I have truly enjoyed my work these past few years with Asian American young adults. Through this work I have been witness to countless stories about being American born yet holding the trauma stories of their parents and grandparents immigrating from poverty, war, crime to name a few. I have been fortunate being able to attend specialty workshops and also through my own experience as a first generation born Asian American connect ties to how the experiences of our ancestors explain our present but do not have to dictate our future. Below are a few tidbits of wisdom I would like to share about intergenerational trauma.
1. Trauma can be something that happened or the ABSENCE of something that should have happened. Oftentimes we think of trauma as something done to an individual. However, especially with intergenerational trauma we find the trauma lying in a “lack of” that every child should have access to, such as a safe space to process thoughts and emotions.
2. What happened to your people and continues to happen? When we are looking at trauma through a generational and cultural perspective we no longer can just look at the individual but the context they grew up in. How were their communities and families affected by history and what are the discriminations/barriers they still continue to face?
3. There is a difference between parents who were traumatized vs. parents who are traumatizing. We need to identify whether a child grew up with someone who is impacted by trauma vs. a caregiver who performed actions constituting abuse. Children who grew up with parents who were traumatized experience intergenerational trauma through survivor guilt, vicarious trauma from parent’s storytelling and may have a view of love through associating love as sacrifice vs. attunement.
4. We cannot do trauma work WITHOUT grief work. They go hand in hand. To experience trauma means to experience a “loss of something.” Whether it is the loss of a safe environment, loved ones, the idea of home, community, there is loss tied to trauma experiences.
Helpful Healer 