Battling the lasting effects of intergenerational trauma through a myriad of initial experiences
By: Neha Myneni ‘21
A person contemplating their own history. Photo by Nick Dolding.
Children and grandchildren of those who experience trauma are more likely to be actively suicidal and have other major mental health concerns than children and grandchildren of people without that trauma, as noted by SAMHSA.
These rippling effects can be clearly accounted for by all forms of trauma, which can be best defined as an emotional response to a terrible event, according to American Psychological Association. Intergenerational trauma is an interesting subset of the wider umbrella of trauma as it presents how trauma can affect those who did not experience it firsthand.
Intergenerational trauma, as defined by Erica Babino, the Assistant Director of Inclusion and Outreach at Catlin Gabel School, “is the transference of oppression and its negative consequences across generations.” In studying this, people have discovered historical experiences between people in all nations, including African Americans and Native Americans in the United States, Ukrainians, Germans, refugees, and so on that led to traumatic symptoms. The only thing all of these groups of people have in common is that they all have ancestors who either experienced a single traumatic event or a series of traumatic events.
In the United States, African Americans were enslaved throughout the 17th and 18th centuries and then were continued to be oppressed under Jim Crow laws throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, while Native Americans were forced off their land and killed from the 17th century on. In Ukraine, from 1932 to 1933, Holodomor took place, which was the mass starvation of millions of Soviet Ukrainians. In Germany, an entire generation of people were malnourished during World War I. From 1941-1945, European Jews were subject to the Holocaust, where upwards of 6 million were killed.
The effects of such instances of human injustices often have clear societal consequences, such as the continuing racism in the United States against BIPOC or global anti-semitism. However, it has also been proven that the people who were forced to live under such cruel conditions often had their trauma passed down to their descendents. In an article from the American Psychological Association, Brent Bezo, a doctoral psychology student at Carleton University, studied the effect of the Holodomor on the descendents of survivors.
He noted that certain behaviors were passed down through those families, including “risky health behaviors, anxiety and shame, food hoarding, overeating, authoritarian parenting styles, high emotional neediness on the part of parents and low community trust and cohesiveness—what many described as living in ‘survival mode.’” These behaviors are often what enabled starving Ukrainians to survive during the Holodomor, but as the descendents no longer live under the same circumstances, this “survival mode” is no longer necessary and can contribute to an inability to trust the people and the world around them.
In another study done by the National Institutes of Health, intergenerational trauma is widely studied in refugee families, where refugees are defined in the context of the study as “individuals forced to flee their countries of origin in the context of political violence, persecution, and instability.” They noted that “More than half of the study findings in our review suggest an increased risk of adverse psychological outcomes and vulnerability to psychosocial stress within the next generation of refugee families,” which is consistent with previous research and supports the idea of learned survival behaviors as a result of traumatic events passed down through families, adversely affecting their descendents.
The injustices listed above are only a couple in which the descendants of the original survivors have been proven to have intergenerational trauma, but a question remains: How can we help people deal with trauma they did not experience first-hand? Babino mentions a clear way of handling intergenerational trauma.
“Therapy appears to be the most common means of dealing with intergenerational trauma where one learns why they are suffering from the trauma, how to manage it for themselves and not pass it on to their descendants,” said Babino.
Through therapy and other intervention strategies, people can learn to break the cycle of intergenerational trauma that persists throughout their families. However, the Western history of therapy prevents it from being the best option for marginalized people in general. To begin with, there is the general fact that there is a severe racial and ethnic divide when it comes to healthcare. According to another study conducted by the National Institutes of Health, Black and Latinx Americans specifically have lower insurance coverage rates and are also more likely to lose their insurance than their counterparts.
And this is not even considering the added hurdle when it comes to mental health insurance, as many insurance plans do not cover mental and behavioral health and even when they do, it is still considerably difficult to begin seeing a mental health professional. A study done by NAMI in 2016 said that “people had more difficulty finding in-network providers and facilities for mental health care compared to general or specialty medical care” and a 2019 report noted that “a behavioral health office visit is over five times more likely to be out-of-network than a primary care appointment.”
Even if these accessibility problems were to be addressed, there’s still more reasons for therapy in its current form to not work well for many marginalized people. In an article by The Atlantic, which focused on a study that analyzed the correlation between the race of a caller and the likelihood of a therapist to offer them an appointment, the results were skewed unfavorably against Black Americans. The study found that “28 percent of white, middle-class callers were called back and offered any appointment, compared to just 17 percent of African-American, middle-class callers” and that “an identifiably black, working-class man would have to call 80 therapists before he was offered a weekday evening appointment. A middle-class white woman would only have to call five.”
In this way, with the combination of worse insurance coverage, lack of mental health coverage, difficulty finding a mental health professional compared to a general medical professional, and difficulty finding a mental health professional to accept their request, BIPOC have a much greater difficulty utilizing therapy in its current form, especially as a means to dealing with intergenerational trauma.
Catlin Gabel School Upper School counselor Dan Petrocelli mentioned a process to deal with intergenerational trauma, emphasizing that this process usually requires a licensed psychotherapist.
“Identify cognitive distortions and distorted thought patterns that have evolved over years from intergenerational trauma-influenced behaviors often leading children to have low self-esteem,” he said. “Process through ‘stored’ memories and experiences to increase where these symptoms have taken root. Then...strategize as to how the person can fully cope and heal, and begin identifying and settling into wh” it is they really are, and where it is they want to go from here.”
Dealing with intergenerational trauma is a particularly difficult experience, as it requires learning a deeper understanding of the learned survival behaviors that were passed down instead of developed in response to a firsthand experience, which is why therapy is so useful in attempting to deconstruct the understanding built around this mindset. However, as therapy is not an option for everyone, at the very least, it is important for those with intergenerational trauma to deconstruct their own preconceptions and their origins in order to understand how they are affected by the experiences of their ancestors.