How Mental Trauma Is Spread Across Generations
Natural calamities, accidents and man-made catastrophes often leave lasting changes on the lives of the sufferers. Unknowingly, these people tend to pass their personal trauma to their children, and to their children’s children.
What is Trauma?
Trauma refers to the body’s response to serious injury or threat, and is often used to describe both the negative events that lead to distress and the distress itself. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders define ‘trauma’ as the “direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or threatened death or serious injury, or other threat to one’s physical integrity; or witnessing an event that involves death, injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of another person; or learning about unexpected or violent death, serious harm, or threat of death or injury experienced by a family member or other close associate.”
Trauma may lead to a range of cognitive, physical, emotional and behavioural effects on the sufferers. The cognitive outcomes of psychological trauma include memory problems, poor judgement, and inability to differentiate and make choices. Emotional effects include flashbacks, anxiety, helplessness, intense fears, and loss of control. Sufferers also experience many other symptoms, such as irritability, hyper-alertness, difficulties in communication, and tendency to engage in substance abuse.
How is Trauma Passed across Generations?
The darkest side of trauma is that it can easily spread from generations to generations. Children do not have to directly feel or experience the trauma. By simply hearing about it, or by looking at how it affected their parents, they can already demonstrate symptoms of psychological trauma.
Peter Loewenberg, a psychohistorian, cites examples of how trauma is passed across generations. He tackled the starvation trauma that children in Europe acquired from their parents who then suffered from childhood starvation throughout the hunger years in Germany (which happened during the World War I). Parents would tell their children about their difficult experiences, like defining ‘indulgence’ as having to share an orange with the whole family. Another example of social trauma was the humiliation of the Japanese Imperial land from 1937 to 1945. He called it the greatest Chinese historical trauma.
Howard Stein, another psychohistorian, argued that trauma can be transferred in vertical or horizontal directions. He used the downsizing of a corporation as an example of vertical transmission of trauma. As the term implies, the trauma comes from the top and spurs down to the bottom. Horizontal transmission of trauma, on the other hand, is articulated by Stein as the circulation of injury among people in more equivalent power relations. Example of this was the trauma experienced by healthcare professionals during the Oklahoma Bombing in 1995. These people demonstrated similar traumatic symptoms after having seen and worked with the bombing victims. By simply showing empathy, they also acquired such debilitating illness. He said both the vertical and horizontal transmissions may happen simultaneously in response to the same event.
In a study by the United States Institute of Peace in 2001, entitled “Training to Help Traumatized Populations, Special Report”, researchers suggest that trauma-induced social divisions provide the basis of historical myths that can come to be a central part of group identity. These myths can be activated consciously or unconsciously, and cause conflict in the future. An example of this was the historical trauma created by President Slobodan in Yugoslavia. In 1389, during the battle of Kosovo, the president presented to the public the body of the Prince Lazar who was killed in the battle. After that, he began to ceremonially rebury the bodies of victims in one Serbian village after another. The fear inflicted to the masses helped the Slobodan regime control the population and stay in power.
Healing the Wounds of Social Trauma
Whilst the transmission of trauma among families remains to be the biggest threat to the well-being of the future generations, it is possible to reverse, if not, at least reduce the impact of social trauma. The question now is – how? Many argue that the trauma will not go away unless actively confronted. According to a study by Gutlove and Thompson in 2003, the goal of trauma healing "is to acknowledge the experience and integrate it into a sort of personal or collective rebirth.
There are therapies that are proven to counter the effects of trauma and help patients take control of their lives again. According to Judith Lewis Herman, author of the “Trauma and Recovery”, there are three stages of the healing process. These are safety, acknowledgement, and reconnection. Most programmes start with providing the victims a safe place. They should know that they are safe. Such feeling of security encourages victims to open up and reveal the details of their sufferings. Next is acknowledgement. Talking to a therapist about their experiences leads to acceptance and forgiveness. Once all these art met, patients can start reconnecting with themselves again, and learn to face life not with fear, but with hope and optimism.
Do you think therapies, such as CBT and psychotherapy, can help victims of traumatic events recover from their condition? Can it also help stop the effects of trauma from spreading across families? We’d love to hear your insights. Share your comment below.
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