What is generational trauma? An expert gets into how families inherit trauma, how to cope
According to many therapists and mental health professionals, sometimes trauma isn't derived from one-time, extreme life events like a tragic tornado, a school shooting or a car crash. Many people have reported they also experience generational trauma, meaning they suffer from the lingering effects of intense short-term or chronic stressors felt by their family or community.
“I define generational trauma as incidents that live in our body, and in our emotional psyche, that we have not necessarily experienced ourselves and we have passed on through family experiences,” says Gwendolyn VanSant, a nonprofit CEO and member of the Trauma Research Foundation’s Board of Directors.
What are symptoms of generational trauma?
To VanSant, people are often unaware of the signs of generational trauma, which she says can include depression, anxiety or distrust of certain groups or institutions.
VanSant’s nonprofit BRIDGE Inc. worked with vaccine-hesitant people during the COVID-19 pandemic, and she witnessed some of the effects of generational trauma firsthand. VanSant, who identifies as African-American, described how vaccine hesitancy among some African-American communities she worked with came from a “distrust” stemming from traumatic experiences with the medical community from current and earlier generations.
“If an African American, for example, is fortunate enough to know the history of medicine, and the way we have been specimens and objectified… or we haven't been told the full truth about medical processes and their impact,” VanSant explained.
“The trauma there is related to real violence, real oppression,” she added.
How generational trauma happens
Gertrude Lyons, Ed.D., is a life coach who works specifically with mothers and families and focuses on women’s empowerment. In her practice, Lyons has seen how traumas suffered by a mother, even in childhood, can have a direct impact on her children later in life.
One of Lyons’s clients grew up in foster care and suffered emotional and physical abuse as a child. “She felt like she didn’t deserve care; she didn't get any kind of proper care growing up,” Lyons explains. As an adult, Lyons says her client often feels like “her self care, her emotional needs, her physical needs are really unimportant.” The mindset led the client into an emotionally abusive relationship in adulthood, something that’s had a lingering impact on her children.
The client’s teenage daughter is now suffering from an eating disorder. “Just by witnessing her mom not take care of herself in that relationship… it has had an impact on her,” Lyons explains.
How can we address generational trauma?
To Mariah Rooney, an experienced trauma therapist and social work professor, conventional one-on-one therapy isn’t always the right way to help those suffering from generational trauma.
Rooney works a lot with adopted children or children in foster care who have experienced rejection or disconnection from parents. Some queer children have been rejected by parents who never unlearned the homophobia their own parents taught them, Rooney said. Other kids have been adopted by a family of a different race, and feel severed from communities of others who look like them.
Those kids don’t just need talk therapy, Rooney says, but safe groups where they can heal from the rejection or loss they’ve experienced. “Trauma disconnects us from ourselves: from our bodies, from other people, from community, from a sense of belonging,” she explains. “In order to really heal, we have to experience safety and connection with other people.”
VanSant agrees that community is often crucial in addressing generational trauma. “A lot of generational trauma comes from societal spaces,” she says, adding people can find healing in different, intentional groups that counteract those traumas. VanSant has built community healing spaces like a “solidarity meetinghouse” that includes places for women to get their natural hair done and a community kitchen.
“It's producing results already: people are feeling more heard, and seeing their needs met,” VanSant says of the community healing spaces organized by BRIDGE Inc. “That is one of the best ways to move through some of that generational trauma and disrupt it."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What is generational trauma? Symptoms and coping mechanisms
