Healing Across Generations

For Vanessa*, a recent Common Threads Project participant from New York, processing her trauma meant addressing intergenerational cycles of harm.

In stitching her painful experiences, she decided to include her grandmother as part of her story. She represented her as moonlight, shining down on her during a dark time. Vanessa reflected on how her grandmother – “her strength, her story, her love, her trauma” – and the generations of women before her are a part of her story, too. 

Throughout history, women have gathered to sew together. Across various cultures, at various times, women have used the safety of that gathering to express their trauma stories through the cloths they sew. Participants of Common Threads Project healing circles take part in this tradition: not only finding connection and strength amongst others in the group — but also across generations.

For Vanessa, like many other survivors of gender-based violence, healing her own invisible wounds extends beyond herself: rippling out to others and breaking intergenerational cycles of violence.

“From generation to generation let me be the last to suffer in silence of the abuse by men who see me, the women in my family as objects for them to possess.”

*name changed to protect anonymity