TRAUMA SILENTLY WALKS IN TIME 

For children of Holocaust and Russian Gulags survivors academic research has observed symptoms which would be expected if they had actually lived through the Holocaust themselves, such as a characteristic difficulty in distinguishing between reality and fantasy. This difficulty, a by-product of the lost capacity to produce symbolic representations like those in myths and dreams, is profoundly unsettling to a child's identity construction and deserves subtle attention. Those who have lived through trauma pass their trauma down to the new generation in the form of Adverse Childhood Experiences, but according to Grubrich-Simitis.

in situations of extreme trauma, the parents’ need to deny their own experiences, lead them to react aggressively to the child’s apprehension of their trauma, unconsciously conveying the message that this apprehension is merely a fantasy of the child. In this way the possibility of imaginatively ‘knowing’ the parent is foreclosed

The Legacy of Unspoken Trauma in Children of Survivors

This preclusion of the child to voice the parent's inner state has deep, very well documented, side effects. Anne-Marie Levine (first) and Raffaella De Castro, who collected the stories of 23 Roman Jews born to Holocaust survivors, demonstrate the foreclosure by sharing their own personal stories, and showing in one of these, the affect of silence, and in the other, the affect of toposes, which are formulaic narratives that are empty of personal emotions and confuse the child's apperception of the parent's emotional self.

Nothing was mentioned about the Holocaust either at home or at school ...everynight I had terrible nightmares. My parents were dismayed ...they wanted to forget and I kept them from it. I had inherited their unconscious. It was diabolical

there was the presence of a traumatic topos, a story that had the power of a ‘myth’ and that risked being mistaken for a phantasy, becoming merely ‘pre-history’ or ‘post-history’ of the mind, passed on from generation to generation

According to Laub and Poddel these formulaic narratives (topos), preclude a dialogical relationship between the experiencer and the empathic other, hindering the possibility of healing through social connection in the present. Read that again if needed, because it means that some stories often repeated in families, do not have the function to communicate and connect, but their very opposite. Rita Goldberg, child of a Holocaust survivor whose epic escapes from the Nazis were worthy of a film script recalls:

The culmination of intense emotion and physical strain became the foundation of a new personality in my mother. That personality was energetic, cheerful and outgoing, but I sensed my mother's capacity for joy hid a wound too deep to heal. Learning to build a wall and compartmentalise pain and conflict helped her to survive but created a remoteness that distanced her, even from us.  She buried a part of herself so deep it remained impenetrable. I went through periods of depression, consumed by a vague gloom, like some sort of auto-immune disorder. As the eldest child, I felt the pressure to be responsible and protective towards my mother, but the history was a crushing burden and has to some extent paralysed me

As Perel Wilgowicz (1999) puts it: 

the child of survivors becomes imprisoned in the parents’ trauma through a kind of ‘vampiric identification’ in which he is neither dead nor alive, unborn, in an imageless, timeless condition, condemned to repeat what they themselves have not experienced

Leah Warshawsky TED talk, illustrates this process with a certain grain of humour through the story of her grandmother, reminding us again of the relational blue print download that can incur through what Kirsten Holmberg has termed 'emotional wifi'. We get a living glimpse of how, as growing children, we experience the shadow that is not resolved in the parent or grandparent, and become destined to suffer the logic that is embedded in it.

Whatever the line of defense the survivor consciously or unconsciously engages in, it is as though their children dream to give voice to the unspeakable in the minds and hearts of their parents, and indeed there are indications that the more their parents are secretive about their deeply traumatic experiences the more the children's unconscious is bound to engage with the ghostly elephant in the room.

And yet, for compassion's sake, we cannot forget the horror of the traumatized elder, and must meet all witnesses of horrors like Rwanda or the million other examples in the microspheres of everyday life, like that of Anneke Lucas or Sasha Joseph Neulinger, with the same equanimity as we meet the dread of the child. For this loss of symbolic representation and time in the children, is but a reflection of the deeper loss in the parent.

