Episode 6: Intergenerational Trauma: Myths And Misconceptions

Welcome to My Mother's Trauma, a podcast exploring feelings about families, what to do with what's passed down to us, and how to break the cycle for more justice and liberation. I am your host, Kim Loliya. Let's take a moment to breathe.

Hello everyone, thank you for your presence.

What I'd like to do in this episode is invite us all to broaden our gaze when it comes to intergenerational trauma. It's just so easy with the language that we have available today to narrow our field of vision and I don't mean that just physically but also mentally and emotionally as well.

So I'm here to softly challenge and see if we can collectively hold more possibilities with this topic. And if we can, I'm really here for it. It's an exciting possibility. I feel like a wider gaze allows for more generative conversations to happen and

That's really important. And when there's misinformation or a lot of confusion, it's often a colonial strategy that keeps us asleep, trapped and even more compliant.

So let's resist this and let's see what we can do to get free.

So my intention for this conversation is to uncover and validate some experiences that we might have minimized.

I can't guarantee that we'll be successful in this process, but we'll try and see what happens.

I'm going to take you through some common myths and misconceptions and they're things that I've heard from friends, clients and colleagues. They all tend to be beliefs that could be somewhat limiting but you also have choice with your beliefs and if they're helpful for you, you can keep them.

really trust your sense of what you need and what's true for you. Our first myth is perpetuated by a lot of professionals and researchers and it's the belief that intergenerational trauma is a consequence of a big calamity like a war or famine.

Obviously these big events that include forced migration and displacement are really traumatic. And some studies have found traces of these events in our epigenetics several generations after the disaster took place.

These are quite obvious and maybe more traditional manifestations of intergenerational trauma. But when we focus only on those, we exclude everything else that could impact our family line.

like parents migrating for work and not being around for their children. That can create a huge intergenerational ripple.

or mothers experiencing postpartum depression and struggling to leave their room for months or years.

or it can be conflict at home. So children who grow up listening to their parents arguing are probably going to hold that as trauma.

and perhaps pass it on as well.

All of these examples and more are intergenerational trauma triggers.

As a working definition, intergenerational trauma is any adaptation, whether big or small, as a result to any change in the environment.

And these adaptations operate at different levels, like our personality, behaviour, the choices we make, how we communicate, our body language.

our genetics, et cetera.

It can even be really good things that create that ripple, like getting a promotion at work that brings in more money but it affects how much time you spend with your friends and that in turn affects mental health and the stress starts to seep into the community as well as family life.

So when we think about consequences, yes we have war or famine, but we also have everyday pressures that count as well.

The second myth is that everyone's suffering will look the same.

Through epigenetics we know that trauma affects gene expression and it can switch on some genes for disease, whether that's mental, physical or both.

But as we're people and not machines, there's a lot of variation when it comes to trauma.

so it could look different for everyone. And some people may manifest overt trauma symptoms while others may not. We might be in a family system where we live in a completely different way to the rest of our family. We could be in different countries. Some folks might have migrated and some

couldn't or didn't want to in the family and this leads to a completely different environment. digging more into this theme of isolation, if you're in the diaspora and your family is predominantly in another country, the stress of not having your community around could mean

that you start to exhibit very particular trauma symptoms that the rest of your family don't have. Plus the daily stress of whiteness is reduced. And for family members who haven't migrated and don't live in a context where nobody looks like them, they might experience

other stressors but just not that one and some of those could be lack of resources, job scarcity, environmental crises, could be anything. So we can't necessarily assume that our suffering will look exactly the same as that of our family because it just can't, it's just not possible.

And we can't guarantee that we will feel the same as the rest of our family because everyone has different coping strategies and suppression mechanisms.

So with trauma, there's no one size fits all.

and it's so important to acknowledge that we all suffer slightly differently. Moving on to our third myth or misconception, it's the belief that you can't stop intergenerational trauma from being passed down to your children.

Last year I did a webinar exploring maternal deprivation within the global majority context and exploring the impact on children and adult children.

