The following is the second column in a two-part series on generational trauma. These columns were adapted with permission from “Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family’s Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer,” and the first column came out in September.
Every morning, I wondered when my dad would come back.
He was sick — bleeding internally from what we didn’t know — and it was up to me, at 14, to help keep the farm going in the middle of winter. We had help from a family friend who came to milk the cows, and my job was to help him and do all the other work Dad and I usually did together: feed the livestock, give them fresh bedding, clean the barn, and more, morning and night. All without knowing if he was OK.
It’s a moment I’m proud of more than 25 years later, but it also left a scar that, it turns out, was a century old. It was during that hard winter that I accepted, after too many mishaps with machinery and animals, that I lacked my dad’s talents and couldn’t farm. And that feeling of failure revealed a deep truth about the generational trauma ravaging rural America: how it activates hurt inherited from our past, and impacts our future, in hidden ways.
Generational trauma — which, according to the National Farmer Mental Health Alliance, means one generation’s scars affecting four generations or more — doesn’t just mean we inherit hurt. It also means when we face our own trauma, it colors and deepens what we experience – especially if that trauma happens when we’re young, and we face it again later. Rural families are at high risk, with livelihoods affected by uncertain weather, farm accidents, and economic decline.
To be clear, I was lucky to have a good home, free of the trauma of abuse. But as I uncovered in my book about America’s disappearing farms, we carry a legacy of survival trauma going back to Great-Grandpa Alois — and our farm’s start during the harshest winter on record in 1912.
Alois faced lifelong brutal conditions and grew harsh, believing his children needed strict discipline to survive. My grandpa Albert grew up fearful during two decades of poverty that included the Great Depression, and became an alcoholic. My dad stepped up at the tender age of 8, after his father slipped off a corncrib, and never really stopped.
By the time I came along, Grandpa had carried us into the middle class, and Dad had carried us into the modern era, but family farms were disappearing at an alarming rate. I grew up proud to be the first son in our family to go to college, and ashamed to be the first who failed to farm.
Farmland work ethic helped me climb, but I harbored hidden pain. Every crisis at work led me to push myself to the limit. Emotionally, it felt like the farm was at stake — even though my dad had long recovered, my sister was taking over the farm, and I’d found a way to help by telling our story, volunteering on the business side, and pitching in with fieldwork. It fueled a decade-long drinking problem.
I was living the generational trauma cycle: my ancestors’ trauma was activated when I was a kid, worried about failing my dad, then reactivated throughout life. My drinking fed what Christy Updike of the Farmer Angel Network calls a “both ways” dynamic. Mental health drives substance use, and vice versa.
“They make each other worse,” said Updike, who had a relationship end because of a loved one’s substance issues. “It breaks more than just the person with the addiction.”
Counseling helped moderate my drinking. But it took a severe episode of near burnout last spring to fully reveal the stakes.
It was intense stress from work and writing projects, combined with a deep dilemma around how to help my parents with a farm issue, that put me over the edge. For days, I felt my mind on fast forward, saw my wife’s face as our conversations made no sense, and experienced disturbing memory loss.
It felt like my mind was slipping away — maybe for good.
My daughter brought me back. Just one year old, with her mother’s sweetness and her father’s stubbornness, I saw her jolly smile bore no trace of my troubles. I didn’t want it to.
With counseling and sharing, I got enough relief and rest to halt the burnout. And thinking of my family, I saw the truth: each generation had carried trauma, but had also worked to leave some behind. My grandpa, a kind man, shed his father’s harshness. My dad, who never drank around us, shed his father’s alcoholism.
And although my dad supported me in my career, I accepted that growing up, we didn’t understand each other well enough for me to avoid feeling like I’d failed him. I decided that’s what I would shed for my little girl: letting her feel like she had failed me.
It’s the least I can do — she saved me first, after all.
There is strength in speaking up about mental health or substance use issues. Call or text 988 for help with mental health challenges, large or small, and check with your doctor to learn about your own personal risk factors for addictions. You can also find resources through organizations like the Farmer Angel Network or the National Farmer Mental Health Alliance.
Brian Reisinger is an award-winning author and rural policy expert who grew up on a family farm in Sauk County, Wisconsin. His book “Land Rich, Cash Poor,” was named Book of the Year by the nonpartisan Farm Foundation. He serves as senior writer for Midwestern-based Platform Communications and lives with his wife and daughter, splitting time between Sacramento, California, and the family farm in Wisconsin. You can learn more or contact him at www.brian-reisinger.com
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