When I watched Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, I felt as though I was watching intergenerational trauma made visible. Bruce’s story is an intimate portrait of what happens when the unseen wounds of one generation break open in the next—when the son, carrying the father’s silence and rage, must find a way to speak what could not be spoken.
The film captures the paradox I’ve lived and written about in my forthcoming book Luminous Truth: Breaking the Dark Patterns of Intergenerational Trauma by the Light of the Heart: that it is often the wounded one—the child, the empath, the artist, the one harmed—who must hold and transform the pain that others could not bear to face. Bruce’s father, like my grandfather, was a man split by his own suffering, unable to love without hurting. The abuse was dark—invisible to the public, hidden in the private chambers of family life—and it left the son to carry both the injury and the work of healing.
Springsteen’s song Dancing in the Dark may be his most direct articulation of that inheritance: “I’m just tired and bored with myself / Hey there baby, I could use just a little help.” It’s the voice of someone who knows the ache of wanting to shed inherited skin, to break free of the ghosts in his DNA. I know that longing. For years, I wanted to extract my grandfather’s DNA out of me—to stop the repetition of what had been done, to draw the venom from my own blood.
But healing doesn’t begin with escape; it begins with turning toward what others turned away from. Most of us don’t know that’s what we’re doing when the call comes—we just feel the press of something unresolved asking to be met. Springsteen likely didn’t set out to heal his father’s pain any more than I set out to redeem my grandfather’s story. Yet through the creative act of facing what was hidden, we join a universal, archetypal human movement: the slow work of bringing darkness into consciousness so it no longer needs to rule from the shadows. This is what trauma researchers call transmuted witnessing—the alchemy of transforming personal wounds into collective expression so that others might feel less alone, and so that what was once bound in shame can move into the light of shared humanity.
In Deliver Me From Nowhere, the father asks to speak to Bruce alone. He has planned what he wants to say — words of gratitude for the house, the money, the care his son has given him and his mother over the years. It is touching to witness this late-flowering tenderness, his effort to offer something back. And yet, beneath the gratitude, another truth trembles, unspoken. The apology — the acknowledgment of harm — catches in his throat. He cannot quite deliver those words or own his behavior.
The moment is beautiful and painful all at once — gratitude a doorway, but not the whole of reconciliation. Watching, I felt both the grace of the father’s reach and the sorrow of its limit. So many of us know this space: when love begins to stir but cannot yet face its shadow, when the one who hurt us can thank us for our presence but not own their own actions — can’t yet witness or inhabit themselves fully.
And still, something shifts. The air between them — thick with everything spoken and unspoken — becomes its own field of transformation. What could not be said aloud still moves in that shared silence, as though the heart itself carries on the conversation. The pattern softens; the burden lightens; love, imperfect yet alive, begins to move again.
Then comes that tender exchange when Bruce tells his father he never sat on his lap before that moment. The father’s face falters in disbelief, his mind trying to grasp the magnitude of what he had missed. Bruce’s eyes glisten, and in that moment, something breaks open. The father’s gaze softens; the son’s voice trembles; love comes rushing in through the crack. The past doesn’t disappear, but it is altered. What was once frozen becomes fluid again. The lap that was empty is, at last, filled — not by a child’s body but by presence itself.
In that exchange, I felt something ancient shift — not only between a father and son, but in the larger human story. It reminded me of the moment my grandfather’s voice came through: “Write about me.” I understood later that what he was really asking was to be seen — not excused, not condemned, but witnessed in truth. To write about him was, in a sense, to sit on his lap — to enter the space of love and reckoning that had not been possible in his life.
Perhaps this is what art is for … to let love come through where words have failed, to let what was split become one. Springsteen’s music does that for his lineage. My book does it for mine. Together, they gesture toward what is possible for all of us — that even when words fail, the heart can still speak, and the past, touched by presence, can begin to heal.