And after that webinar for a few months, lots of people got in touch, particularly mothers who were terrified that they were ruining the lives of their children. Mothers who had experienced maternal deprivation realized that they felt really impacted by that and they assumed that

that impact would almost automatically pass down to their children. I've heard some folks talk about intergenerational trauma like it's a virus that's out of control and I got a sense of just how panicked some people feel around this and it makes so much sense. If you're a parent

and you hear about intergenerational trauma even in passing, one of the first thoughts is probably going to be some anxiety about what you're passing down. But I think we forget that children are way more adaptable compared to adults.

because they're more instinctively tapped into their natural ways of processing trauma

So what would feel impossible for an adult to proces

A child could work through in an afternoon of play.

That said, sometimes children are traumatized because they were too overwhelmed by what happened to access their natural systems of repatterning trauma.

and maybe they didn't have enough support or enough encouragement or confidence. But that's not always the case. Sometimes children process trauma in a way that is really seamless and organic.

Children also don't have the same barriers to getting help that adults do because under a certain age they're not aware of the social stigma around something like therapy. So that can be a huge asset in finding the right help for your child if they're struggling and if you feel that that's the right thing to do.

And the more you can regulate yourself in the here and now, the more choice can become available when you parent and it can be possible to parent in a different way.

Moving on to our fourth misconception, it's the intergenerational trauma affects only global majority communities.

I'm just not sure how people can say this when white body supremacy has so successfully been passed down generations.

In the recent acts of terrorism that took place in the UK, we saw children and young people playing an active role in persecuting immigrants and refugees. So where did these young people learn that whiteness equals dominance?

It's probably from their parents, their close family, as well as our overculture.

And it's not just violence. It's entitlement, appropriation, obfuscation to avoid responsibility, and a ton of other things. These are all intergenerational trauma traits because they're literal wounds in the psyche of whiteness. But it's not just in the mind, it's also in the nervous system.

because only a nervous system that's completely disconnected, erratic and in trauma could be violent to these extremes and feel nothing and get on with life. So in that respect, breaking the cycle is cross-cultural work that we all need to do.

And for white folks, it's also about unlearning the legacy of harm and holding others accountable to do the same.

Our fifth myth is that it's all your mother's fault. I have this suspicion and it's more of a hunch, it's not really based in fact, that some of us and I'm including myself in that group have double standards when it comes to our parents.

We're more likely to blame our mothers compared to our fathers for the trauma that we've inherited. It feels like the expectations on our mothers are really high, especially around being emotionally available, emotionally intelligent and nurturing. It's like our mothers should

do better or know better.

And don't get me wrong, mothers can do better and be less harmful but often don't have the capacity to do that because of absent fathers.

And there's gendering and patriarchy in the mix as well.

because mothers who are left to be single parents are expected not to fall apart.

They need to emotionally provide for their children because that's what society is telling femmes that they should be doing. They're expected to not be stressed and if they don't get child support from their ex, they need to work three jobs and they're not allowed to complain about it. It just doesn't seem realistic.

and I don't often hear people complaining that their dad is emotionally immature or responsive.

because it's kind of expected that men are automatically less available.

It's like masculinity has this opt-out feature that means that people don't expect men to communicate their feelings or even know how to do it well. Especially in black communities. With this legacy of absent fathers, we're used to seeing our dads take off. That's seen as normal. And that is just so sad.

So while mothers have their issues, it might be healing to consider the wider context in the process of holding them accountable.

and if you're a mother yourself think about your wider context if you'd like to also hold yourself accountable.

Moving on to number six.

It's the myth that acknowledging intergenerational trauma must lead to forgiveness.

This is a myth because no one should be pressured to forgive anyone. Forgiveness is a process that some people might choose to go through, but it's not automatic and it's not something that has to happen once you start to work with intergenerational trauma. Some people don't want to forgive or they're not ready and

That is absolutely valid. It's also about impact over intention. Because if a family member is harming you, whether it's because of intergenerational trauma or anything else, it doesn't change the impact that their behaviour is having on you.

If you've been hurt by someone and you're in rage or grief then that's a sacred process. It's up to you how you want to hold these feelings and what you want to do with them.

Number seven is a really common one and it's that you can't enjoy your life until you've broken the cycle.

