse, neglect, alcoholism and the resultant 'hypervigilance', overactive amygdala, etc. I'm a Gen-X'er and could see how the policies of my parents generation were hurting us, even in my teens. We knew Reagan was full of it with his 'trickle down' economics, the absurdity of McCarthyism, the castigation of the LGBTQ community. Hell, watching 'Wall Street' and the 'greed is good' comment back in 1987 was abhorrent even then. At every turn we worship money instead of community and people. At every turn we defer to propping up the wealthy.
I had thought that after the dot-com crash we'd learned our lesson. Nope.
I had thought that after the 2008 financial crises we'd learned our lesson. Nope.
What I see now is a flicker of hope - that this time we've all seen how the 1% have controlled every aspect of this transfer of wealth from working people to the greed class. They pit us against each other and hope we don't look up. Unfortunately it's at a time when they seem more than willing to double down on destroying everything we've built so they can buy another yacht.
I hope that, this time, we're not going to stand for it any longer. For everyone's sake. No one needs, or should have, a BILLION EFFING DOLLARS. It's absurd on it's face.
We can all live comfortably, peacefully if we finally address this wealth gap. Life is hard enough as it is - why do we insist on making it harder for everyone so a super minority can have more money than they can possibly spend in a lifetime?
Exactly my upbringing. My father had schizophrenia as did my brother. My father was deaf also. My mother worked 16 hours a day. My sister and I became parents at 8 and 10