When The War Is Unwinnable
For the last several months, and after being fully vaccinated, I have been working on re-emerging and re-integrating to society. As a result, I have felt much busier, with more things to do, and yet, I still struggle with having a good sense of time which is the first excuse at to why I haven’t written in a while. The second excuse is that I still own a crappy part of me called “perfection,” which makes me question what I want to write about almost daily, and I hate feeling exposed.
Nevertheless, todays blog is in reference to all that has happened in Afghanistan. After reading all the stories of Afghans fleeing their country, some successfully, others not so much, I have been impacted by the sense of fear, perseverance, utter disappointment, and sadness that was felt among the people.
I was watching the news one evening, and a journalist stated, “the war is unwinnable, and at some point we just need to get out.” We can of course go off in a very different direction today, and have a dialogue about the strategy in which the United States withdrew. Frankly, I don’t care what political side you are on, in my opinion, it needed to happen, the execution was not pretty, nor perfect, and frankly ugly. What I want to introduce is the argument that that Afghanistan could be compared to many families where intergenerational trauma exists, and continues without any resolution.
The concept that trauma is passed down from one generation to the next is something I work with every day. A father who was abused, then goes on to abuse his own children, who then all go on to abuse their own children, and so on. The fighting continues without end, and the damage is done. Families who have intergenerational trauma, like Afghanistan, may experience years of diplomacy, but they have also experienced years of suffering. In the end, the family environment has become so toxic that everyone’s water is muddy.
As we watch the news of Afghanistan, the easy thing to do is to make President Biden the single scapegoat for the failures of Afghanistan. However, that would be as much of a mistake, as it would be to blame a single member in a family for the ongoing toxicity and brokenness that exists within their entire family.
No one entity can save a family, or take full blame for years of dysfunction. Just like saving a country, solving family dysfunction demands a joined force, working together, and committing to change together. In my work, I have often witnessed when a client acknowledges that they have done all their work on themselves, and have worked so hard on trying to “fix” their family to no avail that they come conclusion that they can not ‘fix” the family on their own. Acceptance and letting go of expectation of change, painful as it may be, can often lead to a new sense of freedom.
In the end, and sometimes, something broken does mean it can always be fixed. And sometimes, accepting that the war is unwinnable can be one’s own saving grace. As a client leaves my office, I often say “keep on moving, you can do this, and you are not alone.”