Where to Start? Intergenerational Trauma and its Roots
A whispered story swept through three generations of my family. A whisper that swept under the rug the life of a man, his legacy and how he died. Someone wanted Frederick George Bull to be forgotten, for his name to never again to pass over someone’s tongue, never again to meet the air he used to breathe, to never again live on. That someone was his own wife.
(Image by Oberholster Venita from Pixabay)
It’s a whisper that took me back to the early 1900s when I began researching my family history about a decade ago. One that would take me on a long venture through intergenerational trauma and would make me look at the roots of my own traumas. In the psychology world, intergenerational trauma remains a relatively new field of study. Holocaust survivors have, understandably, been the most studied in this field.
According to goodtherapy.org, intergenerational trauma “is defined as trauma that gets passed down from those who directly experience an incident to subsequent generations. Intergenerational trauma may begin with a traumatic event affecting an individual, traumatic events affecting multiple family members, or collective trauma affecting larger community, cultural, racial, ethnic, or other groups/populations (historical trauma).”
Holocaust and Indigenous residential school survivors fall into this category. However, domestic violence, sexual abuse and hate crimes can also contribute to intergenerational trauma within families. Dr. Yael Danieli is a clinical psychologist, victimologist, traumatologist and the Director of The Group Project for Holocaust Survivors and Their Children. In her studies, she organized survivors and their adaptation styles into four categories.
Numb: They self-isolate, prefer silence and seek it out and have a low tolerance for stimulation. They are also minimally involved in raising their children. Basically, emotionally absent.
Victims: They fear and distrust the outside world, try to remain inconspicuous, and tend to be frequently depressed and quarrelsome.
Fighters: They have a focus on succeeding at all costs, keeping up an armour of strength, and don’t acknowledge weakness or self-pity. I’ll go ahead and insert hyper-independence into this category as well.
Those Who Made It: They feel a need to pursue socio-economic success and distance themselves from the trauma – both their own and that of other survivors.
When parents experience trauma of their own, either in childhood or as adults, that trauma can manifest into their parenting styles. Therefore, a Fighter parent may create hyper-independent children who also don’t know how to ask for help and live in a state of great anxiety and fear of failing or being seen as vulnerable and over-reliant on others. A Numb parent might be emotionally unavailable and unintentionally teach their kids that processing and showing emotions is bad. A Victim parent could make their kids paranoid of the world and keep them oversheltered. Those Who Made It could prioritize career and financial success over family because it is what distances themselves from the trauma.
What survival mechanisms a parent learns while in the chaos of trauma, and never overwrite with new tactics of behaviour, becomes a blueprint of life for their kids.
Therapy is a way of rewiring the brain to adjust from survival mode to thriving mode, to learn how to engage and reconnect with the world once more, to find healthy ways of coping with the trauma instead of living forever in survival mode. I can say from experience that the rewiring process can take years. But it was worth it once it was unravelled and I could see the trauma for what it was – and how far back it goes.
I looked at Frederick’s death and saw where the trauma began trickling through bloodlines. One little lie became the foundation on which familial ties would be frayed and destroyed. When my great-grandmother, Theresa, told her kids that their father shot himself on a ship in 1923, she exposed her children to something they never should have been: both the loss of a parent, and the concept of suicide, especially at a time when it was so frowned upon and deemed sinful. Mental illness, if Frederick suffered from it at all, and suicide, were not things taken seriously back in the 1920s. Frederick had already done time in the military, so it’s possible he already had PTSD. The shame of their father’s supposed suicide would have proved an effective way of keeping her kids silenced. Suppressing such a trauma would impact each of the four kids differently.
Dr. Gayani DeSilva, child and adolescent psychiatrist and author, listed off the symptoms of intergenerational trauma for a Health.com article:
hypervigilance,
a sense of a shortened future,
mistrust,
aloofness,
high anxiety and depression,
panic attacks and nightmares,
a sensitive fight or flight response,
issues with self-esteem and self-confidence.
Passing down the impact of trauma means the trauma has the potential to be repeated in newer generations. Domestic violence and child abuse are notorious cycles for this. And such a trauma isn’t something mere records can tell the story about. It’s something I’ll need to reach out to other family members and potentially dig into some painful memories, if they’ll allow me to.
So, where did this start? Knowing all of this, having done all this reading on intergenerational trauma, what was the inciting event for Frederick’s murder and what prompted Theresa to feel the urge to kill her husband? Did she have help? And did another mysterious death a year or two later tie into it all?
Come along. There’s much to unpack, still much I don’t know, and more questions than answers – but I’ll find answers.
Sources
Intergenerational Trauma, Good Therapy: https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/Understanding_Intergenerational_Trauma
Genetic vulnerabilities: https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/some-children-may-be-genetically-predisposed-to-victimization-0906131