It ends with . . . no catharsis

I finally got around to seeing It Ends With Us.

It deals with the important subject of intergenerational trauma.

Blake Lively plays Lily Bloom, a woman traumatized as a child by her parents’ marriage, in which she witnessed her father physically abusing her mother.

She goes on to meet Ryle Kincaid, a neurosurgeon, whose meet-cute with her begins with him kicking a chair across a rooftop in a fit of anger. The red flags only continue from there: his instant declaration that he doesn’t do relationships; telling her to “shut up” and leave a party she only just arrived at to go somewhere more quiet (i.e., his bedroom) for sex; and repeatedly saying he can’t stop thinking about her, even though he still “doesn’t do relationships.”

Finally, he “relents” and decides he wants to “try” having a relationship with her, which is when things really begin to go downhill. In a disturbing reverberation of the events of her childhood, his capricious rage leads to multiple acts of physical abuse.

Actually, my favorite artistic choice in the movie is that these acts of violence are made intentionally ambiguous. They all look like mistakes—did he really hit her when the food was burning in the oven, or did he just knock into her by mistake? 

Later in the movie, when she is coming to terms with what’s really happened, we are played the same scenes, though this time it’s painfully obvious that there was no ambiguity at all. 

It’s as though we, the audience, have been gaslit right along with her the whole time.

On the very same day that Lily realizes she must leave, she discovers she is pregnant with Ryle’s child. During the pregnancy, Ryle becomes contrite, loving, and helpful. Even so, at the birth, Lily informs him they’ll be getting a divorce. 

After Ryle has left, in a solitary moment with her newborn daughter, she tells her:

“It ends with us.”

 

“It ends with us” is a powerful statement. 

It forces all of us who relate to reckon with our own intergenerational trauma, asking ourselves: 

Will it end with me?

 

• Will I pass down the trauma of my mother, or father, who themselves were passing down the trauma of those who came before them? 
• Or will I be the one to break the cycle?

It’s a question that makes us realize that anyone can be the pioneer of change in their personal lineage. Anyone can decide “enough is enough,” and do something different. 

In doing so, they not only change their own lives, but the lives of everyone who comes after them.

Breaking the cycle is hard. 

It requires us to negate our own conditioning and rewire ourselves. 

It’s not for the faint of heart. 

But one of the things I was reminded of when watching Lily take such steps is how often it comes with no real catharsis.

  

3 times Lily Bloom gets little to no catharsis:

1. The death of her dad

We discover that Lily chose not to travel home and see her abusive father when he was dying, presumably because it was just too painful, and she wouldn’t know what to say to him if she did. Still, her mother wants her to speak at the funeral, suggesting she “just say five things you love about him.” Lily tries, but on the day, she still isn’t able to write a single thing, and abruptly leaves the stage without speaking. 

We’re not led to believe that Lily didn’t love her dad, but that her feelings were so impossibly complicated that she couldn’t bring herself to utter anything at all.

His being alive offered her no closure, and neither did his death. She never heard what she needed to hear from him, and so is left with the terrible disappointment of having had a dad who let her down terribly, and never answered for it.

 

2. Her mum’s explanation of why she never left

There’s a beautiful moment when Lily’s mum is helping her build a crib for her unborn baby. She talks about having never built things before, since this was always the remit of her husband. Though it sounds innocent enough, in the context of what we know about her relationship with Lily’s father, it can’t help but feel like a metaphor for all the ways he debilitated her and made her feel incapable.

Lily asks her why she stayed with him, to which she plainly replies: 

“Because it would have been harder to leave. And because I loved him.”

These two laconic statements are raw, honest, and sympathetic. And yet, they’re not exactly an apology for having kept Lily under the same roof as the man who would later beat her boyfriend to within an inch of his life, or traumatize her by putting the abuse on full display in their house for years.

I know there will be no shortage of readers here who have at some point felt enraged that everything they were put through was reduced to: “I did it because I loved them.” 

It can feel like a depressing lack of closure, as if “love” is the appropriate justification for any and all evils that took place within its insulated cocoon, where nothing got in, and nothing got out. 

 

3. Lily saying she wanted a divorce 

Lily realizes she will not put her child through what she went through, and states that she wants a divorce. In the moment she says it, Ryle is holding their baby in the hospital bed, and is being compellingly loving and sensitive. He seems vulnerable. There’s no anger on her part, just clarity. It’s not some big moment of sticking her middle finger up to someone who hurt her. 

She loves him. She even feels sorry for him and the traumas that have made him the way he is. 

But even when he says he’s ready to become all she needs him to be, and everything she’s wanted seems once again within her grasp, in order to truly break the cycle, she still has to say goodbye to him on a romantic level and choose to bring up a child as separated parents. 

How unsatisfying.

 

The prize for finally winning the battle against our conditioning, and thus breaking the cycle of our own intergenerational trauma, is rarely the big moment we are hoping for with those around us. 

People don’t suddenly blossom into what we’d always hoped they would be simply because we’ve changed. They often don’t apologize. Or even if they do, it’s not the kind of apology that makes us feel they’ve truly acknowledged what they’ve put us through. We often have to let go of people we still love, and even find ourselves, against all logic, feeling sorry for. It can be equally painful to watch innocent people we love remain with the very people we have chosen to leave behind. 

 

We therefore cannot rely on the expectation of external catharsis. 

It has to be about what it does for us: 

the subtle-but-profound effect of consciously choosing who to invite into—or release from—our lives, and going out to meet the world in a different way than we used to. 

In doing so, we plant the seeds for a different life than the one we’ve previously known. 

The ultimate reward for breaking the cycle is not closure, it’s peace . . . as well as the ability to model, and bring a little more of it to those we love who have so far been unable to discover it for themselves.

Key Takeaways

1. “It ends with us” is a powerful statement. It forces all of us who relate to reckon with our own intergenerational trauma, asking ourselves: Will it end with me?

2. Anyone can be the pioneer of their lineage when it comes to intergenerational trauma. Anyone can decide “enough is enough,” and do something different. In doing so, they not only change their own lives, but the lives of everyone who comes after them.

3. The prize for finally winning the battle against our conditioning isn’t always closure, it’s peace. 

What About You?

• Is there a situation in your life where you’ve been expecting catharsis to come from the outside, instead of simply appreciating the gift of peace you have given yourself? 
• How has parting ways with someone meant you are no longer suffering in the old ways? 
• How has approaching life differently brought newness and magic into your life that was never available to you before? 

Matthew Hussey