This is basically delayed gratification and I've noticed that's quite common especially in self-development spaces and especially in the West where there's pressure to always be on a healing journey and not just do it privately but also compare notes with your friends because

This work is a multi-generational marathon. No one is ever done. And waiting to be done is a false economy. Pleasure and joy are resources that make this marathon possible. I'm thinking of folks who run marathons who stop

and have an energy bar on the side of the road or a high carb snack and it's pretty much what we need to do too with moments of pleasure and joy.

stopping and feeling these emotions is what makes the marathon possible and that's valuable not just for us but also for our teammates across generations. Number eight is that you can heal intergenerational trauma for your whole family.

I call this intergenerational trauma heroics and if you care about these topics you might be prone to attempting a few heroics yourself. I know I have over the years and it's backfired spectacularly.

It comes from a place of not wanting to see your family in pain and this hope comes up that it will be possible to sort everyone out but that also comes with pressure and disappointment if you try to help but you notice that other people in your family are resistant.

and then the if only thoughts start like if only I had enough knowledge or skill or money or something else if only I had this or that it would all be okay

But even if all conditions were perfect, we can't force our family or anyone else to change.

and that's a huge thing to grieve. The impossibility of that is really sad so even if the work that we do on ourselves has a very positive ripple onto our family that's great but we can't expect that to happen all the time. If we do it's probably going to be painful.

And speaking of pain, we now have number nine. A misconception that the healing process will be painful. We're really pain averse as humans on a biological level and even the possibility that something will be painful can be enough to put people off. Or we can start to go into brace patterns

of expecting the worst.

and sometimes that can be a self-fulfilling prophecy in itself. Healing work is a lot less painful than what the mind thinks because the mind likes to catastrophise in order to prepare us for the worst case scenario and this is a great adaptation that has kept us alive for millennia.

But these days it can also lead to a lot of fear and anxiety. And there's another misconception that once you're in a healing process, it will be painful all the time. 24-7.

But what I see in myself and in the folks that I've worked with are cycles or waves of intensity.

Generally a cycle of contraction is followed by a big expansion and that's where it's possible to access relief or feel like you have a lot more space to breathe. A lot of energy is freed up in the healing process and it's more possible to see beauty

when we expand out of a contraction into an expansion.

the mind likes to hyperfocus on pain and that's okay, it's part of our survival instincts but it helps to be able to know that and to put it into context.

Last but definitely not least, it's the myth that intergenerational trauma only relates to your biological family.

When people talk about intergenerational patterns in the West, the lens is really biological. It's often about blood relatives like your children and their children. But in my head, I tend to see it as a family line that goes up and down.

and a community line that goes across. And where those two lines intersect, that's where intergenerational trauma shows up.

Family systems are so much more than biological, as I was saying in episode 1.

If you happen to be in a close community, like a faith community, and someone is being harmful in that community, it could easily affect your parents or grandparents and that could then be passed down to you. So going back to the broader gaze I spoke about at the beginning of this episode,

It can help to apply that here and imagine a wider family system. And from that place a lot of information can become available.

Okay, we're done with all the myths and misconceptions.

Having travelled through them, notice how you feel and while you do that, I'll go back over each myth again and I'll also include them in the show notes, so check those out if you'd like to.

The first one is the intergenerational trauma is a consequence of a big calamity like war or famine.

The second is that everyone's suffering will look the same.

The third one is that you can't stop intergenerational trauma from being passed down to your children.

The fourth is that it affects only global majority communities.

The fifth is that it's all your mother's fault.

The sixth is that acknowledging intergenerational trauma must lead to forgiveness.

The seventh is a myth that you can't enjoy life until you've broken the cycle.

The eighth is that you can heal intergenerational trauma for your whole family.

The ninth is that the healing process will be painful

and the tenth is the belief that intergenerational trauma only relates to your biological family. These beliefs are not a complete list. You might have your own or you might think of some that come up as a result of the ones that I've gone through.

So if you'd like to share your thoughts, feel free to reach out via social media or email. Contact details are in the show notes.

Thanks so much for listening and for being in this practice where we've widened our gaze together.

I hope it's brought you some new ideas and as always more liberation.

If you'd like to learn more about intergenerational trauma, as well as decolonial and anti-oppressive ways to heal, check out blackpsychotherapy.org. We offer classes, programs and talking therapy for individuals, couples and groups. If you'd like journal prompts, decolonial musings and special discounts,

You can sign up to our newsletter via the link in the show notes, where you can also find a link to submit a question for me to answer in a future episode. I super look forward to connecting with you again and take care.