It Stops With Us

The pain we carry is not ours alone but the choice to end it can be.

It Stops With Us is a deeply personal, unflinching book about generational trauma, how it’s passed down, how it shows up, and what it takes to stop it. Written with raw honesty and emotional precision, Scott Pettifer tells his own story of inherited abuse, emotional neglect, and the slow, brutal work of breaking the cycle.

This is not a trauma memoir for sympathy. It is a manual for truth-telling. For making sense of what happens in families when silence becomes survival. For understanding how we internalise pain, and how it shapes everything, our parenting, our relationships, our sense of self.

Blending memoir with deep insight, It Stops With Us lays bare what happens when trauma is unspoken and what becomes possible when we finally speak. If you’ve ever felt the weight of your past pressing into your present, this book is for you.

It’s not about blame. It’s about responsibility. And the choice to say: this ends here.

This book was never meant to be released quickly.

It Stops With Us is the most personal thing I’ve ever written. Every page carries the weight of my childhood, my bloodline, my silence. It began as an attempt to name what had shaped me, the pain, the patterns, the invisible lessons inherited in a home that didn’t know how to speak truthfully. I wrote it because I needed to. Because silence had already cost too much.

But I knew I couldn’t release it lightly.

My father passed away a month before I finished the final draft. His death was not sudden, but the timing mattered. Out of respect, for the complexity of our relationship and for the man he was, I held the release until May '25.

This isn’t about blame. It never was. This book is not an attack. It’s not a reckoning aimed at someone else. It’s a reckoning I took on myself, to stop the story from repeating.

It Stops With Us is now available. I’m releasing it not with anger, but with clarity. For anyone who has carried pain they didn’t choose. Who has felt the weight of their family history settle in their bones. Who has promised themselves, quietly, that they would be the one to change it.

I waited because it was the right thing to do. But I will not stay silent. Because silence is how this all began.

Scott Pettifer

1. Trauma doesn’t end when the event ends.
It stays. In your nervous system. In your tone of voice. In how you respond to love, to stress, to stillness. The story continues, even when no one talks about it.

2. Generational pain repeats until someone interrupts it.
Families pass down more than names. They pass silence, fear, coping patterns. It doesn’t always look like violence. Sometimes it looks like distance. Shame. Absence. And it continues until someone says: no more.

3. Telling the truth is painful; but silence costs more.
This book is proof that truth-telling hurts. But the price of not telling it is higher. Silence protects no one. It only delays the healing.

4. You can love someone and still name what they did.
This is not a book about blame. It’s a book about honesty. You can grieve someone and still hold them accountable. You can forgive without forgetting.

5. Children learn from everything including what we hide.
Kids don’t need explanations to internalise trauma. They feel it. Absorb it. Shape themselves around it. Even the things we don’t speak become part of their reality.

6. The past doesn’t stay in the past, it lives in our present.
How we speak to our children. How we argue. How we protect ourselves. How we detach. All of it is often shaped by what we survived without processing.

7. Cycles break when someone is brave enough to feel what others avoided.
Stopping generational trauma doesn’t mean you never struggle. It means you choose to face what others suppressed. You feel what others numbed. And that takes strength.

8. Healing isn’t heroic. It’s human.
It’s messy, slow, and deeply personal. You won’t get it right all the time. But if you’re asking better questions, if you’re trying to do better it already stops with you.