I have been teaching for over 40 years, and have, naturally, had friends and relationships during the course of my life. Over time, I have realised how chaos follows some people throughout their lives. Financial chaos, friend drama, volatile relationships with partners and family, and job crises seem to choose them. Or do they choose it?
From long experience with school and university pupils I realised that many students who acted out (had dramatic fights, exhibited poor impulse control, behaved badly in class, exhibited attention-seeking behaviour, began drinking and doing drugs early, and ended up committing petty crimes) came from chaotic households. A combination of undiagnosed mental illness or neurodiversity, parents who themselves came from chaotic homes or had mental ill-health, and lack of support from the system really does perpetuate generational trauma. If you add drugs and alcohol to that, it’s a recipe for disaster.
If chaos was the normal in your home growing up, then calm must seem unstable and dangerous to you. You repeat patterns of chaos because it is familiar to you, your baseline. Maybe acting out is the only way you received attention growing up. Perhaps you have a low threshold for boredom so you seek drama as stimulation to feel alive. This could be a pattern you repeat over an entire life.
In the time when I was teaching children, diagnoses of neurodiversity (ADHD, ADD, dyxlexia, dyscalculia, and autism spectrum disorders) were very rare, and support was non-existent. My heart hurts for all the students in years gone by who were considered naughty when they were actually battling executive dysfunction. Many people holding top positions today are neurodiverse, but I would say most of them did not function well in a traditional school or business environment.
Disorders such as borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder take hard work and usually dialectical behavioural therapy to break hardwired reactions to things. But it is hard, and many people with these disorders feel that others are the issue. It’s so hard to break that cycle.
Sometimes in my life, friends’ volatile relationships have become aggressive and physical, sometimes they have been repeatedly evicted or fired from jobs, and often they have explosive relations with friends and family. When it happens over and over, you realise there is a problem. I now create boundaries with people in my social circle who want to repeatedly bring drama and chaos to my door. Either to cause it, or to vent about it. I will be their friend, and I will advise them to break their patterns, but I will not get involved year after year after year if nothing changes, because it is exhausting. And change needs change.
I recently started – but was unable to finish – Broken Child – a 2000 documentary (narrated by Susan Sarandon) on generational trauma and cycles of trauma and abuse. Hurt children become parents who hurt children. I wish I had seen this documentary (or as much as I could stomach) years ago. It would have helped me as a teacher to fight harder for educational and social systems to interrupt the cycle. It would also have helped me understand these cycles and try to fix the cause, not the symptoms. I still do not want to deal with chaotic people year after year if they do not want to change their learned pattens and keep dragging me into their drama, but this documentary gave me so much more compassion for how this behaviour is created. Hurt people hurt people, and those hurt people hurt people. It is so sad.
