TRANSGENERATIONAL TRAUMA: CAN TRAUMA BE AFFECTED BY FAMILY HISTORIES?

Sometimes the distress a person may suffer can be transgenerational in nature: a traumatic story can be repeated as an event or type of event across several generations, from parents to children, or between other levels of kinship in which the characters seem to relive the same events over the decades.

Traumatic experiences lived through by previous generations in the family, if not re-elaborated, that is to say, mentally processed and consciously and physically integrated, can “implicitly pass” into the attitudes and behavior of the children and those who follow.

Having been exposed to stories, tales, ways of living and understanding life, relational and inter-relational dynamics are risk factors to be taken into consideration in a very serious way in the treatment of psychological disorders and family psychopathology.

The transition

A sort of unconscious and involuntary passing of the baton takes place: often in our clinical psychotherapy studies we hear from people who had grandparents who went to war, or grandmothers who suffered violence, and then later passed on tragic and dramatic, frightening and scary stories to their children and grandchildren, with a lot of affective and emotional involvement and above all with the consequences of these experiences, such as alcoholism, depression, aggressiveness, etc.; or we listen to women who are victims of sexual violence talking about their own grandmothers who were sexually abused decades before (perhaps people I know); or we hear from drug-addicted men whose fathers were also drug-addicts or alcoholics, etc.

For us therapists who work according to a transgenerational approach, these are “echoes of traumas and stressful events experienced by family members in ancient times”.

Sexual abuse, addiction and psychological violence: three possible repeating stories

One of the most widely discussed and studied areas related to traumas that influence the history of the individual is that of sexual abuse.

American research on the relationship between pregnancy and the intergenerational transmission of violence has shown that abusive behavior towards children is strongly and significantly correlated with the individual history of the abuser, whose past includes experiences of abuse suffered in childhood. (Jester, 1996)

Another interesting area related to trauma is that of addiction: alcoholism and drug addiction have a transgenerational origin in that they concern the relational and inter-relational dynamics of the family.

The child of an alcoholic mother may be more attracted to a partner who has an addictive behavior, having only known the way of relating and inter-relating in a family in which a member has developed an addiction.

In alcoholism, we talk about a carousel of fictions to indicate the relational dynamics that characterize this type of family, which tend to perpetuate themselves between generations.

It is not only a question of sexual violence, but also of psychological violence: having been exposed to “psychologically abusive parents” (i.e. not present, not caring, not responding to primary and secondary needs, verbally aggressive, for example) means having a higher probability of acting out abusive attitudes and behaviors (of the same type) towards younger children, simply because they are more familiar with such attitudes and behaviors.

Those who commit sexual abuse do not feel empathy or compassion for the victim: they perpetuate the attitude and behavior they have suffered, not recognizing the evil of the act. They feel no sense of guilt because, as the victim, they saw that the abuser did not feel any.

The dependent person may take the path of substance abuse or look for life partners who have developed an addiction; those who have suffered psychological violence (denigrating acts by their parents) act in very similar ways.

Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy represents the possibility of breaking these chains of perpetuating post-traumatic suffering: In fact, it represents a place where the person is given the possibility to mentalize, verbalize and consciously integrate their own history of origin (going back at least three generations) with their current difficulties, find different coping strategies that are more effective than those known and learned in the family, evolve and move forward, with their own history towards a different future.

A person undergoing psychotherapy that follows this transgenerational approach can thus interpret their psychological problems (depression, anxiety, panic) in relation to their family history (with all the events that have occurred), contextualize them and give them a more explicit and clear sense and meaning that is more integrated with the person themselves.

The genogram: the genogram is a symbolic graphic tool used in psychotherapy to collect a person's history from a transgenerational point of view.

Through a precise graphic design made up of symbols associated with people (a dot for a female, a square for a male) and with relationships (a straight line is a marital relationship, a dotted line is cohabitation, crossed out is a separation), the genogram, in a very simple and direct way, allows the psychotherapist to collect the individual and family anamnesis and to place the story on three generational axes, identifying not only the people who have made up the patient's history, but also the events that have crossed the patient's life.

Is it possible to break the chain? Yes

It is possible to break the chain by analyzing past events and happenings, in order to avoid adopting attitudes and behaviors that can undermine one's own and others' psychological integrity.

Being the child of an alcoholic parent does not necessarily mean that you will also become an alcoholic and marry an alcoholic man/woman: having been exposed to a history of alcoholism, even if it happened a long time ago, is a risk factor in terms of the possibility of suffering from psychological distress related to the typical dynamics of a family in which a member has developed an addiction.

Psychotherapy is a place where this chain can be broken.