The experience of totally senseless events fundamentally question the semantic dimension ...It undermines the metaphorical and the non-metaphorical use of speech as well as the structuring of time in past, present and future

The camp had dried up my brain and I could not, I just could not squeeze another word from it. I was not up to the job, and not because the gap between my will and Kolyma [Russian gulag] was too great, not because my brain was weak and exhausted, but because in those folds of my brain where ecstatic adjectives are normally stored, there was nothing but hatred (Kolyma Tales 1994, p. 450)

The simultaneous coexistence of two aspects of the ego: one part of this ego continues “living” in the death camp stripped of all its defenses; the other part, “adapted” to the new reality, behaves... as if it were able to love, to hate, to struggle, to work, making projects or becoming ill

The documented, population-wide dissociation that followed the Holocaust may justify the atmosphere of denial and repression that reigned all the way into the 80s. Certainly, both temporal and emotional distance seemed necessary before survivors were able to deal with their repressed memories, a fact noted in most after shocks, but according to Jucovy (1992), pessimism about the possibility of confronting and treating intergenerational trauma was rampant and it was only with the pioneering work of Judith Kestenberg, and the findings of a study group set up in 1974, that a picture began to emerge, and therapists ready to confront issues that cried out for intervention became available. 

Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma Across Cultures

Since then the reality of intergenerational trauma has found confirmation in even hard science. Yehuda et al. 2000 shows that lasting hormonal changes found in Holocaust survivors with PTSD are replicated in a high percentage of adult children of these survivors. Such research underlines the devastating effects of trauma across generations, an issue that countries like the USA and Australia may be plagued with.

The USA and Australia have a history that has inflicted trauma over native populations over hundreds of years, and for most of this history, and even currently, it is often denied, repressed, or concealed. Due to cultural rules that reinforce the psychological egemony of the persecutor, traumatizing events are an ongoing reality for these native populations, but as we have seen it is also a psychological, hormonal and neurological inherited reality that by now lives in everyone of their blood cells and bones. 

Personal Stories Illustrating the Cycle of Trauma

Scientific support for these effects don't lack, as with a study by Neeta Thakur, showing that the more an american black woman experiences discrimination the more prone she is to have asthma, and it is the main reason why today we pay attention to stories like those of M. and D., stories of everyday life that illustrate the historical intergenerational link between trauma and development

M is a 22 years old woman whose ACE trace back to a law passed in her nation that allowed the construction of major highways over populated areas. The state, in building these highways through the city, had targeted neighbourhoods that were often poor and politically marginalised because they offered least resistance. The construction of the highway, happening when M was only 6, led to a breaking of the community fabric, and to an increase in povery rates. M was the daughter of a very young woman who had married a man that walked out of the relationship very early on. M's mother had found another man, but he was abusive to both her, her mother and her older sister, so when M was a teenager she dropped out of High School and met a boy named D, who himself was a dropout, son of parents addicted to drugs. When M and D met it was love at first sight but their lack of positive social networks meant that M and D had to find odd jobs, sleep in shelter homes, and move frequently. When not long after M fell pregnant accidentally, the stress brought on by the news triggered anger and physical abuse in D, whose violent ways of dealing with stress had been taught by his addicted parents all his life. With a lack of good parenting models, the stress increasing because of their finances dwindling, D and M came to a critical separation when the child's skull was injured due to a fight they were having. The state took the custody of the child away from the mother and put the child in foster care, all the while placing M under unfair pressures to tend for herself, and once a week to her child. Her continuous state of trauma arousal made it very difficult for M to be present when the child was there, as well as impaired her memory and cognitive capacities, causing several difficult meetings between the child and the parent. This caused the child's psyche to enter a state of dissociation very early in life, showing emotional reactions ranging from being completely emotionally shut down to crying that could not be soothed

If you are the child of a trauma survivor, and recognise yourself or someone close to you in these descriptions, make sure to talk about this with someone you trust, and perhaps orient yourself, in due time, and as you keep learning about the topic, to a professional who may be able to orient your need to heal. 

Wishing you Well,

Your Shrink in Bansko