Inter-generational Trauma

Individual trauma reverberates across communities but also across the generations. The concept of historic trauma was initially developed in the 1980s by First Nations and Aboriginal peoples in Canada to explain the seeming unending cycle of trauma and despair in their communities. Essentially, the devastating trauma of genocide, loss of culture, and forcible removal from family and communities are all unresolved and become a sort of ‘psychological baggage... continuously being acted out and recreated in contemporary Aboriginal culture’.

 C Wesley-Esquimaux and M Smolewski, Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Health, Aboriginal Health Foundation (2004) p 3.

The concept of inter-generational trauma is a topic of much research and discussion and even some contention. Native Canadians believe that trauma reverberates through 7 generations and many researchers are looking at similarities in descendants of Holocaust survivors. I don’t know if this is true, but this much is clear: My father manifested many of the traits of survivors of the Holocaust, although he was not in the camps and that has impacted my life significantly. He loathed violence of any sort, even in movies and TV shows, yet was capable of great emotional violence.  Survivor-parents have shown a tendency to be over involved in their children’s lives, even to the point of suffocation and to push their children to be high achievers and my father was no exception.  When it came to education he was an unstoppable force.   I used to joke that I was half way through university before I realized some people didn’t even go.

Of course, not all traits passed from survivor-parents are bad. Resilient traits - such as adaptability, initiative, and tenacity were passed on to me. We as children of survivors have a tendency to be task-oriented and hard workers. We tend to  know how to actively cope with and adapt to challenges.

Sometimes, those challenges were within the home. Some survivors, such as my father, did not talk to their children about their life experiences. It was the dark elephant in the room, and contributed to an environment of confusion and insecurity. Some research indicates that children and grandchildren of survivors may have different stress hormone profiles than the general population, and may be at greater risk for anxiety disorders. 

In our family, my relationship with my father was a push-me-pull-you all through my life. 

My father was suffocatingly overprotective and over-involved while also maintaining an emotional distance from me and from my mother at any cost. This contradictory behavior is apparently quite common in survivors. In times of emergency or great emotional stress which came from outside the family, my father was a rock. He would have defended me to his death and I knew that. But he also worked actively to push the people he loved as far away emotionally as possible, and he often did so with great cruelty. There is a theory that suggests that this results from having already gone through great loss and knowing it is possible to lose everything on a visceral level. Resisting emotional closeness was a result of self protection, but it also caused him to be extremely emotionally isolated, and as a result, he was very lonely for most of his life.